Numbers: Majority Vs. Top

We're starting to get the negative numbers for pension and endowment funds that pay for faculty and staff retirement and also support education. The University of California's pension fund fell from $6.7 billion to $5.7 billion in the first three quarters of 2008. Cornell University reported a hiring freeze in response to endowment drops and state funding cuts.

Meanwhile, the salaries of university presidents rose an average of nearly 8 percent last year, and many presidents are making more than a million dollars a year. Some have refused raises, but most have not.

Media coverage so far has not been kind. Stories of big salaries reduce public willingness to pay tax dollars to support public universities that since they can pay these fat salaries, the thinking goes, must be flush to the gills.

My suggestion: public universities should send the opposite message by cutting their salaries by the same proportion by which their operating budgets are cut.

Since most people assume that executives cut their own pay only as a desperate last resort, when they have already fired thousands and tried to sell off the company, they will finally listen to our budgetary cries of pain