Appearances Matter (Editorial)

Colleges and universities in Arkansas employ too many administrators and pay them too much. How’s that for getting right to the point?

Of course, not every administrator is superfluous, nor is every administrator overpaid, but there are too many of both.

Mark Friedman’s Page 1 report (Adjunct Professors’ Low Pay A Savings For Colleges) on the scandalously low salaries paid adjunct professors at some Arkansas schools highlights the inequities in pay.

So here’s another explicit editorial pronouncement: Cut administrators’ pay and convert those savings into higher salaries for those actually teaching our children. Or cut administrators’ pay and lower tuition. Or maybe raise adjunct pay and lower tuition.

A recent situation illustrates the profound lack of awareness possessed by some in higher education: last week’s trip to Rome by five University of Arkansas System trustees, President Donald Bobbitt and their spouses. A total of 19 people affiliated in some way with the system were scheduled to visit the University of Arkansas Rome Center, which the university describes as “the perfect study abroad opportunity.”

According to their itinerary, they were staying at the Hotel Raphael, whose website indicates a room runs from about $433 to $510 a night.

The UA System “may” pay the costs, UA System policy states. It’s not known, as of this writing, whether it will. But at least one Arkansas legislator looked askance at the junket. “These are the kinds of extravagant expenses that I believe drive up the cost of higher ed,” Rep. Mark Lowery, R-Maumelle, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Well, yes. But we’re most puzzled by the tone deafness of university administrators. A trip costing several thousand dollars is a drop in the UA’s multibillion-dollar bucket, but it’s a poke in the eye to the thousands of Arkansans struggling to pay for an education in desperate hope of entering the vanishing middle class.