It has now been over two years since Tony Monaco was formally inaugurated as Tufts' 13th president. If you don't remember the ceremony, you didn't miss much - it was just a series of speeches under a tent on the Res Quad, something that you see at Commencement all the time. Total cost? $1,700,000.
Why? Not because Monaco decided to give truffles and Italian wine to all the attendees. But instead, while this was happening, President Emeritus Larry Bacow was moving from Medford to Cambridge to set up shop as the President-in-Residence at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. As he left, he took with him a seven figure check.
According to an article in the Boston Globe this Sunday, the money was given to Bacow as "end of service compensation," and this is in line with a new trend for college leaders to receive exorbitant payments after retirement. The Globe reports that local university presidents, such as ones from Boston University, Brandeis, Harvard, Northeastern, Suffolk, the University of Massachusetts and Wellesley in addition to Tufts, have all received hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in compensation in exchange for doing ... nothing.
I imagine that some of these presidents might dole out the occasional words of wisdom to the current staff, but so did my grandfather after he retired as a mid-level employee from the community bank he worked at for decades, and he never received a severance package in the millions.
No, the reason for the extra pay has nothing to do with continued work for the university. I don't know if Bacow was able to negotiate his severance pay into his contract when he was first hired, but considering that he began at Tufts when most of this campus was in early elementary school and large severance packages had not yet become a thing at universities, it seems unlikely that the Board of Trustees would authorize such a thing. To uninformed me at least, it seems more likely that Bacow's friends on the Board of Trustees decided to give him a nice parting gift, a small token of their appreciation.
A token that was not necessary to secure additional work commitments from Bacow.
A token that was not necessary to compensate Bacow for his 10 years at Tufts - he received a more-than-adequate salary and benefits for that.
The first rule of financial accounting is that money is fungible. I'm sure no donor stepped up to offer a special contribution to the university to pay Bacow's severance pay, so this was paid by general university revenue.
Or in other words, a token that was funded from student tuition money.
Applying a simple "We can afford to spend four percent of the endowment annually" metric, this $1.7 million should have been more than enough to pay full tuition and board for a student at Tufts in perpetuity.
It seems that every time the student body makes a reasonable request from the university, there just don't seem to be the funds for it. Sexual assault victims' advocates? Eh. Internship grant money? Not going to happen. Need blind admissions? "We're trying hard, we promise." But the moment that the administrators want extra pay, it is just tossed to them?
Some change would be nice. If we can't have that, I'll settle for transparency. I want more than just a single line in the Boston Globe, devoid of all context. The University of Massachusetts publicizes all compensation to all employees, as required by law. Why can't Tufts do the same?
The Globe article does end with what is, in context, a heartwarming story. When President Edward Parrish of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) stepped down in 2004, all he asked for from WPI was moving expenses and continued access to computer software.
Maybe we will be so lucky when Tony Monaco retires.
BhushanDeshpande is a senior who is majoring in quantitative economics. He can be reached at Bhushan.Deshpande@tufts.edu.
