By Professor Doom
I’ve written
before of the
situation for most college professors in Colorado. They’re
paid sub-poverty wages, and the laws/hiring are manipulated so that there’s no
legal violation in doing so, even to the point of cutting their hours to avoid
Obamacare—it really is curious how our Left-leaning campuses don’t support
Leftist policies when it’s their own pocketbook being raided.
Let me recycle one
quote that really sums up the Colorado system that “can’t afford”
to pay the professors even minimum wage:
“…in order
to keep the administrative class afloat, this is the reality for me and for my
peers. Our college system, for example, has hired two new administrators per
day for the past three years…Its financial profile is rated at the top of the
scale by the metrics of Standard and Poor’s or Moody’s, as a revealed in a
recent analysis of CCCS finances conducted by the American Association of
University Professors (AAUP).”
All the money
flowing into higher education has done the students no good—our $1.3 trillion
dollars of student loan debt can attest to that. It’s also done nothing for the
workers in higher education, who find their pay frozen for twenty years or
more, if they’re lucky, and in most cases pay has been reduced, much reduced.
I understand that
most workers have had their pay frozen, that the strife for higher education
professors is reflected in most every profession nowadays. That said, it really
is disturbing watching all the administrators drive to campus in shiny new cars,
and watching glittering administrative palaces go up even when enrollment
falls, while the professors go down to the food banks (which, in Colorado,
actually specialize in helping professors, because there are so many starving
professors).
Time and again I
have heard expensive-suited administrators bleat about how education is worth
any price, that students shouldn’t worry about the debt they’re taking on for
the cost of tuition, because having an education leads to a high paying job.
Our college
professors are the most educated class of citizenry…and many of us are starving
to death on the wages those obscenely overpaid administrators (who themselves
often have minimal, if any, education) give us, based on that “valuable”
education.
The situation is
really bad in Colorado, where faculty begged to be given a raise, a raise in a
system that is flush with cash and has no trouble hiring yet another $150,000 a
year Diversity Vice President on a twice-a-day basis even as it wouldn’t dream
of paying a faculty member $30,000 a year…no money for the latter, you see.
Committees were
formed, and determined that, yes, it was about time for a faculty pay raise, to
the tune of 28% (keep in mind, many administrators get pay raises on the order
of 10% a year, so 28%, once every 20 years, is hardly excessive).
Administration,
always eager to say how precious education is, revealed their true colors at
the thought of paying educated people:
Officials balked,
saying the "current political environment" made such a hike
unfeasible…administrative salaries have skyrocketed in recent years, along with
major building campaigns on several of the 41 campuses operated by the state's
thirteen community colleges…
Take it
from a veteran of state community colleges, they really are a cornucopia of
opportunities for fraud, and actively support incompetence. Spend a few million
on a building, pay for it with bonds…and most of it goes directly into
administrative (or trustee) pockets in the form of kickbacks, and the system is
set up so that you almost never can follow the paper trail (there are a
few exceptions that give some idea of what
goes on).
Still, some
administrators got tired of watching the faculty starve to death, and so
deigned to let them have a little something. And we’re
talking little:
(the above is a poster distributed protesting the meager pay
raise. Snowflake photo SnowCrystals.com)
That’s right,
folks, the faculty beg for their first pay raise this millenium, admin looks
down from a table loaded with foie gras stuffed lobster…and deigns to give them
almost $5 a week more. That’s a few
cans of beans, at least, but I really feel if educators had some influence over
this system, there would have been something a bit more equitable.
Seriously, $200
million for a college sportsball stadium isn’t much of a problem for the
Colorado education system, but paying college professors even a starvation
level wage is just too tough for administrators.
No money, you
see. Too bad. Better luck 20 years from now.
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