It seems chancellors at the University of Wisconsin will get a chance to become accustomed to it. “On Pearl Harbor Day, 2018, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents dropped its own economic bomb on the people of Wisconsin, approving raises ranging from $14,421 to $72,668 for 10 of the UW System’s 13 chancellors,” Richard Grusin, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin writes. “In the days following the December 7 meeting, social media has exploded with expressions of the emotional damage inflicted by these oversized raises.”
“Many University of Wisconsin faculty and staff, whose pay has remained static for roughly a decade, and who took de facto pay cuts in 2011 when Act 10 peremptorily increased individual retirement contributions by roughly 7%, filled Facebook and Twitter with complaints, shares, and retweets about these obscenely inflated raises. Over and over again, faculty and staff decried the injustice of chancellors like UW-Madison’s Becky Blank and UW-Milwaukee’s Mark Mone receiving raises ($72,668 and $49,419 respectively) greater than the salaries of many assistant professors and full-time instructors.”