It sure is an education knowing where all that debt tuition is going.
"Top lawyer helped win many college chiefs’ perks" March 28, 2012|Mary Carmichael and Todd Wallack, Globe Staff
When universities are deciding how much to pay their presidents, they call Raymond Cotton. When presidents need an advocate in salary negotiations, they call him, too.
Cotton, who works for the Boston-based law firm Mintz Levin, has carved out a niche as one of the nation’s most prominent consultants on academic salaries, helping to negotiate or assess contracts for more than 250 clients.
He is also is the common link between two recent Massachusetts controversies over large salaries and corporate-style perks for university presidents....
Cotton, 69, inhabits a sector of higher education few outside the industry ever see.
I'm offended when education is called an industry, although that is what inculcation and indoctrination are.
His specialty barely existed a decade ago, when compensation consultants were more likely to be found in the boardroom than in the ivory tower.
But the job of the university president has grown more complex and demanding in recent years, and pay packages have followed suit. What once might have been a straightforward discussion can now be a prolonged series of negotiations over chief-executive-level pay and benefits.
Details of those negotiations are typically hashed out behind closed doors, even at public institutions....
Some university officials commend Cotton’s work, saying the complexity of modern presidential contracts demands a facilitator with expert knowledge.
“There are nuances,’’ said Rita Bornstein, a former client of Cotton’s who led Rollins College in Florida from 1990 to 2004. “Who pays for cleaning the president’s house? Whose furniture do you use? Does your spouse get compensation? Does he travel with you?’’
Bornstein knew none of those nuances when she negotiated her first contract by herself and wound up underpaid, she said, at $135,000 a year. At renegotiation time, she hired Cotton and got a bigger salary and a swath of new benefits, including the promise of a year’s sabbatical at full pay after she left the post.
“I wish there were more people working in compensation consulting,’’ she said. “It’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing.’’
But others disagree....
Jim Finkelstein, a George Mason University policy professor and former administrator who is studying 100 presidential contracts at public colleges. “We’ve begun to corporatize the higher ed environment.’’
Now I understand why I'm totally disillusioned with the institution. That, and the fact that they lied to me and gave me a worthless piece of paper for tens of thousands of dollars.
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Most of Cotton’s press is more benign. He writes frequently for trade publications and is regularly quoted in newspapers as an authority on how much presidents should be paid.
Often, his answer is more. In 2006, he told the University of Pennsylvania he believed that in general, college presidents “are underpaid, [given] the complexity of these jobs and what they are asked to do.’’
A year later, he told the Globe that a $2.3 million exit package given to Richard Freeland - then the departing president of Northeastern University, now the state commissioner of higher education - was very modest compared with Freeland’s annual salary....
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