by Richard M. Berthold
Daily Lobo columnist
With the passage of time, large organizations, whether public or private, inevitably become more bureaucratic and administratively top-heavy, and the University is certainly no exception. Further, and hardly surprising, compensation grows far more rapidly among those at the top, particularly in academics, where generally cowardly faculty are disinclined to seriously challenge the powers that be.
These problems are only exacerbated by a high turnover rate in the leadership, as has been the case with UNM. A new president typically wishes to create his own administration, installing his people and restructuring the system. Unfortunately, a new hire, at least in the administration, always means a higher salary - compare the compensation package of the recently departed Louis Caldera with that of the newly arrived David Schmidly. The Regents claim UNM cannot be competitive in hiring high-quality administrators (whatever that is) unless we offer the big bucks, yet somehow that reasoning fails to be applied to the faculty, who for the last 30-odd years have been behind the salary curve when compared to peer institutions.
In my 30 years at UNM, I do not believe that I ever saw a new president reduce the size of the administration. It is difficult to compare the numbers and authority of administrators over the years because the official nomenclature keeps changing - UNM has had a particular problem deciding between vice presidents and associate provosts - but I believe that when I joined the faculty in 1972, there were three vice presidents. It is not exactly clear, but there are now almost a dozen - Schmidly having created three new ones - including the brilliant coup of bringing the athletics director into Scholes Hall.
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And this is just the highest level. Every one of these offices is like a mini administration; the office of the provost (Vice President for Academic Affairs), for example, contains a deputy provost, a vice provost and three associate provosts. College deans used to have secretaries or perhaps an office manager. Now they have associate deans, who, of course, make more money than common secretaries.
It is not at all obvious to me exactly what all these people do. UNM's enrollment has not grown all that much in the last three decades, so why do we need so many more administrators? Some of this surely has to do with cowardice and our politically correct society, since it is otherwise hard to see why we need an executive vice president for institutional diversity. Former UNM President Bill Gordon revealed to me that the vice president for institutional advancement was created to provide a job for an incompetent administrator who could not be fired because she was female and Hispanic. But most of it, I think, is keeping up with the Joneses; big important universities have huge collections of high-paid administrators - and million dollar coaches.
And the recent news about the Office of Research and Economic Development demonstrates that at least one vice president is hardly earning his fat paycheck. Was he or anyone else in the office immediately terminated? Of course not. In fact, part of the suggested solution for dealing with the $2.1 million debt piled up under Vice President Terry Yates is to tax the budgets of academic departments, which is to say, make the faculty and students pay for another administrative screw-up. Oh, and "restructuring the office."
Finally, as you already know, UNM is paying part of the salaries (each part more than I ever made as a professor) of three former administrators who are now state officials. Apart from the blatant and perhaps illegal conflict of interest - former Provost Reed Dasenbrock is now secretary of Higher Education - why the hell is the University paying people who no longer work here? Simply because they refused to take a cut in their already-inflated salaries?
Where do I sign up for one of these jobs?
