Who does Colorado State University exist to serve: overpriced administrators or cash-strapped students? The fact that tuition skyrockets at the same pace that administrator salaries balloon suggests that, first and foremost, CSU in great part serves fat-cat administrators.
The CSU System currently has three — count ’em — three chancellors: emeritus chancellors Joe Blake and Michael Martin, and one interim chancellor, Tony Frank.
The CSU System confirms that Frank is paid $475,000 a year, Martin $305,000 a year, and Blake $154,500 a year, arguably making it one of the most top-heavy public universities in the nation.
How do Colorado’s citizens and students benefit from that arrangement? It’s unclear whether Blake and Martin do much of anything. Neither has had a tangible impact on the quality of instruction at CSU or CSU-Pueblo, nor has either reduced the cost of instruction for struggling students.
If anything, CSU’s emeritus chancellors have substantially inflated costs for students.
Further evidence that CSU is becoming a country club for the super-rich is Frank’s campaign for a $250 million luxury football stadium.
Sure, tuition may be going through the roof; CSUP students may have recently launched a food relief program (called the Pack Pantry) for starving students, staff and faculty; and Rocky Mountain PBS may have recently reported that 78 percent of the instructors at Colorado community colleges are working for poverty-level wages. But what Colorado’s hard-pressed students need more than anything is a few more emeritus chancellors to populate the luxury boxes at Frank’s new stadium.
No one can say that CSU lacks vision. There may have been a time when CSU existed to provide aspiring students with access to high-quality higher education, but those days are over. Who cares if poor and middle-class students can no longer afford higher education? If they are too poor to afford tuition, then they are probably too poor to buy season tickets to the football games. So there’s no point in admitting them to CSU, is there? Who wants to share a football stadium with a bunch of poor people anyway? Losers.
The new CSU can’t be bothered with lifting students out of poverty. It’s the rich that matter. Attracting richer students will enable CSU to fulfill its primary mission: delivering fat salary bumps to emeritus chancellors.
Perhaps Frank and the other CSU chancellors have finally figured out what higher education is all about. Who says people aren’t learning anything in school these days?
Tim McGettigan is professor of sociology at CSU-Pueblo.
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