2014 ended on a bitter note for students and university faculty across the United States as the University of Michigan hired Jim Harbaugh to coach its football team for $7 million per year. While the university claims his salary is lower—only $5 million per year plus a $2 million signing bonus—the absurd fact remains that any person, let alone a football coach, can earn that much at a public university in the state whose largest city declared bankruptcy. The University of Michigan has a free hand to pay its football coach $7 million while over 92,000 people are homeless in Detroit—a city with a 39.3 percent poverty rate.
Ludicrous ironies like this are not uncommon in higher education. The administrators who complain of hard times while cutting faculty and staff pay and rolling back financial aid often turn around and write themselves similarly bloated pay checks. For example, Anthony Marx of Amherst College made an annual salary of over $1.5 million in 2011. In the same year, John Sexton’s base salary at New York University totaled over $1.2 million, and nearly $1.5 million counting benefits, raises, bonuses, and so on.
Public universities—universities receiving taxpayer money and ostensibly increasing access to education—often pay their top executives staggering amounts. In 2013, E. Gordeon Gee of Ohio State University raked in $6.058 million; the following year, Texas A&M University’s R. Bowen Loftin made over $1.6 million.
Harbaugh’s mammoth salary is consequently not unusual among university big-shots. More disturbingly, it is not even unusual among university football coaches: The University of Alabama’s Nick Saban makes $7.3 million, while Bob Stoops of the University of Oklahoma makes $5.25 million per year. Like Harbaugh, Stoops and Saban coach for public universities. In other words, university presidents and other high-ranking executives are not the only ones getting rich off of taxes and students’ tuition; the problem is much more pervasive.
Students, faculty and staff should be indignant. There has been a growing movement towards cutting scholarships, grants and other financial aid, making it increasingly difficult for working-class students to attend colleges and universities. As a result, student loan debt has topped $1.2 trillion in the United States. At the same time, tenure for college instructors has become increasingly rare, meaning that often-indebted college teachers face low pay, absurdly long hours and tenuous employment. A countrywide trend to outsource university staff positions through third-party contractors like Aramark and Bon Appetit has allowed universities to mount an offensive against unions and stable employment for their custodians, cooks and other staff.
Student athletes have special reason for outrage, since the appointment of Harbaugh comes on the heels of a massive, drawn-out struggle between athletes, coaches and administrators over whether college athletes may form unions. Athletes, who receive nothing but scholarships, are the heart and soul of the multi-billion dollar college sports leagues. In 2008, 10 college football teams alone produced over $1 billion in revenue, while the players who make the sport—the people who spectators pay to see—only receive free admittance to classes that they have little time to attend between practices and travel. Meanwhile, college athletes may sustain terrible injuries through the intense and long periods of exercise involved in practice, leaving many former athletes with lifelong, sometimes debilitating injuries. Coaches, on the other hand, reap the profits the student athletes produce, raking in the huge sums of money athletic franchises produce.
In other words, battle lines have been drawn. Students, faculty and staff have been put on the defensive against university administrators. Administrators make their enormous salaries from students’ tuition and from faculty and staff’s labor. While hiking tuition pushes out working-class students—the historical backbone of the student anti-austerity movements—university administrators have cut operating costs by prioritizing adjunct professors in lieu of tenured positions and have cut maintenance costs by outsourcing staff positions. Put plainly, it has become clear both where universities’ money is and is not going. As Karl Marx put it, “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.”
Students across the United States have taken up the call to freeze and lower tuition, and staff and faculty unions have struggled to exist and defend their workers. Unity, however, is the only defense potent enough against their shared enemy. Students, faculty and staff are trampled underfoot semester after semester, year after year by university administrators in what amounts to a massive act of theft.
Universities exist for the purposes of education and research—that is, for faculty and students—and cannot exist without the workers who staff them. Administrators cannot claim the same importance when it comes to making their schools run. Instead, they simply dictate policy, occasionally deciding how buildings should be used, how to spend university money and how to improve marketing—all tasks that could be done by the workers and students who produce the wealth behind their enormous salaries.
The attention around Harbough’s new position should be channeled into steeling a movement on campuses and beyond to end this massive regime of theft. The bloc formed by unity between faculty, staff and working-class and revolutionary students can be immeasurably stronger than the super-rich administrators, coaches and all other who exploit them.
