New Mexico cannot begin to afford University and College Presidents

President of UNM David Schmidly, $587,000 base salary per year, and President of CNM Kathy Winograd, $206,000 base salary per year, are just too expensive for this state to maintain over the long run. With them they bring a whole host of $100,000 vice presidents because they cannot be bothered with the task of running an institution. At a time when the budget gets tight they resource to freezing salaries for teachers and instructional support staff clearly these people live in a fantasy world and have no connection with the reality of working in a economically challenge state such as ours. They together have managed to drive morale to an all time low at the state’s two largest institutions of higher learning. The voting public needs to demand that the state government find a way to bring these two presidents back to reality before they do permanent and lasting damage to our higher education system.

Governing Board Elections are planed for early February for Central New Mexico Community College. The deadline to resister to run for a seat on the board is December 16, 2008 at the county clerk’s office in the city. The Board which picks the president and controls the direction of the college is a public office and anyone not connected with the college can run for the seats as long as they live with in the district of the seat they are running for at the college. The current board has refused to control the sitting president when it comes to pay issues. They gave President Winograd a $15,000 lump sum increase to her base salary and a few weeks later increased her base salary by 3%. Just this last week President Winograd refused to increase wages of the lowest paid individuals in her institution. She is also looking to get another large pay increase come next June of this year.

UNM President David Schmidly has also stopped any form of increases to instructional wages while adding yet another vice president to his current administration. He at a meeting last evening refused to even consider a pay cut even though other university presidents across the country are taking pay cuts in order to prevent harm to their universities. 700 people at the meeting were clearly not happy with his views on how to run our states largest University.