By attempting to put all university positions — from administrators to STEM professors to English professors — on to the same scale, St. Mary’s College may realize one crucial fact: some employees and some positions are just more valuable than others.

James Piereson at Minding the Campus has the story:

Looking at Inequality in Faculty Pay

Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Company once had a policy that the CEO could not make more than five times the amount earned by the lowest entry-level employee, capping the CEO’s salary at $81,000 in the early 1980s. By 1995, though, that policy had been eliminated. It turns out that it was difficult to attract a qualified person to head what had become a $150 million company at that kind of salary. But even this lesson from most idealistic hippies of the Green Mountain state does not seem to have deterred many liberals from promoting wage ratios as the key to solving economic inequality.

The most recent example comes from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a public honors college. Professors at the school are trying to tie the salaries of everyone from the vice president to adjunct faculty to the same scale. The problem with this is not only that it’s difficult to compete for good administrators when compensation is severely restricted. It’s also that faculty in different disciplines are worth different amounts. Professors in the STEM disciplines or in business, economics, and law have the option of going into the for-profit world. So tying their salaries to what an adjunct English professor makes is a recipe for ensuring that quality math and science professors will look elsewhere for employment. Though the professors at St. Mary’s use the rhetoric of “community” as the basis for their proposal, the fact is that their college still operates within a wider marketplace in which everyone is searching for better opportunities.