Watchdog Journalism (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s editorial page gave a welcome shoutout to the work our Senior Editor Mark Friedman did on his Aug. 7 report about administrative salaries at the Arkansas taxpayer-supported colleges and universities. There’s nothing more satisfying than recognition from one’s peers, and this was not the first time the “big paper” had taken note of the work we’re doing over here.

The D-G described administrative salaries as “an old scandal made new again.” From our perspective, it was just an update on similar reporting Mark had done three years ago. When I wrote an article in April about inflation in the cost of higher education — faster by far than health care over the past quarter-century — several readers told me that the real problem we ought to be reporting on was runaway administrative salaries. Mark and I concluded that enough time had passed that readers had forgotten that we had actually devoted time and space to that issue.

Besides, several top administrators had changed since then — including at the University of Arkansas, UA Little Rock, Arkansas State University and the University of Central Arkansas. The salaries being paid to public employees are always fair game for reporting, especially those that are growing far faster than general inflation or even wages.

For some strange reason, there are administrators who seem uneasy at the prospect of their ultimate employers knowing just how much they are being paid and how quickly the costs of their particular positions have grown. You’d almost think these nervous administrators weren’t sure the taxpayers and tuition-payers would agree they were getting a good value.

Maybe they think the public just won’t understand the many excellent reasons why a job costs their institutions 30 to 40 percent more than it did five years ago, a period during which the consumer price index has grown by less than 7 percent.

But Mark Friedman tried his best to tell the administrators’ side as well. “In order to remain competitive, UAMS attempts to match internal compensation practices with the external market conditions for these positions,” Stephanie Gardner, the interim chancellor of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, explained. “This approach positions UAMS to attract strong applicants for these positions as well as retain the talent that we have here.”

That’s the same explanation given by others, and it’s given for the salaries of top executives at publicly traded companies. A few years ago, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker called this phenomenon the “Lake Wobegon syndrome,” a nod to radio personality Garrison Keillor’s fictional hometown, where “all the children are above average.”

We’ve seen a related syndrome in state government jobs, where the newcomer is worth more on Day One than anyone who previously held the job — even someone who had been in the position for years or decades.

But I’m not passing judgment on any individual salary. What is more notable to me is the sheer number of positions at the state’s colleges and universities that command six-figure salaries.

Since fiscal 2010 — not coincidentally the year after Lu Hardin resigned as president of UCA over irregularities in the payment of a bonus — state law has required the Department of Higher Education to report details of the salaries and benefits of state college and university employees who earn $100,000 per year or more. That first year, the 2009-10 academic year, the report was 501 pages, with almost every page being a separate person’s compensation report. By 2014-15, the report was 739 pages (actually down by six from the previous year). The 2016-17 report was 856 pages.

Higher ed employees are, as a rule, better educated than average, so no one expects them to be paid like burger-flippers. And many of these administrators have moved into the report because their salaries have increased from just under the $100,000 threshold to just above it. But I don’t think that can explain why the report has grown by 70 percent in seven years.

Meanwhile, let’s not forget that percentages can sometimes enlighten and sometimes mask. In the case of some of these administrators, salaries that were adequate for the predecessors have increased by more than $100,000 a year.

Perhaps these numbers are scandalous; perhaps they are completely justifiable. Either way, Mark Friedman has done a public service by being the reporter willing to keep an eye on them.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.