Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Dan Dewalt. He lives in Brattleboro.
VPR recently interviewed UVM Interim President John Bramley. During the conversation, he was asked about UVM’s affordability for Vermont students and about the out-sized salaries of UVM’s top administrators. Some of his answers revealed just how far the gap between the privileged and rest of us has grown.
He stressed that UVM gives financial aid to students and quoted the current $12,180 tuition costs, neglecting to mention that room, board and other fees bring the cost up to almost $25,000 per year.
“We give excellent value for the money” he said, but showed no understanding of the actual impact of the thousands of dollars in student loans, often at interest rates approaching 10 percent, on the Vermont student who does not have financial backing from his/her family to pay for college. Graduating from college with a debt of $50,000 (or more) is not uncommon these days, and there are very few jobs that pay enough to meet that load of debt coupled with living expenses.
When defending his $325,000 salary (not including percs and benefits), he said, “ Yes, that’s a lot of money. I think I work pretty hard for it.”
“If you look at what I get paid compared to a single mom with three jobs at minimum wage, it’s outrageous, if you look at a baseball player, or a hedge fund manager, I think its pretty reasonable,” Bramley said. “So it’s all relative.”
Indeed, since he gets less than a hedge fund manager, we should consider his salary a bargain? Has it ever crossed his mind that he could trim his own personal salary down to $225,000 and give a fully paid UVM education to four Vermonters every year with the savings? Upper echelon earners don’t think in those terms, they only compare themselves with others of their ilk, a small coterie of overpaid executives who manage to arrange for big pay and bonuses whether they succeed or fail during their tenure with companies or universities. (UVM’s outgoing president resigned early, but still managed to get a 17 month paid leave, — at $27,000/month — to help him rest up between leaving as president and when he’ll return as the highest paid professor at the university.)
Bramley trotted out the self-serving and tired argument that you have to pay these high wages to attract the proper caliber of executives. Maybe we should think more about the downside of having executives separated from their constituents by an insurmountable class gap. What proof is there that a a quality candidate for UVM president could not be found among people who would be willing to work for a more modest salary? It also doesn’t hurt to remember that money isn’t the only draw for quality leaders. The governor’s job in Arkansas paid a notoriously low wage in 1978, but that didn’t stop Bill Clinton from campaigning hard to win the seat.
Even though Bramley acknowledges the existence of the low wage parent, he can’t possibly understand the strain and worry that haunt that parent at every waking moment, as he or she struggles to make ends meet without enough money to pull it off. The wealthy understand the rest of us as statistics, or as markets, or as units of productivity, but, by virtue of the wall of privilege that they have erected around themselves, they have very little capacity to truly understand the challenges that we face everyday. So while it is ridiculous to suppose that there is no place for them in our economy and lives, it is equally ridiculous to think that they should dictate all of the economic terms under which we all live.
If UVM is truly to serve the interests of Vermonters and the state, it needs to provide an education that is affordable to a majority of Vermonters. That is not now the case, and if UVM continues to browse only among the wealthy elite for its leadership candidates, it will continue to burnish its ivory tower image, but it may not do much to integrate the university into the fabric of our lives. Vermont does many things differently than the rest of the country.
Why not have a university that demotes elitism and embraces instead values of egalitarianism and universal education? If we can work for affordable health care for all, why can’t we chart our own unique path for a quality secondary education for all as well? As long as the top UVM administrators are beholden to and invested in the status quo of the elite executive world, it is unlikely that we will see real change.
If Vermonters want a university system that will serve us all, we will have raise a mighty noise. Just as the economic system no longer serves us, our higher education system is becoming more dis-functional and remote from everyday Vermonters. We need not accept either of these deficiencies. As the Occupy movement has awoken us to see what power we might exercise as citizens, let us look in every direction to see where our current systems have gone awry. Our leaders show us everyday that they are not up to the task, let’s push for a new type of leadership and start to move ourselves out from under the smothering control of the current power elite.
