Huge racial pay gap for Community College Presidents
But don’t expect DOJ to care
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning that, according to a new study, there are dramatic disparities in the salaries of community college presidents associated with race, sex, and gender.
Bucking trends in the pay of top officials in most other professions, women, on average, earned higher base salaries than did men at the helms of two-year institutions, the study found, and Hispanic and black presidents earned more than their white counterparts….
Hispanic presidents reported the highest median base salary of any ethnic group, at $201,553, the study found. Black presidents had a median base salary of $190,000, and white presidents had a median base salary of $167,200.
I wonder if the Departments of Justice or Education are investigating this apparent discrimination.
Actually, I don’t.
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I just sat through an Affirmative Action presentation at my company (yes, the term is still in full use). Power Point, of course, so everything was dumbed down to a few bullet points per slide. I work for a privately owned utility in VA.
First slide clearly stated that we are an Equal Opportunity Employer and that we do NOT descriminate based on race, gender, religion or sexual orientation. This is based on EEOC federal law and the US Constitution. In practice, it means that you CAN descriminate against whites, men, christians and heterosexuals. You just can’t descriminate against anyone else.
Second slide announced that we are in compliance with federal Affirmative Action policies. The goal being to “erase any gaps” in racial and gender employment. In other words, we make a point of hiring and promoting minorities (that’s “protected minorities”, mind you, only blacks and hispanics count, other minorities like asians and Jews get screwed worse than caucasians. In private, non-protected minorities are referred to as ‘the other white meat’, remember those old commercials for pork?) regardless of whether or not they are the most qualified. This is based, legally, on an Obama Executive Order. Obviously, it is in clear conflict with both federal law and the Constitution, but, in practice, Affirmative Action reigns supreme while the law and the Constitution don’t mean jack.
The 3rd and 4th slides detail how this policy gets implemented. The 3rd started by pointing out that we hire and promote based on objective qualification for the job, and then details how we, in fact, hire and promote based on race and gender regardless of qualification for the job.
The 4th started by declaring that we do not use quotas for race and gender hiring, and then went on to celebrate how we were meeting our race and gender quotas in hiring.
These presentations made it seem like we are “erasing” our gender and racial ‘gaps’ merely by ensuring that we always hire the most qualified person. No one in the room, or in the entire company, is under any illusions about the absurdity of that notion.
I’ve seen this, several times, play out when we’re filling a position. Here’s how it works: We post a job publicly, for a specified period of time, and interview everyone that applies. If no minorities apply for the position, we repost the job a second time for another, longer, specified period of time regardless of how many qualified applicants have already applied and have been interviewed.
Then, the department the position is in is thorougly scrutinized to see where they are on their “numbers”, a euphemism for the quota system that officially doesn’t exist. Managers here live and die by their “numbers”. If your numbers are good, you can hire the most qualified candidate. If your numbers are ‘bad’ you have to hire someone that will help ‘fix’ that problem, even if they are the least qualified candidate (which they invariably are).
The ‘numbers’, by the way, get tallied separately by category. So, a minority woman is a ‘twofer’, since hiring/promoting her helps both your gender and racial quotas. Now, if you can find a black, muslim woman you’ve hit the trifecta (we’ve hired several). Similarly, if you can find a homosexual black woman, also trifecta. Homosexual black man, well that’s just a twofer. I sat through a meeting once, attended by the president of the company, corporate council, and every department head, and the conversation turned to a debate on when and whether a transgendered person counted as female for the gender ‘numbers’. It was the most surreal experience of my life. Homosexual muslims don’t seem to exist, I wonder why? Twofers and Trifectas are a big deal. You see, there is actual work to be done, and each department can only carry so much dead weight while still actually meeting its goals. Twofers and Trifectas allow managers to minimize the number of positions occupied by people that are, shall we say, underperformers.
Oh yeah, there are separate tallies for blacks and hispanics. Must meet ‘numbers’ for both.
If someone is hired that helps your department’s numbers, “its all good” (another catch phrase here) and no questions are asked. You can get the paperwork in whenever. Just make sure absolutely nothing is said that would clue in the more qualified candidates that applied as to how blatantly they were discriminated against. On the other hand, if you are able to hire the most qualified candidate, you have reams of forms to fill out. You have to fully document not just how spectacularly awesome your hire was, thereby justifying your decision to not descriminate against him, you also have to fully document all of your efforts to find a qualified minority or woman that you could have hired instead. You are expected to have made the extra effort, you see. And you’d better be able to prove it.
I was seething with rage during the entire presentation, but held my tongue. A couple years ago, I made the mistake of asking how the Supreme Court decision in the Ricci v DeStefano case had impacted our Affirmative Action policy. I know for a dead certainty that that question cost me a promotion. But, I was sitting in the front row and when the OD presenter (a black woman, of course, who else to run your affirmative action program?) asked if anyone had any questions and no one did, she singled me out and said “you look like you have a question”. “No.” I deadpanned, “The policy is crystal clear.” There was a slight commotion in the back, quickly suppressed.
My attendance at the meeting, btw, was mandatory. Like the guys in ‘Office Space’, I have 5 bosses (a byproduct of working in a department that operates 24/7). All 5 of my bosses (one of them 3 times), and their boss (I refer to him has my uber-boss), made a point of stopping by my desk over the past two weeks just to remind me about this meeting. You can sit there in silence, but you absolutely have to make sure that you get your named signed off on the meeting’s sign in sheet. They keep track.
Having less than fully qualified personnel working in a business where your actions and, even if you work in the office – your decisions, can and occassionally do get someone killed or seriously injured is no joke. No one is under any illusions about the competency of their coworkers. Everyone is fully of aware of who is capable, and who is not, and when real work has to be done certain people are kept as far away from it as possible. We have one man that isn’t even welcome standing around watching. He spends his days driving a company truck around town, just burning time. No one questions the utter impossibility of firing someone that help’s their dept’s numbers though.