CUNY administrators are coming under increasing fire for their decision to hire General David Petraeus to teach one course next year for anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000. The American Association of University Professors has denounced the decision. And now Republican State Assemblyman Kieran Michael Lalor, a Marine vet who fought in the Iraq War, has issued a scorching letter to CUNY interim chancellor William Kelly.
Lalor focuses on two issues. First, he charges CUNY with dishonesty. When Gawker first broke the story of Petraeus’s salary, it reported that he was going to be getting $200k. That report was based on Freedom of Information Law documents Gawker had obtained from CUNY. Within hours, however, CUNY announced that Petraeus was only going to get $150k and that part of his earnings would go to charity.
As Lalor points out, there’s something fishy about the timing of that announcement.
In an email time-stamped two-and-a-half hours after the Gawker story was published, the University Vice Chancellor writes to Petraeus to “memorialize” discussions between the University and Petraeus agreeing to a $150,000 salary, of which Petraeus would donate a portion to charity. The University is telling the public that Petraeus agreed to this different arrangement before the story went public out of the goodness of his heart. However, when the University spokesman spoke with my staff, it became clear that there was no written documentation of this change prior to the publication of the Gawker story. That’s strange given the fact that there are numerous back-and-forth emails discussing the salary written before the Gawker story. All of those emails conclude that the salary will be $200,000 and mention nothing about charitable donations.
In no uncertain terms, Lalor accuses the university and Petraeus of scrambling after the Gawker story broke to make the salary issue seem more palatable.
It appears that Petraeus and the University are being dishonest with the public in an attempt to save face. Rather than admitting a mistake, they are claiming they never made the mistake. I am skeptical to say the least. I am formally requesting that the University provide the public with any written documentation to prove the claim that the salary cut came before the public criticism. If that is unavailable, I am asking the University to rescind its offer to Petreaus. A troubling pattern of dishonesty has emerged around him. If there was a cover-up here, Petraeus is not the right fit for the University.
The second issue Lalor raises is: What in the world is CUNY, a cash-strapped public institution with a mission to educate poor and working-class students, doing with a celebrity hire like this? Couldn’t that $150k or $200k be better spent elsewhere? Again, Lalor:
High-priced celebrity hires are not the right fit for a public university. Whether it is $150,000 or $200,000 to teach a single class a semester, this is not a good investment. Taxpayers fund CUNY to provide an affordable education for New Yorkers. Paying $150,000 to David Petraeus to teach a three-credit seminar for two semesters contributes little to an affordable, quality education. Taxpayers and students both deserve better. While Petraeus might offer some glamour, that alone does not fit with the University’s mission.
It is also not quite accurate to claim that Petraeus’ salary will not be funded by taxpayers. CUNY is a public university. According to the CUNY spokesman, Petraeus will be paid from the University’s Research Foundation. However, there are no grants or donations specifically earmarked by donors to pay for Petraeus. That means the salary will come from the Foundation’s general funds. Money sources are fungible in a large institution and when CUNY takes funds from one place, it affects other funds, specifically tax dollars and student tuition payments. This hire definitely involves tax dollars and public spending.
I have no idea if Lalor is right about whether tax-payers are footing the bill for this celebrity hire or not. But let’s assume CUNY is securing private funds for it. Isn’t that in itself a terrible waste of resources? Private donations don’t just roll in; university fundraisers work and cultivate donors to make specific donations for earmarked funds. The notion that even one paid member of the university staff is working right now to secure private money to pay for this hire is itself a scandal.
It’s also indicative of a larger problem: CUNY is being run (into the ground) by a group of men and women with no sense of how to educate students, how to build (and pay) a first-class teaching staff, and how to manage a great public institution.
{ 18 comments }
Alan 07.03.13 at 2:38 am
Corey (if I may) I have to think that your attention to this issue has played a significant role in getting the appropriate bigwigs to get involved. Thanks.
Meredith 07.03.13 at 4:30 am
“It’s also indicative of a larger problem: CUNY is being run (into the ground) by a group of men and women with no sense of how to educate students, how to build (and pay) a first-class teaching staff, and how to manage a great public institution.”
The points embedded here are key. In other comments sections on this topic here, at the Gawker, LGM and elsewhere, I’ve read various defenses of the Petraeus hire that miss these points as they defend, on various grounds, hiring big names.
Hiring a distinguished professor (or general or whatever) for a course or two, with generous compensation, can be fine, provided the generosity isn’t off the charts and, more important, provided that this person’s time at the institution will truly enrich it. A distinguished visitor can, for instance, give visibility to important areas which the institution needs to develop, and she can be an invaluable resource to faculty as well as students and the larger public who, say, attend the visitors’ public lecture(s) or performances — things of that type. Much good can come of bringing a distinguished visitor for a semester. (And most will need to be paid well to come — they’re disrupting their personal lives and their other research and teaching/professional obligations for this.) But ensuring that such hires are productive depends on faculty and administrators actually committed to educating students and developing (and paying) a first-class teaching staff.
Andreas Moser 07.03.13 at 11:00 am
Most of the money will go to his divorce lawyers.
Anderson 07.03.13 at 1:29 pm
Good news.
Andrew F. 07.03.13 at 3:57 pm
Lalor is a Republican state representative from upstate NY, who has voted against things like minimum wage increases, increased gun control – a brief search did not turn up any results on his views on public education. However I strongly suspect this is simply yet another avenue of attack for Republicans who wish to hammer the “waste and abuse” of public spending, poisoning the waters for future discussions of public projects.
There are two plausible ways, given the facts as known, for this hire to be a problem:
1) CUNY payed well above market price, possibly indicating a special favor
2) There are other projects on which 150k is clearly better spent
(1) is very unlikely.
(2) is the crux of the issue. But I have yet to see anyone introduce any examples of better projects that need the 150k (or so) that will be spent on Petraeus. At the very least the one year hiring of Petraeus seems like a decision that is not clearly wrong, or to put it differently, seems reasonable. It is impossible to judge without a large number of additional facts.
I realize that some think it is obvious that 150k can be better spent. Taking the benefits to the students of interaction with Petraeus seriously, and remembering that we’re talking about the marginal value of 150k after taking the rest of the budget into account, I don’t think it’s obvious at all, although it’s still an open question.
Manta 07.03.13 at 4:42 pm
Andrew, you sound like a partisan hack: since Lalor is not a Democratic representative, his views should be discounted?
And about better use of the money: “A first-time adjunct professor teaching a full course load at the City University of New York can expect to pull in around $25,000 per year”.
Barry 07.03.13 at 4:52 pm
Andrew, I already handled your (1), with my comments on hookers and blow.
Barry 07.03.13 at 5:32 pm
Andrew F: “1) CUNY payed well above market price, possibly indicating a special favor”
Following up, since your errors are fractal: the fact that Petraeus can pull down vast sums of money for – well, for connections doesn’t mean that paying him this money isn’t for special favors (i.e., connections). Somebody at CUNY is going to have his personal phone number, and can ask him for a favor. How big, I don’t know, but presumably $150K big.
Marc 07.03.13 at 7:14 pm
Andrew is raising the pretty obvious point that professor salaries can be demagogued too. This can be a dangerous game that the right can play too.
Barry 07.03.13 at 7:45 pm
Andrew is just bullsh*tting, as he always does. The point that everybody else except for him and you is that there’s no reason for CUNY to hire Petraeus for a ridiculous drive-by ‘class’.
Manta 07.03.13 at 8:31 pm
Marc, what Andrew is claiming is that it’s not clear that 150K$ could be better spent.
If the administrators at CUNY cannot find a better way to spend that amount of money, when (again!) “A first-time adjunct professor teaching a full course load at the City University of New York can expect to pull in around $25,000 per year”, they should be fired en masse for clear incompetence.
Scott Lemieux 07.03.13 at 8:54 pm
Andrew is raising the pretty obvious point that professor salaries can be demagogued too.
As soon as the typical professor at a public university gets paid 100 grand a course (with assistants and not being expected to produce scholarship), I’ll start worrying about this potential problem.
Peter Frase 07.03.13 at 9:48 pm
I’m most interested in this:
> According to the CUNY spokesman, Petraeus will be paid from the University’s Research Foundation. However, there are no grants or donations specifically earmarked by donors to pay for Petraeus. That means the salary will come from the Foundation’s general funds.
If this is true, it’s scandalous in itself, although not exactly for the reasons Lalor says. To clarify, the CUNY Research Foundation (RF) exists to manage the grants brought in by CUNY researchers, and it is the official employer of students and other non-faculty researchers who work on such grants. Despite the name (and despite the composition of its board), the RF is technically a private non-profit institution that is separate from CUNY itself.
I’m a longtime RF employee, and I was on the committee that bargained a first contract between the Professional Staff Congress (the union that also represents CUNY faculty) and the RF, covering RF employees at several CUNY campuses. In those negotiations, it was routine for the RF representatives to claim that they had little ability to concede on our wage and benefits demands, because RF employees were paid out of grants that had been given to individual Principal Investigators and which were subject to various sponsor restrictions. We always assumed that the RF had significant amounts of disposable money that they skimmed off the grants as part of their “overhead” charges, but their finances are naturally quite opaque. But if they really do have hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around to give to David Petraeus, that could have paid for a substantial portion of the wage increases and health insurance contributions that we spent years fighting over at the negotiating table.
Jeremy 07.03.13 at 10:14 pm
Well, it’s a good thing the right is keeping their anti-university demagoguery in check waiting until the left starts it up first.
SebastianDangerfield 07.03.13 at 10:35 pm
On the subject of hidden costs, given what we know about Petraeus’s “mentoring style” «shudders» can we not also assume that CUNY’s risk management officer (if such a person exists) was asleep at the switch?
Barry 07.04.13 at 3:17 am
Marc: “Marc, what Andrew is claiming is that it’s not clear that 150K$ could be better spent.”
Not true; he’s using things like ‘market price’, meaning whether or not they paid for more than he or an equivalent celebrity would get; everybody here but you and he are pointing out that there’s no justification of him being worth it to the students.
kris 07.04.13 at 5:51 am
Hiring Petraeus is outrageous on several counts, of which the following are the most compelling to me:
1. Paying him $150,000 or equivalents for a 3 hr drive by “seminar” is not justifiable. Students and the general research mission of CUNY are far better served by spending this money to hire full time faculty, or better still paying existing adjunct and temporary faculty a better living wage. This is a pure case of grift.
2. If John Yoo’s continued employment at UC Berkeley as a faculty is a disgrace, hiring Petraeus to teach students is an even greater one. John Yoo authored torture memos, Petraeus on the other hand actively executed a policy of torture. I don’t see how the interests of students are served by holding up someone like him as an example of a successful person worthy of emulation.
PS: For details about his involvement with torture:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link
http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/03/07/guardian-lays-out-details-of-how-petraeus-organized-death-squads-in-iraq/
jpe 07.06.13 at 12:25 pm
@ Peter Frase: it appears to be a donation restricted to Petraeus that is being routed through the RF, rather than being the general funds of the RF.
“Chancellor Matthew Goldstein has provided private funding for your position, which will be paid through the CUNY Research Foundation”
http://christianpost.com/news/ex-cia-boss-gen-david-petraeus-lands-150000-gig-at-cuny-to-work-just-3-hours-a-week–99286/
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