> At my home institution, we hire new PHD's at under 35K per year (almost
> poverty in Calif, and certainly almost never get married people at that
> level) ... people who have been thru 4 years of undergrad and up to 10 of
> grad and postdocs..... our max salary (attained after about 20 years if
> you are kept) is 61K.  And we are getting raked over the coals for not
> being able to attract minority faculty .... !
 
> What a hypocritical arena
> DI athletics has become. The presidents OK six figure salaries for
> athletic directors and coaches, and let the faculty recruiting go to hell.
>  One of these days, it will all come home to roost.
 
First off, Comley is being paid the $100,000 a year to do BOTH the AD and
the coaching job.  The number of six figure coaches are very small.
 
Second, coaching vs. teaching exhibits the classic security vs. money
tradeoff.  I work at Hewlett-Packard because I like the security (among other
things), even though I could make a lot more at a startup or less secure
company.  Once teachers achieve tenure, they have a greater level of security
than almost any other profession.  Athletic coaches have among the worst.  You
can be a very good coach and yet external factors over which you have no
control can get you fired.  ANd if you didn't have a good record prior to the
firing, you may get no second opportunity.
 
Third, comparing new PHD's who are being hired at 35K to head coaches is
comparing apples with oranges.  A more accurate comparison is entry-level PHDs
with entry-level assistant coaches.  If I remember correctly, some assistant
coaching positions are unpaid and some are ~$17K a year.  Head coaches only
reach that level after many years of climbing up the ladder.  Take for example,
Steve Cedorchuk at BC.  This isn't a perfect example, because unlike many head
coaches, he justly deserved to get fired (based on his scholarship antics).
However, the prominence of his case gives me more info to work with than other
head coaches who have been canned.  After all his years as a player and the
work he put in there (comparable to a PHD's education) he worked as an
assistant for something like 19 years to get his shot as a head coach. He was
head coach for only a couple years and then was canned.  My guess is that he
wasn't making a big salary during those assistant years.
 
Fourth, although 61K may be your top salary for experienced professors, that
only includes income from the school.  It is the norm that instructors
supplement their income with consulting or other forms of income.  This can
be in the form of writing textbooks (which students *must* purchase),
consulting with corporations in technical fields or, for example, writing
novels in the English department, or writing symphonies in the Music
Department.
 
I would hazard that the top instructors with all income included make a *lot*
more than the top coaches with all income included.  Just as an example, if
you compared the money that Hennessey and Patterson (prominent in the computer
field) make from their textbooks, consulting, and teaching with Shawn Walsh,
Comley, or *any* coach or coach/AD combo, Hennessey & Patterson would
blow them away.  Not even in the same ballpark.
 
If after 20 years no one is interested in hiring an experienced instructor
as a consultant or having he or she write a textbook, than something is wrong
and he or she probably doesn't deserve any more than 60K with lifetime security.
 
Or if the instructor chose a field of little practical interest (consulting
positions for PHDs in Philosophy, for example, would be close to non-existant)
then the person knew what they were doing when they pursued a field with
limited non-academic rewards.
 
It may be knee-jerk to say athletics gets too much money and academics not
enough, but I don't think the system is half as bad as its detractors would
claim.
 
DaveH
part-time BU instructor