Wednesday, October 7, 2009

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Lose

I was going to talk with the “gang of six” and other assorted bad actors about the health care debate, but it remains too depressing.  Ideologues on the right raising fearsome "death camp" fantasies worthy of Stephen King while their counterparts on the left still dream of French and Danish-style single-payer system.  I feel for Obama.  I’ve been there.  You stand in front of a class of a couple hundred students and realize that nobody read the assignment.  So instead I’ve decided to talk with a group that we all can agree have lost their minds: The University of Alabama’s Board of Trustees Compensation Committee.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I speak frankly?  Thank you.

And I mean that, thank you.  We here at NC State have been hard pressed to explain what our Chancellor and Provost were thinking when they decided – in a time of budgetary disaster – to pay the wife of the former governor 185K a year to run a “speakers bureau.”  The gang of three is gone, but the rest of us remain somewhat embarrassed.

You have made us look like pikers, unworthy of public attention and scorn.  So I say again, thank you.  And I want you to understand that I am not here to judge.  Rather, let us say I am simply trying to understand.  Do I have this right?  You have agreed –unanimously – to pay your coach 42 MILLION DOLLARS over the next nine years?  And he doesn’t even coach basketball?  You will understand why we in the ACC have a hard time understanding this.  Your largess does, however, shed some light on why the SEC is rumored to be the “best football conference in the country.”  A rumor started, no doubt, at football coaching conferences during the session on Strategies for Leveraging Obscene Compensation.

But let me ask this as gently as possible: Have you completely lost your minds?  Universities all over the country are facing double digit budget cuts and you are going to pay Nick Saban 42 million dollars to teach large undergraduates to run into each other with maximum mayhem?  Again, have you completely lost your mind?

Oh, I know, we run the same arguments here to pay our coaches less grotesque, but still ridiculous, salaries:  First, it is “different money” raised from fat-cat alums who would never contribute equal sums to “the academic side.”  Second, these are very tenuous jobs – the same alums who foot the bills will toss the coaches to the wolves if they don’t beat Flordia/Texas/USC/Carolina/Yale/YourBiggestRival and get your university to a bowl game in a couple years. 

I don’t want to harp on the old and futile responses of maybe the fat-cats would fund the academic side if the athletic side wasn’t sucking up all their largess with skyboxes and tailgate fanfare.  And, by the by, give me a head coach’s golden parachute and you can throw me to the wolves anytime.  But, those arguments were drowned out by the roar of ESPN College Game Day years ago.  I have another concern: you are embarrassing your university, particularly the faculty who teach there.

Long ago, in a galaxy far away, there was a planet called Ben And Jerry.  It was a frozen planet, run by two beneficent old hipsters not surprisingly known as Ben and Jerry.  They had fled to their frozen orb from the inhospitable outer rings of Maybe Bagel.  Imagine their joy and surprise when they discovered that their planet was host to myriads of icy flavors – some of which still tasted wonderful in the morning.  Ben and Jerry began, with the help of flocks of little ice-cream elves, to market their frozen nectar throughout the galaxy. Even they could sense the potential for significant wealth.  But, perhaps because they were old hipsters, they had an ingrained distrust of greed and disproportionate compensation, so they declared that the highest paid person on Ben And Jerry could make no more than seven times the salary of the lowest paid person.  And so it was for a while. Ben and Jerry are both multimillionaires now, and I doubt that the night watchman or the cookie cruncher is compensated at the “one-seventh of Ben and Jerry’s income” scale.  But that is not the point.

The point is that Ben and Jerry realized that there is an inherent relationship between compensation and the dual perceptions of employee self-worth and corporate mission.  It follows that people who are valued most by the organization are paid the most money and one’s relative importance to the mission of the organization can be measured by comparing your salary to those in the “higher pay grades.”

You are paying your football coach 42 million dollars.

Did I say this before?

Have you completely lost your minds?

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