Tue 18 Nov 2008
Another Top Ranking: Morty’s Salary in the Top 10
Posted by lgeorge under Morton O. Schapiro
Posted at 10:47 amThe Berkshire Eagle reports that “… a new survey puts Williams College’s Morton O. Schapiro ninth on the list of top-paid leaders at private schools that primarily award bachelor’s degrees. Schapiro’s compensation for the 2006-07 academic year was $514,744, including $62,729 in deferred compensation benefits, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s annual survey, released yesterday. Schapiro’s compensation total for the previous year was $474,518….”
Do I see both an excellent opportunity for leadership and a bit of a cost-cutting or hold-the-line possibility here?
Another interesting note: Rep. Grassley (he of the move to force more take down of endowments; I guess we already took care of that, unintentionally) was all over the rise in college presidents’ compensation.
November 18th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Classic posts on Morty’s salary here (was it only 4 years ago that $400,000 seemed excessive?) and here (still one of my all time favorite posts).
What odds would people give on Morty freezing his own salary?
UPDATE: Also, Grassley is complaining about college presidents serving on corporate boards. Longtime readers will recall Morty/Marsh. Since the faculty handbook forbids more than “modest involvement” in outside paid employment, Morty (a member of the faculty) should resign his board position (or Williams should amend the handbook accordingly).
November 18th, 2008 at 11:24 am
What’s Williams’ endowment rank among private schools that only award bachelors degrees? If we have the second biggest endowment, and pay Morty the ninth most…well, that doesn’t sound quite so bad anymore.
November 18th, 2008 at 11:37 am
current eph - I don’t see why the size of the endowment should be correlated with compensation. The endowment is large because of many factors that predate Morty’s tenure, or lie outside his job responsibility.
However, I could see a case for paying college Presidents in proportion to funds raised from donors - ie, maybe a very modest base salary plus 10 bps of annual fund raising? Note that this would probably still amount to at least 400k-500k annually, so, based on fundraising prowess, his compensation doesn’t seem outsized to me.
November 18th, 2008 at 11:39 am
“What’s Williams’ endowment rank among private schools that only award bachelors degrees?”
Unfortunately, we can only speak of that right now in terms of the past tense and in ways that may have little meaning for the present and future, as the drop seems to have been quite sharp and all the markets remain so volatile.
I don’t want to go after Morty, but he, surely, has enough, even an abundance, right now (and a very, very nice house to live in, to boot). I think he has an opportunity to lead here — but it would only be leading if he generously took the step himself rather than being harried into it, so I’ll shut up now.
November 18th, 2008 at 11:52 am
This recent article compares the salaries of the presidents of public universities vs. private. Many are making upwards of 2 million dollars. Kind of makes Morty’s salary look modest in comparison.
There’s also a comparison of faculty salaries.
November 18th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
I suspect that is comparing apples to oranges. It makes more sense to me to compare the Williams package with that of presidents of other colleges that primarily award undergraduate degrees. Then, too, just as the campus one-upmanship construction wars and the rapid rise in tuition have troubled me, I am troubled by the possibility of a compensation arms race. These things get out of control very quickly; someone always makes more (often WAY more).
In any event, when the decision-makers start evaluating where to set the top packages at Williams next time, assuming we are still in dire financial times, I hope that, if they feel the need to use incentives, they will consider one-time bonuses rather than significantly increasing the base pay.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Ronit–fair point. I do think endowment size matters…the President controls the endowment and the larger the endowment, the larger that responsibility. However, you’re right, funds raised are probably more important a factor than endowment size. I wonder if absolute funds raised would be a better point of comparison, or relative funds raised per student, or relative funds raised compared to that school’s peers.
No matter what, it seems like Morty’s performance will likely fall in the upper half of the top 10 of similar schools.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
“…the President controls the endowment and the larger the endowment, the larger that responsibility.”
Out of curiosity, does anyone think colleges should ding presidents where endowments have fallen precipitously? Where does the buck stop?
November 18th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
These are very hard judgments to make. It is not enough to say that Williams is X big or raised Y amount of money. You need to think about the counterfactual of what would have happened if someone other than Morty had been president.
We raised $450 million (or whatever) in the capital campaign. Great! Does this mean that Morty is a great president or a horrible one? It all depends on what Williams would have raised if the trustees had selected Cappy Hill ‘76 (or whoever) as president back in 200.
When someone, say Derek, claims that Derek Jeter is in the top half of baseball shortstops, one way to tell that he has a reason for this claim is that, for starters, he knows the names and performances of many/most the shortstops on other teams. He has an informed basis of comparison.
How many of us can name, say, even a handful of the other NESCAC presidents (or whomever you think Morty’s peer group) is?
My point is not to pick on current eph but just to highlight the difficulties in actually evaluating Morty’s performance.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Morty’s underpaid. $500K+ is a bargain.
November 18th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Fair, once again…I really don’t know where Morty’s performance falls (and in my post I did point out the difficulty of measuring this). However unscientific my guess that he is among the top 10 in his peer group is, I’m going to keep it out there. Does anyone really disagree that Morty has been–over the course of his tenure at Williams–one of the top 10 most effective presidents at Williams-like schools? I have no idea exactly what should go into measuring what “effective” means, in this context, but I’m fairly confident that whatever reasonable criteria we use (fundraising performance/overperformance, popularity with students/faculty/alumni, effectiveness implementing policy, etc), Morty is still going to shine.
November 18th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Morty’s salary is probablly used as a bench mark for the salaries of the presidents of our sister colleges. How is the president of say Bates going to argue that he desserves 475 unless Morty is getting 500?
Moreover, Morty’s salary is used as a bench mark in setting the salaries of his deputies at Williams. About 47 years ago I was at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. in Akron, Ohio doing interviews for a survey I was conducting on the management of Fortune 500 companies. I was told that for years the Firestone brothers had underpaid themselves as executives. An outside consultant (I think from the Harvard Business School) told them they had to raise their salaries drastically. Since they were severely underpaid their VPs were proportionally underpaid. And the pattern held for the 3rd and 4th levels of management. The consultant explained, “Sir, you can’t get decent VPs for what you are making. And you need to make twice what you are paying your VPs. You don’t need the money but your hired help does.”
The Firestone brothers understood immediately and corrected the problem.
November 18th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
For the record, commission-style pay for fundraisers has been determined to be unethical by the Association of Fundraising Professionals, an organization I understand to be a credible group for these matters. Take from that what you will . . . I personally have not reasoned about the matter enough to have decided.
Negotiating one’s own executive salary with a NFP board has got to be the most awkward thing in the world. I’ve tried many times to imagine the conversation, and balk every time. I’ve no idea how it happens, or how one learns to do that kind of thing.
November 18th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
(FWLIW, I will quietly note that the Student Body of Deep Springs College recently ousted the President for focusing too much on fundraising and not enough on values.)
November 18th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Henry:
FYI, there was a message left for you a while back on your comment on this thread.
I only draw it to your attention because I know you post rarely and may have missed it…and it seemed like an interesting project.
November 18th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Really, Jonathan? Unethical? That’s sad. I was wondering if any other non-profits implemented a commission based fundraising system.
Of course, that might lead to other forms of performance-based pay in the rest of academia and the non-profit world, and that would probably lead to widespread faculty/staff mutinies.
From my brief experience in the non-profit world, I came away with the impression that executive pay schemes in this area are utterly inscrutable, and lend themselves to all kinds of corruption.
Ken - Deep Springs is a very different case, but let’s be honest about Williams. Fundraising is absolutely the single biggest responsibility of the college President. And even if his pay isn’t “officially” tied to fundraising, his ability to tap donors for big bucks is precisely the reason why he is paid so lavishly. The purely administrative part of his job can probably be done by someone else at 20% of the cost. How much does a typical principal of a large public high school make? Someone like that would easily have all the administrative skills needed to run Williams, and I doubt they make anywhere close to half a million.
November 18th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Sophmom,
Thanks so much. I did find out about the post. It was so long after my post I would not have never heard of it except 2 other regulars forwarded the post to me. You folks are really a together group. I got in touch with the fellow on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. He happened to have had dinner with my friends in Sewanee the night before. Fellow southern activists from the 60’s. So he is already in wonderful hands.
November 18th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Great. And thanks for letting me know. It would be interesting to follow up on that project.
BTW, I always enjoy your comments, and the Firestone bros. anecdote is no exception.
November 18th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
sophmom,
Thanks so much. And I always enjoy your comments. The young history teacher at Sewanee and my long time friends agree that Bishop Robinson is going to get his honorary degree and soon. Sewanee has always given all of its alum who make bishop such a degree. And lots of pressure is being applied by folks with lots of $ and they are in the midst of a major drive. It will make the New York Times when it happens.
November 19th, 2008 at 4:26 am
So noted and accepted (though DS has the same financial concerns, for which every member of the SB holds equal potential responsibility as “the President.”) And I will not now argue against your point. But: I believe the DS response would be something like: there are other systems of value, and we lose something critical when we speak in terms of self-interest alone.
Back to the Melian and Mytilenean dialogues…
November 20th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
I should have cited my claim about the AFP’s decision:
http://www.afpnet.org/ka/ka-3.cfm?content_item_id=1227&folder_id=899