Today In Elite Academic Graft
By Paul has written before about John Sexton, the president of NYU and master of looting student/taxpayer money for the benefit of himself, other administrators, and a tiny cadre of scholars. In a particularly special example, Henry Louis Gates Jr. is being given a housing benefit worth roughly $80 grand a year…for not working for NYU at all.
The university frequently deploys metrics on rising application numbers and university rankings to argue that Sexton’s strategy has been working. But other numbers have been rising, too. NYU’s tuition, for example, was $26,646 in 2002; by 2012, it was $44,848, a staggering increase of 68 percent in a decade. The cost of attending NYU is among the highest in the country, and its financial aid remains woefully inadequate. NYU has the highest total student debt in the country, and a typical student in one of the classes I teach is likely to graduate with 40 percent more student debt than the national average.
And while salaries for top executives have increased dramatically — with Sexton’s salary doubling over his tenure to $1.5 million, plus a $2.5 million length-of-service bonus and an $800,000 pension upon retirement — the vast majority of faculty salaries have stagnated, barely keeping up with inflation.