MSU administrators deserve raises, recognition

“President Lou Anna K. Simon has refused raises the past two years and all of the top administrators, including Strampel, Rappley and Wilcox donated their raises back to the university, the Lansing State Journal also reported.”

This is kind of a confusing sentence (lacking a comma?). You should fix it before you publish tomorrow.

I think I must have missed the editorial advocating raises for the thousands of on-campus workers who make sure the university functions at its most basic level: clerical staff, power plant workers, police, administrative professionals. They will all be getting a 0% increase next year – and they sure as hell haven’t seen anything like a 20% increase over the past few years. Surely the editorial board doesn’t mean to suggest that the administrators should prosper even more as the university lays off 800 workers?

At the very least, I look forward to the next editorial complaining about how the sidewalks haven’t been cleared as efficiently this year and the buildings haven’t been cleaned as regularly. A little perspective would go a long way, boys.

At least the author has some shame, by keeping an anonymous byline. The State News should be ashamed to print such propaganda.

I get where you guys are coming from — I really do — especially with wanting to keep Wilcox. And I totally get staying competitive with other Big Ten schools. Still I can’t help but think of years past when faculty declined raises because of the tough economic circumstances faced by students and their families.

Arguably, faculty members are dealing with the same crap economy as students but it’s hard to justify a raise when students are seeing more classes taught by TAs, fewer majors offered and generally less professor involvement all around. When was that last time you left a Powerpoint-domination lecture, collected a barely-read assignment from the TA and thought of your professor, “Now THAT GUY deserves a raise?”

@ hilarious: This is an editorial. They never have bylines. JSYK.

In this time when the majority of MSU employees are being asked for concessions in the form of minuscule or no raises, and depleting health benefits, how is it possible that these administrators are so valuable as to deserve these salaries. The value of their individual raises alone are are greater than the majority of MSU employee’s entire annual salary. Of the 6 million people unemployed at this very moment, I’ve got to believe there are a few people as qualified if not more so, that would be happy replace these administrators.

If the argument for the administrator’s raises is to be competitive by targeting the median salary of the other Big Ten schools, how come faculty/staff salaries have been dead bottom last in the Big Ten…for many years.

So, hooray for the Big 3! They get raises while less worthy individuals get the boot, shaft, or whatever implement you prefer. Maybe those jobless slobs should’ve gone to medical school, then they could’ve received double-digit percentage raises. Why begrudge someone who already makes 3, 5, or 10 times the median income if they are given even more. Isn’t that the whole idea of capitalism!?!?

Seriously now, why is MSU rewarding someone for starting up a campus NOT in East Lansing? Why does the East Lansing campus, which, may I remind you, is the actual home of MSU, get neglected while we open campuses around the state and around the world!?!? Where is the sense in that??? How about devoting your resources to the people and places located here?

It’s a damn shame that someone receives a raise for eliminating jobs and diverting resources from a campus, city, and region that really needs them.

Another example of sloppy journalism, your editorial sounds like it came straight out of the MSU PR office (maybe it did?). One big issue you did not explore is a basic one covered by a March 2 Detroit News article, “MSU is enacting painful program cuts and layoffs, while U-M is adding staff and is in the midst of one of the biggest building booms in school history.” http://bit.ly/92nae4

In other words, highly paid UM administrators at least have done a good job and put UM in a much better financial place than MSU, for example by having the foresight to build a healthy endowment that somehow MSU leaders have not. So the question is, not just do MSU leaders deserve these raises, but do they deserve to be in these jobs? Whatever good work Simon and Wilcox have done is largely negated by their continuing to divert money to raising administrator salaries while overseeing one of the largest contractions in MSU’s history (and passing this off as “shaping the future”).

2. As someone else pointed out, you did not bother to ask why if administrators think their being in the middle of the top 10 salary range is so important why they don’t invest money to bring MSU faculty from near the bottom to the middle also?

My friend was an MSU staff member. He was laid off the very same day these raises went through.

They needed recognition, huh… isnt that what medals are for?

While I applaud these execs for returning their raises, they never should have received them. I do not doubt that they deserve a raise, but I don’t doubt that any given janitor or residence hall staff member deserves a raise as well.

Wendell Tinasky,

I hear your points and you make sense. After the big $1.4B fundraising campaing a few years ago, MSU officials sat on their laurels. Now, the very Kim Wilcox we are rewarding, is not swining the budget ax like he’s out of his mind; not really seeming to understand that some programs like Music Therapy and Classical Studies are important to the core of what the University is about without considering how little, cash wise, the U is saving by cutting them… Yeah, it’s embarrasing compared to U-M which has worked overtime to stay on top, financially, while we’ve sat on our arses and are now in sheer panick/cut-down mode… And while I understand, from an institutional pride POV to reward our top admins (we don’t want to slum it at the bottom of the B10 as it would look tacky), it does seem that this, and other non-moves, seems like we’re rewarding a degree of laziness rather than light a fire under these admins to make our school better off.