News to Me

All politics is local. So is news. The news need not be geographically local, but if the events have a direct effect on my life, then I consider them to be newsworthy.

For months, we’ve read about the economic crisis and how Wall Street money masters screwed everything to a fair-thee-well, then took taxpayer money, gave themselves bonuses and junkets and failed to understand why people were outraged.

Here in Burlington, the University of Vermont has to cut its budget. A few weeks ago, the U announced cancellation of the baseball and softball programs and 16 staffers will be laid off. Not too bad, but we’ve been warned to expect more cuts.

Then it was revealed that UVM’s president, Daniel Mark Fogel, has given out $900,000 in bonuses to top administrators in the last three years. (Just to be clear, President Fogel is not related to me, despite nominal similarity.)

Well OK, why not bonuses? The economy hasn’t been bad for the last three years. But it’s academia, not Wall Street; it’s not corporate America. You shouldn’t be here for the money. More damning, all these bonuses were secret until a whistleblower with the faculty union revealed them.

The news started people looking at other UVM pay data. President Fogel earns $322,000 per year, which again, isn’t big coin on Wall Street, but for Burlington, Vermont it’s about eight times the local average. He also awarded himself $191,000 in bonuses in the past three years, (That’s not part of the 900 grand mentioned above.) During discussions about the financial crisis, students asked Dr. Fogel if he’d be willing to take a pay cut. He refused.

Since Dan Fogel arrived at Groovy UV in 2002, he’s talked about “raising the metabolism of the university.” I’m not qualified to measure academic metabolism, but salaries of the top brass have certainly gone up. This year, 38 administrators earn $150,000 or more. Last year, 25 administrators were in the 150K club. These are the same folks who got the 900 large in addition to their salary. Another faculty union troublemaker pointed out that comparable university administrator salaries are $122,000 per year.

As I said this is Burlington, where the median income is $40,000 a year, so the fact that our brass earns $30,000 more than their peers, who probably live in a more expensive town, is hard to rationalize. Harder still, when one realizes there are support staff at UVM with 20 years on the job who earn $30,000 a year, less than some folks get for an annual bonus.

To some extent, I understand how this happens. All news is local. So are bonuses. Mister Doctor President Fogel looks around the executive suite and sees John over there working so hard; of course he wants to reward him. Many other administrators, all within easy eyeshot of the president’s office, are hard workers. Some may not be hard workers. They may in fact be dead wood, but if they hear the others are getting bonuses and they’re not, well, they just might be even less productive than they already are, so let’s give them a bonus, too. Just not as big as the others.

The university’s trustees are all wealthy business types, so awarding bonuses dovetails with their worldview. They might think anything that makes the university more like a business is a good thing.

None of these people are bad or stupid, merely myopic and privileged. They’ve landed in an echo chamber of entitlement and the only efforts they acknowledge are those of people like them.

Woeful as this situation is, it’s been useful to me. It’s brought the moral malaise of our fiscal folly down to a level where I can get my arms and head around it. It even points toward a solution – albeit a partial one – to our national crisis:

Less “me.” More “we.”

© 2009, Mark Floegel

One Comment

  1. Briana Clark
    Posted 3/24/2009 at 2:41 pm | Permalink

    Has the list of people who recieved these bonuses been released? Or is that information accessible anywhere?

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