Building Trust Between Colleges and Parents

Presidents of colleges and universities love to talk.

They love to talk about the schools they lead, and why they are great. They love to talk about problems facing America and the world, and how U.S. higher education is producing the next generation of leaders to solve those problems. And they love to talk about the federal government, and how it is not spending enough money in support of colleges and universities.

Actually, college presidents love to talk most of the time. When it comes to certain subjects, they grow quiet.

Unfortunately, the silence-inducing topics for many college presidents happen to be the issues that many parents care most deeply about, the “three p’s” – pay, politics and price.

Simply put, some people think that college presidents are paid too much. There is no doubt, of course, that some college presidents are paid an awful lot of money, with salary packages ranging from a quarter of a million to well over a million dollars a year.

However, many college presidents are leading billion dollar enterprises, with budgets equal to some of America’s largest corporations, so certainly an argument can be made that their be pay might be commensurate with private-sector peers who have significant profit and loss responsibility.

After all, unless they are members of the clergy (who do, in fact, run some of America’s colleges), college presidents have not taken a vow of poverty, nor should they.

But neither should they take a vow of silence. All college presidents, public and private, should make their salaries and the entire budget of their universities open for all to see. This transparency is expected of corporate America and it should also be expected of higher education in America.

With greater transparency will come a greater ability for various constituencies to assess performance. And, in the end, performance should be the standard that drives pay.

The next “p-word” to dissect stands for politics. It is a fact that many people believe that colleges and universities, particularly the professors, are too liberal and/or that whatever their politics, it should not be introduced into the classroom, where the pursuit of knowledge should rein supreme.

Recently, a self-admitted liberal reporter stood in front of a room of college presidents and told them that the fact is “colleges are ideologically one-sided and you botch the issue if you deny it.”

He went on to accuse colleges of “tossing out the token conservative for media consumption” when “such conservatives are indeed rare on campus, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.”

This reporter urged openness when it comes to politics. He suggested that colleges should allow interested observers into their classrooms, to see for themselves just how much politics actually goes on. His guess was not much, particularly in fields such as science, math and music, where very little, if any, of the base of knowledge has anything to do with politics.