Dartblog

President Kim is behind the eight ball in trying to sort out the financial mess that he has inherited from Jim Wright. He is looking at many ways to cut spending, but at the recent faculty meeting, several faculty members implored him to spare the “vulnerable” from the upcoming cuts.

However, under Wright’s budgets, vulnerable administrators enjoyed more largesse than did members of the faculty. Below is a heavily redacted excerpt from an internal letter dated May 11, 2007, from Trustee T.J. Rogers to, it seems, someone on the Board. It details the relative growth of salaries and wages among faculty members, among other employees, and the rise of total expenses at the College.

As you can see, between 2002 and 2006, faculty salaries grew by a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 5.48%; other salaries grew by 6.14%; and total expenses grew by 7.05%.

To put these figures in context, if you start by paying someone $100 and their salary grows by 5.48% each year over 10 years, at the end of that period, you will be paying them $170.49. Do the same calculation with a growth rate of 7.05% and the salary grows to $197.64. That’s a total difference after a decade of 15.9%.

To put things another way, the percent of Dartmouth’s overall budget allocated to faculty members is going down, not up. I reiterate my question of a previous post: who are the most important employees of the College?

Imagine if the amount of money available for faculty salaries were 15.9% higher today than it actually is. Think of all the professors that the College could have hired, and how the presence on the faculty of those additional professors could have ended the long lines of students waiting to get into their preferred courses.

Remember, a dollar spent in one place is a dollar that could have been spent elsewhere.

Addendum: An alert readers points out that in May, 2007, while TJ Rogers was focussing in his letter on the declining share of the College budget devoted to the faculty, Board of Trustees Chair Bill Neukom was hard at work preparing to end the historic parity between Alumni Trustees and Charter Trustees on the Board. The D reported on this development at that time here, and I anticipated the Board-packing plan a few weeks later in a D column here.