The Devil is in the Details

In a post in Inside Higher Education this morning a new feature of presidential contract is covered for the president of Arizona State. Presidential compensation is increasingly tied to incentive structures. But the president of Arizona State has a new wrinkle - one sixth of his incentive payment is tied to the US News Rankings. No bother that as noted in an earlier post most academics believe that the rankings are baloney. The founder of the Education Conservancy called the action by the board of ASU “rotten, educationally irresponsible, wimpy,short-sighted and wrong.” (It is hard to tell how he feels but I think he does not like it.)

Raymond Cotton, the leading lawyer who works on presidential contracts commented that it is inappropriate “for a board of trustees to turn their own priority setting authority over to any third party, but especially a for-profit popular magazine.” Cotton is spot on. There are lots of ways to improve the performance of an institution and encouraging an institution to improve its reputation, based on reasonable measures, is an idea that is present in a lot of contracts. But most boards are into things that are measurable on the campus. The US News Rankings is an external source but it is also an uneven and quixotic one based in part on gossip.