Editorials

Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor for the CIA leak case, makes $140,300 a year in his job with the U.S. attorney’s office, according to Slate.com’s excellent “Explainer” column. Besides his Washington case, he’s also handling the prosecution of a former Illinois governor in Chicago. If he were instead holding on to a lucrative private practice while serving as a special prosecutor, he might be making something like the million dollars reported to have been paid to Kenneth Starr by his tobacco in dustry clients while he was Clinton’s special nemesis.  

Are we to conclude that a better prosecutor than Fitzgerald could have been obtained if the government had paid more? No. Starr—the big cheese from the private sector—ended up looking foolish and l o sing his case. 

So what are we to make of the San Francisco Chronicle’s weekend revelations about the high salaries and astounding extra perks awarded to the University of California’s top brass? Did the citizens of California get better people than Fit zg erald just by coughing up big bucks? Are today’s U.C. executives much better than their predecessors because they’re now paid as if they were captains of industry? Are the 2,000 or so U.C. employees who make at least twice as much as Patrick Fitzgerald tw ice as competent? Doubtful.  

It has become an unfortunate characteristic of U.S. executives that they grossly overvalue their own services when their own pay is on the line. This has been true in the private sector at least since the eighties, and no w th is theory has entered the public sector as well. Thus the Chronicle quotes U.C. Regent John Moores: “The senior folks at UC are under market, and there are a lot of bad things that can happen from that. You don’t get to look at the best people in the market … It is almost like there is a Marxist notion that it is bad that we give raises to bring people to market rate.” Moores is also chairman of the San Diego Padres baseball club, in another sector that has been widely criticized for compensation creep. 

And Moores is probably some sort of a Democrat, since he was appointed by Gray Davis and serves on some of Jimmy Carter’s charity boards. The Republicans could be worse. Moores has at least opposed private fundraising to boost salaries even more, an unlovely concept being pushed by some U.C. administrators to increase the compensation of those already in the +$350k category.  

The equation of high pay with excellent job performance hasn’t been proved, though it’s loudly asserted by those who benefit from it. The fiction of a “market” in public service jobs has gotten badly distorted—the best people, believe it or not, are not necessarily the greediest people.  

For that matter, is Berkeley’s Assistant City Attorney Zach Cowan anything close to as com peten t as Patrick Fitzgerald? Their salaries are about the same. And Berkeley City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque makes even more. A local counter-example: Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, who continue to live modestly even though they did well in the software in dustry. They don’t even take a salary for their invaluable public service founding and running MoveOn.org.  

Many observers believe that one reason for the precipitous decline in America’s manufacturing sector is the wide disparity in pay for those at the top a nd the bottom of the ladder. A 1999 Business Week survey calculated that America’s CEO’s, on average, took home 476 times the average worker’s pay, and it’s only gotten worse since then. Do we believe that the University of California will do a bet ter job of educating young Californians because it’s now trying to emulate industry’s worst practices? I don’t. 

Perhaps that’s because I got my education at a time when both my excellent teachers and the administrators who made it possible for them to do their jobs were happy with standard upper middle-class salaries. But now those who are doing the heavy lifting in California’s university classrooms are paid a fraction of what California’s university administrators are paid.  

For example, a tenured sci ence pr ofessor at a California State University campus, teaching four classes a week, makes less than $60,000 a year. And at the same time we are raising student tuition to levels which are beyond the reach of many. I talked over the weekend with an African-Amer ican grandmother who can no longer afford to support her two granddaughters in attending the CSU system, even though they are well qualified academically to benefit from the education. She’s raised them after the death of their mother, and she’s managed t o see that their aunt got through college, but today’s tuition has finally gotten beyond her ability to pay or their own ability to finance their studies with part-time jobs. So they’ve dropped out of school. And U.C. Berkeley is even worse.  

A s citizens of California, it’s in our best interest to make sure that young women like this can complete their education. Topping off the already luxurious compensation packages of California’s educational elite won’t contribute anything to this result. T here are t hose, probably some U.C. regents among them, who say that the major goal of higher education in California should be supporting industrial research of the kind that already seems to have become the primary mission of the University of Californi a at Berkel ey. It’s not, but why is a topic for another day.