Unlearning Liberty. Greg Lukianoff

doubled in constant-value dollars. Some rose closer to threefold. (For a comparison, overall American earnings rose by 6 percent during this period.)”³⁶ Their book provides specific examples of staggering pay hikes:

       The pay of Stanford’s president increased from $256,111 to $731,614 in constant dollars, while that of NYU’s president burgeoned from $443,000 to $1,366,878. The trend was similar at smaller schools. At Wellesley, Carleton, and Grinnell, presidential compensation rose from the low $200,000s to over $500,000.

       In 2008, the most recent reports available show a dozen presidents receiving more than $1 million. Among them were the heads of Northwestern, Emory, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Pennsylvania.³⁷

      Keep in mind that all of these university presidents are the heads of nonprofits.

      These inflated salaries help create a disconnect between the administrations of universities and both their students and the public. Take Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, for example, where President William Brody served for thirteen years pulling in a salary of close to a million dollars. In 2007, a fraternity member posted a Facebook invite to a “Halloween in the Hood” party that relied on urban slang as well as Dave Chappelle- and Chris Rock-esque humor. (The fraternity had already hosted a self-consciously politically incorrect party called the “White Trash Bash” and suffered no consequence for it.)³⁸ Justin Park, the student who sent the invitation, was an eighteen-year-old, first-generation Korean American student who was admitted to Hopkins at the age of fifteen. He believed he was making a hip joke, and he profusely apologized after students complained about the invitation’s racial insensitivity. The issue should have ended there, but President Brody’s administration went after Park aggressively. He was found guilty of “harassment,” “intimidation,” and “failing to respect the rights of others.”³⁹ Although Park’s sentence was later reduced in the face of public pressure (he also agreed not to talk further about his case in order to get leniency), his original punishment included a lengthy suspension from the university, completion of three hundred hours of community service, an assignment to read twelve books and write a reflection paper on each, and mandatory attendance at a workshop on diversity and race relations.⁴⁰ Brody made matters worse shortly after Park’s suspension by introducing a new and almost laughably broad “civility” code prohibiting “rude, disrespectful behavior” at the university. He also stated in an article in the December 11, 2006, issue of the JHU Gazette that Johns Hopkins would not allow speech that is “tasteless” or that breaches standards of “civility.”⁴¹

      FIRE usually succeeds in getting universities to back down from their decisions to punish students for freedom of speech, but not at Johns Hopkins. I believe this is, at least in part, because President Brody was paid such a high salary that he had little incentive to care about public opinion. When Brody retired in 2009, while the country was still deep in recession, he received a $3.8 million compensation package.⁴²

      The problem is not just the rise in cost per administrator, but also the startling growth in size of the administrative class. In 2005, with little public fanfare, an important milestone in the transformation of higher education was reached: for the first time, the number of full-time faculty was outstripped by the number of administrators on campus.⁴³ This trend has only accelerated since then. In 2010, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education, reported that, as of 2009, only 46 percent of the approximately 1.6 million professionals employed full-time by our nation’s colleges were faculty.⁴⁴ As Benjamin Ginsberg explains: