If you read The Post on Monday, you may have noticed that Ohio University President Roderick McDavis made $294,665 this year. Among the university's other top earners were football coach Frank Solich, earning $257,162, and Executive Vice President and Provost Kathy Krendl, who made $245,116. These earnings wouldn't be so remarkable if the average salary for tenured and tenure-track faculty, the highest faculty earners, wasn't $91,995 and if the university wasn't hedging on whether or not to give faculty members a raise. Unfortunately, this is the reality of the situation, and it once again demonstrates that Ohio University administrators' budget priorities aren't in sync with the rest of the OU community's priorities.
We've noticed this variance in priorities before. Students discovered at the beginning of Fall Quarter that the administration had decided over the summer to eliminate maintenance and custodial jobs, leading to picketing and protests by students, faculty and staff who were concerned about the direction in which the university was going. Why, many of us asked, was the administration more concerned with hiring more budget crunchers than it was with retaining needed custodial and maintenance workers? For those who are still waiting for a good answer to this question, let me point out that the man behind that decision ' Vice President for Finance and Administration William Decatur ' is the fifth top earner, making $221,450 this year. This raises another equally pertinent question: How many custodial and maintenance workers could have been retained if Decatur weren't paid quite so much to mismanage the budget?
But that was Fall Quarter. Since then, the university community has been raising more and more questions about the administration's budget priorities. Few answers have been offered in response to these questions, and moreover, the administration's priorities have moved beyond questionable into the realm of obscenity. What is it that Frank Solich has done for this university that has earned him a full $165,167 more than the average for the highest paid faculty? By paying our football coach so much more than we pay our faculty, are we sending the message that athletics are more important to us than academics? And what about McDavis and Krendl? Last spring, the overwhelming majority of voting students expressed no confidence in McDavis. Why, then, is he earning $202,670 more than the highest faculty average? Why is Krendl, who has only followed McDavis' lead and become yet another unaccountable administrator, making $153,121 more than the highest faculty average? These are questions that the university community should demand answers to.
It is time for the students to hold administrators accountable for their financial decisions. We need to ask why William Decatur is earning so much while custodians and maintenance workers are forced to look for new jobs or adjust to more difficult, lower-paying jobs on this campus. We need to ask why football is more important than education to this administration. We need to ask why the two administrators who are behind the countless poor decisions that have been made recently are making such obscene earnings. We need to stand up for our faculty and staff and demand that the administration make its own budgetary sacrifices. If we're going to sacrifice union custodial and maintenance jobs, and if we're going to ask faculty members to wait even longer for pay raises, then we need to be asking administrators to make similar sacrifices. Otherwise we are sending the message that administrators, no matter how inept they may be, are more important to us than our faculty and staff. That would be a truly disheartening message for those who teach us and maintain our facilities to receive.
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Nathan Nelson
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