Is way to save money on chancellors to invest in professors?

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Outgoing UW-Green Bay Chancellor Bruce Shepard thinks so.

But when we asked outgoing UW-Green Bay Chancellor Bruce Shepard “what has to happen so that Wisconsin doesn’t have to lose five chancellors at a time,” he responded by saying faculty compensation is a bigger issue than chancellors’ pay. The school’s “peer institutions,” universities in other states that the Legislature says are comparable, paid professors 5 to 6 percent more when Shepard took office in 2001, and the gap has grown wider.

“It’s as though the Green Bay Packers … said, ‘We’re going to keep a cap on our salaries that’s 20 percent below the league’s salary cap,’” Shepard said in an interview with the Green Bay Press-Gazette editorial board last week. He said the state has done a good job of attracting quality young faculty through the UW System’s reputation, but the salaries are not enough to retain the best of the best as they gain more experience.

The problem, in other words, is not finding talented professors, but keeping them. Extending the sports analogy, the UW System has begun to serve as a “farm league” for top faculty and university leadership as salaries grow at the top of the profession.

I have to agree with the sentiment he expressed. Biddy took a substantial pay cut to come here and I think she would have taken the job for even less. After meeting all of the candidates in person and keeping a close eye on the chancellor selection process, I think that as long as we are paying a somewhat respectable amount we can easily find a qualified chancellor. There are so many other reasons to want to be chancellor of UW-Madison that we can find one person to whom money is a secondary issue. Some old comments on the issue from the BH come to mind.

Despite the five departures systemwide and a lower-than-average salary, Wiley said UW-Madison will find a perfectly capable individual to replace him. He doubts compensation will play a role in the chancellor search as whole.

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Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, agreed, adding a major reinvestment is needed for the UW System in general and dealing with budgetary issues will provide a challenge for the next set of chancellors.

“I think that’s been one of the biggest challenges that’s been ongoing,” Pocan said. “While I’ve been in the Legislature, we’ve had far more bad budgets than good budgets for the UW System. Funding in general is important.”

UW is already working with state legislators to push their initiatives for the 2009-11 biennial state budget.

“The chancellors leaving are just a symptom of what’s going wrong,” Pocan added.

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“I think people don’t do the job strictly for the pay and a lot has to do with doing it at this institution,” Pocan said.

Wiley pointed out that UW-Madison holds the title of the nation’s 2nd-most successful research institution, a factor that is particularly important in an era when corporations are putting much less emphasis on research, relying on universities to pick up the slack.

People want to be the chancellor at elite universities and the way to have an elite university is to invest in the best professors. Professors’ salaries are also a different matter because of the number of professors. Finding one qualified person willing to come to be the chancellor of UW-Madison for less money is not nearly as difficult as finding and keeping over 2,000 faculty members and 6,000 other academic staff members not to mention teaching assistants while offering below average salaries. Unfortunately, the other UW-System schools don’t happen to be as lucky as UW-Madison in this respect.