Earlier this year, for the first time since the economic collapse, USC’s faculty received a 3-percent pay raise, which was mandated by the state to offset inflation.
But for many USC professors, that 3 percent was all they got, while some of their colleagues and administrators, already making more than $100,000 a year, received raises upwards of 15 and 20 percent.
When our university is already crunched for funds, throwing an extra $10,000 or more to such a small percentage — less than a tenth — of the faculty is just unreasonable.
It’s excessive, it’s irresponsible and it’s hypocritical, especially for a university constantly griping to the state government about how it needs money.
What bothers us the most is that the university does need more state funding — and desperately so. What it doesn’t need, though, is to spend the money it has unnecessarily, and give lawmakers any less reason to throw funding USC’s way.
We get that key faculty members should be rewarded for good work and incentivized to stay — but how much is too much?
Furthermore, there are numerous other ways that the hundreds of thousands of superfluous pay raise dollars could benefit USC. For starters, we could use the money for scholarship funds for students — you know, since our tuition money is bankrolling a lot of these raises — or to fund the construction and renovations this campus needs so badly.
USC needs to fix its system and keep a check on how it distributes its money, lest it leave other deserving people — students and hard-working professors — with empty pockets and a bitter taste in their mouths.