Something I have always wondered is why deans and other administrators make such great salaries relative to professors. My hunch is that it is simply because they can, but I feel like I must be missing something. Does anyone know if these tough jobs in ways I don't appreciate?
There are many, many, many, many, many, many, many PhDs who aspire to professorship, particularly at flagship institutions, largely for lifestyle reasons. More of them are minted every year. Very few positions open every year. This guarantees a permanent oversupply of potential professorial labor, especially for those field for which a PhD does not provide obvious advancement potential in career paths other than academia.
By comparison, college deans have a job which is less attractive in a lifestyle sense, a job market which is not by nature inundated with candidates, and skills which readily transfer into (and thus are priced by competition with) management of for-profit enterprises.
For similar reasons, a professor of computer science who is not good at grant writing (+) will earn substantially less than whomever is in charge of making sure the campus bittorrent delivery system doesn't go down.
+ Compensation for all employees at a university is, like all employees everywhere, very sensitive to "I have individualized skills which demonstrably bring more money into this organization." A CS prof who teaches CS101 and spurns grant writing will have a fairly unhappy career path. The successful CS prof will try to get CS101 taught by someone more junior to them and then spend time trying to nail 7 or 8 figure grants.
I've actually had that question for management in general. I'm sure that much of what management--reasonable management, anyhow---does is valuable, but is it that valuable? I really don't know.
For programming, at least, I think it's partly just historical. That's how it's always worked. In a different setting, like a factory, this makes sense as no factory worker is going to have a big positive effect on productivity while a good manager might. But for programming, the ratio of productivity between programmers and managers is much less biased towards the latter.
I guess more progressive software development companies actually are changing this, paying programmers relatively more and reducing the amount of management. So perhaps it's just a matter of the industry adapting slowly.
I think there are going to be many parallels between professors and programmers, so the two questions probably overlap a fair amount. On the other hand, there are also many differences, so perhaps that sort of work is more (or maybe less) important in a university than in a software company.
I think it comes down to being a manager basically sucks. A lot of people, all other things equal, would rather not do it.
Think about it, a manager is fundamentally someone who has to deal with everyone's problems all day long. The one reason many people do it is because it is an obvious path to better pay in many companies. Otherwise who would voluntarily deal with other people's problems all day long?
That isn't to say I think they are necessary but that if you have a crappy position the obvious way to fill it is via higher pay.
A lot of the really high up positions are heavily involved in fundraising, and the argument there is that "If person X can increase our endowment by just 1% more than person Y, it justifies the huge salary"
Nah, the football coach argument is much easier: There is lots of money in college football, and nearly all of it is banned from going to the players. Therefore there are nearly unlimited funds for coaches.
English professors maybe not, but for a lot of departments professors have good business options that should give them similar leverage, and it doesn't seem to help them at all.
Also at Stanford my impression is that a lot of the deans and provosts and whatnot are just professors that have been "promoted" (in the salary sense, at least), so I think in some cases they are even being pulled from the same pool of people.
lot of departments professors have good business options
Most professors are professors because they want to be professors, not for the money. I had several professors when I went to school who'd left business (and taken a significant pay cut) for a chance to teach and research, and I have a friend who's turned down job offers to almost double his salary just because he really likes the university world. Enough people are willing to 'pay' for the opportunity to work at universities by earning less money. Being an administrator at a university on the other hand isn't much different from being an administrator anywhere else and thus you have to pay them full market rates.
"but for a lot of departments professors have good business options that should give them similar leverage, and it doesn't seem to help them at all."
LOL. Maybe I'm just a cynical old fart, but from my experience with most professors, they couldn't get let alone hold a job in industry if their lives depended on it, at least not the ones who have been in academia for 15+ years including their PhD's. Many (most?) of these people are spoiled beyond repair by the freedom offered by their positions, even if they invariably think they have it so bad.
My wife is a professor, and has been for 12 years. The department head and the dean positions are often treated like a hot potato - nobody wants to give up research time to do administrative work. There is no glory in being an administrator, so time to write high profile papers, no time to get big grants that make you a hero in your department, no time for .....
Instead the dean and the department heads spend their time dealing with continual budget cuts, assigning people to committees that they don't want to be on (see above paragraph). In a publish-or-perish world, most academics do not want to give up publishing for a little extra money. So the universities must make it tempting enough of a position (pay, essentially) in order for the professors to give up their freedom of schedule, having to be on campus 5 days a week, and the added headache of trying to herd a bunch of academics who are lost in their own thoughts.
Also keep in mind that professors do not typically get the salaries that they could get in industry. Tenure is great until they delete your department. My wife does sociology, which really means she does a lot of statistics. There was a time 5-7 years ago when I found her some job postings that she would be qualified for as a statistics analyst and the pay was 50% greater than her academic salary to start. She coldly informed me that there was more to life than making money and that she enjoyed her work. So I did the good husband thing and shut up.
I think it's like most jobs: compensation isn't related to how tough the work is, but about the abundance of people who can fill those positions. Administrators earn more because there are relatively few people qualified and willing to do the work. If university compensation was based on the difficulty of the work, adjunct and assistant professors would make far more than they do.
There was a previous discussion about being paid in cool. Professors aren't paid in that but they are paid in freedom, security and if not cool then at least reputation.
That doesn't justify the salaries of the administrators but it does partially explain why Professors aren't typically paid spectacularly.
