A $120,000 Raise For North Dakota’s New Higher Ed Chancellor?
I posted last week that the newly-selected chancellor of North Dakota’s univerity system would be getting a big raise over what outgoing chancellor Bill Goetz made, but I did the math wrong. Hamid Shirvani won’t be making five-figures more than his predecessor. He’ll be making six figures more.
FARGO – If money talks, the loudest voice in the North Dakota University System will belong to its new chancellor.
Hamid Shirvani, the California State University-Stanislaus president who accepted the job this week, will start at a salary between $340,000 and $350,000 – about $100,000 more than the outgoing chancellor’s compensation.
It’ll be the highest salary of any employee in the system, a distinction that comes with expectations that Shirvani will bring a stronger presence to the role.
“We want a strong CEO,” said Grant Shaft, president of the state Board of Higher Education, which hired Shirvani. Accordingly, “We agreed that it was important to have the chancellor be the top-salaried employee in the system.”
In the article the higher ed bureaucrats give the usual excuses. You see, we have to pay Mr. Shirvani more because the chancellor of the South Dakota university system makes that much.
That’s how companies in the private sector do it, right? If one of their competitors raises salaries, they hand out raises to all their employees too. Just because.
What really stinks is that the university system is broken. From irresponsible levels of spending to a “gone rogue” attitude that has the higher ed bureaucrats thinking they don’t have to follow the legislature’s laws to the ugly diploma mill scandal at Dickinson State University, the peroformance of the university system has been shameful.
Yet here they are, handing out six-figure raises. Wonderful.
Let’s hope the higher ed system gets reformed soon, either by the legislature or initiated measure, and Shirvani’s job is eliminated (along with the Board of Higher Education).
Tags: Grant Shaft, hamid shirvani, higher education, North Dakota News, state board of higher education
