is gordon gee responsible for the adjunct explosion?

Gordon Gee, former president of Ohio State, made more than $6 million in FY 2013, including the $1.5 million “release payment” he got in exchange for not letting the door hit him agreeing not to sue the university on his way out. Now the New York Times is reporting that the 25 public universities with the highest-paid presidents have greater increases in student debt and numbers of adjuncts than other publics.

I had a story for this, an organizational story. Ah, I thought. The NYT is implying that the high pay is taking away money that would be going to the other stuff. But really, this just reflects a new model for flagship publics: limit faculty costs (hence the adjuncts), increase the proportion of out-of-state students paying high tuition (hence the debt), and pursue corporate-style CEOs who can lead us into this brave new world (hence the salaries). The non-flagships can’t pursue this strategy successfully, so we’re seeing a divergence between the two groups.

But it turns out that the data don’t, in fact, support that story. They don’t really support any story. The NYT article is based on a report from the Institute for Policy Studies, a progessive think tank. And as I read it, things didn’t seem quite right. IPS reports on the number of adjunct faculty at these institutions, but I haven’t seen good data anywhere on the number of adjuncts. And administrative spending at publics increased 65% between FYs 2006 and 2012, as states slashed budgets?

So I went to their sources. The IPS data on adjuncts and administrators comes from the American Federation of Teachers, which in turn is taking it from IPEDS. And IPEDS data is notoriously wonky.

Yeah, basically the IPS report is just a mess. IPEDS made some major redefinitions of terms in the middle — like who falls under “Part-time/Instruction, Research and Public Service,” what IPS is calling “Adjunct Labor” — so the years aren’t comparable with each other, and AFT appears to have mislabeled some of the years entirely. The University of Minnesota’s impressively fast PR office has a debunking report up, and while I haven’t checked all the numbers, my impression is that it’s right on target.

That doesn’t disprove my theory that there will be increasing divergence between the model for flagships and the path taken by the rest of the publics. And it’s entirely possible that universities with highly paid presidents have underwhelming outcomes in other areas. But if we’re going to argue over what to do about it, it would be nice if it were based on numbers that actually mean something.