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Our View – Trustees decide time has come to ‘rough it’

Give a CSU executive a lobster and you feed him/her lunch. But teach a CSU executive to steal caviar from her/his subordinates and you feed him/her dinner, too.

The Cal State University Board of Trustees did what? They “padded” each other on the wallet with an itsy-bitsy pay raise so they don’t have to panhandle in front of the neighborhood liquor store. Isn’t that why we call them trustees? Of course, that’s what we call the prison inmates who drive those institutional economies, too, but that’s beside the point.

The next thing you know, a bunch of crybaby students and teachers are sniveling, “It’s not fair.” Wah, wah, wah and boohoo.

In an effort to stay competitive with other underprivileged college executives, the board decided to slip a little sumpin’ sumpin’ extra in their pay envelopes. They looked around the room, noticed one of them had a hole in their Gucci loafers and upped their paltry six-figure salaries by a meager 11.8 percent.

Who cares? Get over it.

They’ve earned a raise. In fact, they deserve all they can get. After all, they kept student tuitions to a puny 10 percent increase this year, didn’t they? Whew. And we mustn’t forget the tiresome labor they invested fighting the California Faculty Association, which eventually wore them down enough to muscle out a whopping 4.7 percent raise earlier this year.

The sweat from that joust justifies a few grand in the old 2007 Christmas stocking. Heck, those greedy teachers might have gotten away with more – possibly even an astronomical 4.71 percent – if the CSU executives hadn’t been on their j-o-b. It was probably that valiant stand that wore the hole in the exec’s loafers.

That bloody battle warrants a trip to the bank in the Cayman Islands.

Slum living on a piddling $50,000 to $60,000 “housing allowance” (as CSU presidents must do) has to be nearly as rugged as explaining a bare-bones family budget to a house cat.

To keep from being driven to the poor house in a run-down jalopy, the university leaders learn to chug along with a modest $1,000 per month “vehicle allowance.” The only thing worse would be to make them wash their own dilapidated Beemers.

What CSU executives wouldn’t find life a little simpler if we could just get somebody to hand feed them grapes, while fanning them with palm fronds at the new CSULB tanning salon? Perhaps we should toss in a few servants to scatter rose petals on the ground in front of them as they walk across their campuses.

Those endless hours posing for an Armani tailor must be exhausting. They deserve a vacation. Heck, spring for an all-expenses-paid group world cruise for 11 months – with a quick stop at the Geneva, Switzerland, ATM, of course – and we’ll call it even.

You frickin’ students and teachers need to be spanked for crying foul after everything these stalwart champions of public education have done to ya’ll.

You have some nerve insinuating that university presidents and their upstate compadres don’t deserve an “attaboy/attagirl” in the envelope. For all of their toil and grime to keep educational costs down, you repay them with unkind protest.

Who was it that made sure you got to keep the change from your Pell Grants this year, huh?

You spineless Cal State Long Beach students need to be forewarned. You may have children of your own some day. One day, “your” little CSU president might beg you for an extra six-figure-per-month raise on their allowance.

You’ll be able to tell them, “When I was your age, the CSU chiseler, er, Chancellor had to survive on that much per semester.”

Things are tough all over and we must all learn to make do – even poor CSU executives.

Now quit your bitching and get to class.

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