Western President Bruce Shepard addresses questions about the recent budget cuts at an open forum held last week on May 14. // photo by Katie Greene Western Front
When a campus wide discussion of cost saving and looming budget cuts began in the fall 2008, an age-old question followed not far behind. Like a volcano awakening from its dormancy, people began questioning Western President Bruce Shepard’s ability to maintain an annual salary of $300,000 while the apparent remainder of the university struggled to fathom reasonable, workable solutions to the impending budget crisis.
An online post from “josephj2” on Western’s Viking Village Online Forum on Nov. 28, 2008, suggested Western “reduce the salaries of [highly paid administrators] due to the recent budget reduction.”
Since then, Western’s operating budget shortfall has been finalized by the Washington state legislature. The university is currently facing nearly $20 million in budget reductions during the 2009-11 biennium.
Then, in a letter to the editor published by The Western Front on May 12, 2009, Western senior John Kindle asked, “Isn’t it interesting that Bruce Shepard is willing to dish out so many cuts, but still accept a salary of more than $300,000 annually?”
The Western Front recently sat down with Western President Bruce Shepard in a one-on-one interview to get his personal opinion on the matter.
Western Front: As Western faces its deepest budget cuts historically, why are you, President Shepard, unwilling to accept a reduction in your salary for the sake of mitigating the university’s loss of programs, faculty positions and class sections?
Bruce Shepard: I’ve thought a lot about this. This is the first opportunity I’ve had to talk with anybody about it.
This question always happens in these times, and it’s just as predictable as can be.
I was sitting in a press conference down in the state house at the capital some months ago. Here are six presidents, and we were talking about the worst budget in the state’s history and the state becoming a minority shareholder in public higher education, and all the questions were about Mark Emmert’s salary and Husky stadium. That’s what people were asking about!
Why focus on the salaries when you’ve got a $45 million dollar budget cut. My social science hypothesis at the time was that people just can’t deal with the reality.
We are a talent organization; we really are. Our trustees decided (when searching for a president) what marketplace we wanted to search for a president for Western. I watched this from afar, and I was approached multiple times a week about other jobs.
There are several markets. One is for the people who are up-and-coming. They may be very good, a provost stepping up into president, but they’re inexperienced. There’s one salary range you can offer for that.
If you want a sitting, experienced president, there’s a different salary range. Our trustees decided they wanted a sitting, experienced president, and that’s the salary they set. I think that’s defendable.
Here’s a premier university in the Pacific Northwest that wants to be the best in the nation. What kind of leadership should it have? In these difficult times, I think I have finally gotten pretty good at what I do. I’ve learned from making a lot of mistakes. So they hired an experienced president that has a record of success.
If we’re going to be a premier university, we have to offer competitive salaries. It’s very hard for people to understand why anybody is worth what I am paid compared to what other folks are paid, but that’s what the marketplace is.
Why should a beginning English professor make only half of what a beginning business professor makes? What they do for the university is the same, and there is no philosophical principle with which I could justify a salary differential. They’re both equally important working just as hard and having just as much training and skill and expertise.
The challenge is frustrating because our equity instinct would say they have to be paid the same. But you can’t build a wall around your university and insolate yourself from the marketplace.
These are the discussions I’ve had with the faculty because their instinct is, “Well, let’s just make a common salary for everyone.”
What we would be saying is the marketplace is going to determine where we’re strong and where we’re weak instead of our determining that. Because English professors would be paid well above average, we’re going to get really good beginning English professors, but we’re going to get almost nobody to apply for the business positions.
By trying to insolate ourselves from the marketplace, we’ve ceded responsibility for our strengths and weaknesses to the marketplace, and that’s a frustrating thing.
Why, intrinsically, is what a custodian does worth less than what a president does? It’s not. I could see equity arguments for why there should not be a salary differential there. But it is a marketplace. As a talent industry, we can’t just insolate ourselves from that.
I think we hurt ourselves by reducing our capacity to compete for the very best. If we were to furlough [faculty, administrators and staff] or somehow reduce their salaries by 10 percent, we’ll start to lose them and in the long run we would become a weaker university than if we simply said, “we’re going to do without this one particular position but we’re going to keep the quality and keep the talent there.”
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