By Danny Mayer
The first thing you should know is that UK’s Top 20 bonanza, paid for by students and their families, taxpayers and athletic supporters, and janitorial staff and adjunct armies, represents a fairly large redistribution of wealth, a quiet ho-hum moving of public money into private individual coffers. There have been a number of ways this has been done, but the exploitation of scale—moving from local and regional to national and global scales to deflect blame or increase importance and value—has been a much-used, yet little-discussed ripoff tactic.
Take the example of Mitch Barnhart’s new 10-year, $6 million contract, which UK CEO Lee Todd offered to his buddy without even informing the UK Board of Trustees. The $600,000.00 per year contract represents a $125,000.00 yearly salary increase for the UK Athletic Director. (Editor’s Note: Making just the salary increase alone would place Barnhart in the top 10% of wage earners in this poor state, and somewhere around the top 15% nationally.)
CEO Todd’s main justification for the giant salary increase was, lamentably, one of efficient markets at work. The inflated salary simply reflected, the Herald-Leader reported, the reality that Barnhart needed to be “closer to the market rate for SEC athletic directors.” Later, in other media outlets and in a response to NoC, Todd noted that the market rate was set not by the SEC AD market, but rather via a national market of all major conference ADs. (Todd made other claims, which you can read on our website, but offered no evidence to corroborate them (despite being asked), so we will not publish them here.)
As I told Todd, choosing the national rather than SEC market was a mighty good stroke of fortune for his buddy Mitch. As it turns out, Barnhart in 2009 was already the SEC’s third-highest paid athletic director. Four months earlier, the University of Georgia, which has an athletic program that consistently outperforms UK and generates a greater profit, set the market rate for SEC AD’s with the hire of hot shot University of Florida assistant AD Greg McGarity for $425,000 a year (or $50,000.00 less than Mitch’s old salary of $475,000.00). If the UK CEO was going for market rate in the SEC, his better course of action should have been cutting Barnhart’s salary—not raising it.
Luckily for Todd’s buddy Mitch, though, the correct free market to troll was not the SEC market, but rather the more efficient and better valued national AD market, which, as it happens, is comprised of a wealthier pool of athletic directors. Suddenly, Todd’s buddy Mitch went from being over-valued on the SEC market, to appearing under-valued on the national (big conference) market.
The national market has also allowed Todd to tell a different story about his buddy Mitch. Todd used the national story to highlight Barnhart’s shepherding of the UK athletic program up the rankings of the Sears Cup, an annual ranking of colleges nationwide that stresses athletic achievement across all sports in a given school year. Under Todd’s buddy Mitch’s stewardship, UK athletics have placed in familiar Top 20 territory—comfortably outside it. Last year UK ranked 29 in the Sears Cup (UK’s best showing!, Todd notes); the year before, #34. Before that, 36, with a bullet. The school currently ranks 98 in this year’s race, which concludes in the summer.
The present year excepted, the Sears Cup numbers sound good until you re-scale them back to the SEC market—the market that UK circulates most regularly within. Here in the SEC, UK’s highest ever 29 ranking in the 2009-2010 national Sears Cup competition was only good for seventh best among SEC schools. The previous two years, the Top 30ish rankings were good for eighth best among SEC peers. This year the school sits at sixth best.
Not only did Todd’s choice of a national market make his buddy Mitch significantly more money, but it also allowed the school CEO to spin the raise more effectively. When it came time to measure—benchmark—Barnhart’s value to UK Athletics, Inc., the national market obscured the UK AD’s regional over-valuing. In the SEC market, at least, Barnhart’s above market salary is difficult to jive with his middle of the pack athletic program results. The trick has been to re-scale Barnhart’s benchmarks as a means of (1) inflating Barnhart’s value; and (2) minimizing Barnhart’s less than stellar performance among his real peers.
(I speak here strictly in terms of business markets. While Barnhart comes off to me, personally, as a vile human being whose main interest, professionally, involves destroying the sports I used to love in a Quixotic quest to win the race to the profitably corporate athletic bottom, all in all a genuine scumbag, my personal views have no bearing on the economic argument put forth here. That’s fodder for a different article.)
Cosmic scales: Fracking for Superman (or woman)
I arrive just in time for Tom Harris to begin his moderating duties in the morning’s faculty open-forum on the presidential search. Up front, hidden behind some members of the UK CEO search committee and a few generally suited sycophants hunched into the front two rows, Jim Stuckert of the UK CEO Search committee and Jan Greenwood of UK CEO corporate search firm Greenwood/Asher face the twenty-five strong crowd (media included), ready and waiting to deflect any serious questions. It’s a Friday morning in January and it is cold. Few faculty are in attendance.
As chair of the presidential search committee, Stuckert addresses the crowd first by referencing the “sacred mission” entrusted upon his search committee: to find the best man for the job. Stuckert doesn’t elaborate much, but he doesn’t need to. Over the past decade the UK CEO gig has gained added importance across the state as the college has presented itself as the prime economic asset for leading the Commonwealth into the new global economy. UK, so the argument goes, provides the necessary research and trained academic workforce to attract capital, creative people, and resources to an otherwise poor state. Because of this immense perceived importance to the state’s well being, the default assumption is that UK must aim high and mighty.
How high and mighty? Stuckert says “we want somebody between God and Superman.” Some people laugh. It’s a joke, but the meaning behind it is not. UK must find someone special, and they will search the universe and the Ivy Leagues for that person.
Following Stuckert, Jan Greenwood of Greenwood/Asher addresses the crowd and explains how things have changed in the last 10 years since she hired Lee Todd for UK. Greenwood explains that “the market has changed dramatically” for university CEO presidents. Slowly, patiently, she explains all the reasons why the upcoming presidential search will be conducted entirely in private, by her own private search company, which has been designated by the UK search committee’s outsourcing wing to make their “sacred mission” happen.
She begins the list, all of which describe conditions for making the candidates’ life easier; none refer to the needs of the public to take part in the candidate selection process. Top notch candidates expect privacy. Top notch candidates come from top notch schools who look down on the UK brand. Top notch candidates can lose their jobs if they don’t get the UK job. Donors don’t like it (at the candidate’s school); neither do legislators (in the candidate’s home state).
The words “complex” and “complexity” are used often as justification for Greenwood/Asher’s paid involvement. So too is the need to find the very best.
To ease faculty minds, Greenwood assures the assembled that her search firm does extensive, even if private, research. She refers to the intensive vetting process of candidate’s backgrounds at Greenwood/Asher as “deep drilling,” an unfortunate but telling metaphor. My mind races to black and brown globules floating through the Gulf, deadly shit best left low, then settles on an image of a giant Jan Greenwood fracking God and Superman for natural gas, her hand fisting their innards, her eyes waiting expectantly for a tainted water spout to shoot out their mouth, eyes, nose.
I pull myself together in time to hear a UK business and economics professor take apart Greenwood’s assumptions. “Deep drilling,” as Greenwood calls it, inevitably means serious candidates can expect a certain public to be aware of their candidacy, so to call the search “private” mainly applies to the public at UK. What’s more, the professor tells an unreceptive Greenwood, it is highly suspect for a firm that makes money conducting university searches to shut off public access. Creating more “complex” presidential hires allows the corporate firm to capitalize upon the complexity and secrecy that it’s selling.
I think to myself, And who is to say that Greenwood/Asher’s private search will be objective? They gift-wrapped Lee Todd, an increasingly despised president who, it’s starting to come out, has done a remarkably poor job stewarding the university. Is Todd a benchmark for success? Are there preferred candidates already in the pipeline of Greenwood/Asher, perhaps candidates who lost out on other searches?
The professor continues. On the free market, truly good candidates are not fired for looking for other jobs—they are met with attempts by the home institution to retain the candidate. He could have cited any faculty search ever, but instead cites John Calipari, who if he decides to look for another job, will inevitably be met with a vigorous UK attempt to retain him here. Public searches, the professor suggests, actually attract better candidates. They are better vetted precisely because they are public.
None of the professor’s comments make it into the Kernel or Herald-Leader reports. The forum isn’t a forum at all. It’s public relations, performed admirably by a search firm from Florida. In the long history of capitalist free markets, exceptions have always been made for important people and industries—for Supermen and their lucrative business.
Free markets also have a tendency to scale up, as they do when production moves offshore—globalize—to exploit living conditions in other places. In neoliberal globalization, dirty industry goes to the local market where pollution outlays are cheap—Mexico or Africa. Industrial production globalizes by going to the local market where labor is the cheapest—China, Vietnam, Bangalore. Geographers call it capitalist exploitation of scale.
The UK search, I think as I leave the pathetically empty faculty forum, is no exception. The state’s flagship college, a land grant university funded to support the citizens of the state, has scaled up. It no longer benchmarks itself locally or regionally, though it is of course required to pay lip-service to such benchmarks; national rankings and global marketplaces are the catchwords now, and these larger scales are by design more complex, and require better pay. It makes no difference to Greenwood/Asher, or the search committee, where UK actually ranks nationally—only that it thinks of itself as a player on that scale. The consideration is what is profitable, not the result.
So while this state has a fairly low median income (and is home to 10 of the top 25 poorest counties in the nation), it will attempt to import to the state a deeply fracked, cosmically important superman (or woman) at competive national or global rates. And then it will collect its paycheck and close the book on yet another all around successful search.
Coda: A trip to 2006
Fiver years ago, when UK faculty were still solidly behind Lee Todd’s nationally-praised Top 20 business plan to make the state university a national player among research institutions, UK experienced yet another funding crisis. The college did not have enough money to grant both faculty and staff the raises all sides acknowledged they deserved. Lee Todd, fresh off the publication of his Top 20 business plan that laid out, erroneously, the statewide benefits for being home to a Top 20 research university, pushed through a unique solution.
Both staff and faculty would receive a raise, but unlike previous raises, the two groups would receive differently sized increases: faculty would receive a 5.5% raise, while staff were eligible for a 3% raise.
Todd justified the raise based on different labor markets. Faculty, and in particular Top 20 faculty, circulate on a national market, Todd argued, while staff are paid according to a local market. Todd’s market-based solution to/justification of the differing pay raises was endorsed by the faculty.
Todd’s solution was also sold to students, who with no objections from faculty had experienced three straight years of tuition increases ranging between 9 and 12 percent, as a sound investment in their Top 20 education. It was made to appear pretty clear, and faculty did not protest the notion, that paying more money for Top 20 faculty was worth both the increased tuition paid by students, and the smaller raise received by local market staff.
Last week in the Lexington Herald-Leader, Linda Blackford continued her series looking into the state of UK. The article, titled “Doing more with less,” focused on the low pay of faculty, who have not received a raise in several years (and who, by sheer coincidence, are now becoming restless with the CEO architect of the Top 20). The article offered two tables of salaries. In the bigger table, of UK Top 20 benchmark institutions, UK faculty salaries scored dead last, between 26 and 40 thousand dollars less than the top 3 benchmarks (all University of California system schools).
The second table, smaller, showed UK’s position alongside its regional partners in the SEC. Unlike the nationally focused Top 20 table, the SEC salary table did not show UK faculty salaries to be a problem. They did not show that faculties were “doing more with less.” In the SEC market, UK faculty are well compensated. They have the third highest salaries in the conference (excluding Vanderbilt, whose numbers were not given). On average UK faculty make between 10 and 14 thousand dollars more than their Mississippi school comrades, the two lowest paying SEC faculty gigs.
Scaled even more close to home, that $80,000 average faculty salary is a figure that is nearly double the state’s median income of $43,000.
In the past five years, UK faculty have seen their average pay increase sixteen percent, in part because of the belief that nationally admired Top 20 (aspiring) faculty are economic boons to the state. Back in the real world, one survey I’ve seen shows that real median income for Kentucky households statewide had fallen fourteen percent over the ten year period between 1998 and 2008.
So much for national educational solutions to local and regional problems.
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