As Rob’s research has reminded us, the outrageous and exorbitant compensation paid to Texas A&M president Michael Young is only the tip of the iceberg, they do things BIG in Texas. Jimbo Fisher, their new football coach, has been guaranteed $75 Million for leading the mighty Texas team. (I presume that is spread out over several years of a long-term contract.) Nick Saban, the current Texas coach, is already the highest paid college football coach in the nation at $7 million/yr.
https://www.texastribune.org/2017/12/04/texas-m-guaranteed-75-million-football-coach-jimbo-fisher-how-can-it-a/
So maybe President Young deserves a healthy paycheck too. After all, he does lead a really big and important university that supports a thriving and profitable industry: college athletics.
Coach Fisher is getting a substantial boost over his current salary at FSU, although that was no slouch either, as can be learned from a glance at the top ten college football coach incomes below.
https://www.si.com/college-football/2015/10/08/highest-paid-college-football-coaches-salaries-list-nick-saban-jim-harbaugh
1. Nick Saban, Alabama – $7,087,481
2. Jim Harbaugh, Michigan – $7,004,000
3. Urban Meyer, Ohio State – $5,860,000
4. Bob Stoops, Oklahoma – $5,400,000
5. Jimbo Fisher, Florida State – $5,150,000
6. Charlie Strong, Texas – $5,100,270
7. Kevin Sumlin, Texas A&M – $5,000,000
8. James Franklin, Penn State – $4,400,000
9. Les Miles, LSU – $4,385,567
10. Hugh Freeze, Mississippi – $4,310,000
I suppose it can be argued that college football pays for itself, that it does not use state funds, and that coaching salaries (not to mention the entire bloated organization that supports the football program) are driven by team performance. Isn’t that how free enterprise is supposed to work?
Except college football is not free enterprise. In free enterprise, the workers get paid too, remember?
Let’s get our priorities straight. The purpose of the US system of higher education is not to do nerdy research nobody cares about, or to teach kids stupid crap they’ll never get a chance to use on the job, or to breed hippies and commies to put down America. The reason we have universities is to provide a substrate on which college athletics can flourish and prosper. And college athletics serves an even higher purpose in the Great Scheme of Things: its the farm system for Pro Sports. Now we’re talking REAL money.
However, getting back to our REAL discussion (how
smarty-farty Liberal Kollege Perfessers love to suck at the gummint teat), what we’re really arguing here is just another part of the great political/cultural debate going on in America right now. Conservatives are outraged at how much intellectuals get paid (at least, at the very highest levels at the biggest schools) at government expense. They resent their tax dollars going to support un-American types who question “conventional” American values. On the other hand, the fact that the nation’s educational system has been hijacked to serve as a boot camp for Professional Sports, one of the most lucrative and unregulated (and dangerous, for the players) industries in the country, based, incidentally, on slave labor; doesn’t seem to faze them at all. Meanwhile, the TV-Pro Sport complex has infiltrated its tentacles all the way down into Pop Warner and Middle school levels. American education is being mined by a ruthless industry based on marketing violence to a brutalized public, and that REALLY offends me.
Conservatives whine about how the (mostly) black players are way overpaid, while they feel its OK the drone (mostly) white owners, coaches and administrative staffs enjoy fantastically lucrative careers managing their gladiators for public amusement and private profit in the arena.
Its part of the pattern. They bitch about (mostly) lefty entertainers and musicians at the very top of the heap making lots of dough and having great cultural influence among their fans while the (mostly) white sleazeball promoters, agents and managers exploit the artists mercilessly. But that’s OK because they are businessmen.
Of course, I don’t mean to imply this is a (mostly) black/white issue. Its really about Management vs Labor, you know, the makers vs takers, the bosses vs the workers.
Am I out of line here? Maybe. But I don’t care. We are all entitled to look at the universe through the filters of our own education.