University of Kentucky President Lee Todd has just been awarded his annual $100,000 bonus. His salary for this year is $275,330, so the bonus automatically increases it by a whopping 64 percent to $375,330. Add to this financial windfall the use of both a house and a car, and the president does quite well. Is he worth that? Well…yes, or at least he’s worth whatever it takes to keep him because he, by all accounts, has done a good job, especially if the shortcomings of the Athletic Department are not held against him. Since that department is in a world of its own, often shady and not known for graduating its student-athletes in even slightly acceptable numbers as well as being presided over by a director who is paid far more than Todd – actually unbelievably and intolerably overpaid – perhaps Todd should be forgiven any connection with it, much less oversight of it, notwithstanding that such oversight is part of his job. At Vanderbilt, the president became fed up with the Athletic Department there and just took it over. Perhaps that’s what Todd should do.
This matter converges with a monologue presented by Tucker Carlson on his weekly PBS program Friday evening, June 10, entitled Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered. Carlson is an author and regular contributor to Esquire and the Weekly Standard, among other writing and TV/lecture activities. This is what he had to say: “Over the past seven years, the price of a college education has risen five percent a year, more than double the rate of inflation. For the price of a single year at Harvard, you could buy a cabin on a lake in Maine.” Carlson, on some of the reason for tuition-creep: “Colleges have gone on a building spree. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, colleges and universities will spend more than $6 billion on construction this year, much of it on non-essentials like recreation centers and lavish dorm upgrades.”
UK is heading into the most expensive building program in its history, according to Linda Blackford of the Lexington Herald-Leader in the June 11 edition, – some $375 million in its medical center. There’s no argument with this if it’s needed, but it sticks in one’s craw that another $27 million is on the boards for – get this – a basketball-practice gymnasium, never mind that Memorial Hall is as good a practice facility as there is in the state and has not, despite whatever reason it’s considered inadequate, kept UK men’s teams from being perennial national powerhouses. Also, the team is allowed a significant number of practices each year in Rupp Arena, where it plays its home games. This is not even to mention the loss of valuable parking spaces to be taken up by the gym on a campus already plagued by the lack of same.
There are other reasons for the increase in student costs, of course, but this kind of wastefulness, especially on programs that bear little academic fruit, is intolerable. The football team has an indoor practice facility. How silly does it get? Football is played out of doors and outside practices have never kept great football teams from winning. Ironically, the winningest UK teams in recent history had no such facility.
In the middle of all this is the almost certain closing of Rose Street as part of the building project, one of the city’s main arteries, and one of the two main avenues connecting the university with downtown, not to mention THE main artery connecting the city’s vital business thoroughfare – Nicholasville Road – to downtown. UK has other options, so there would be no argument with this circumstance if there were no other way to effect the construction. UK has offered to widen Virginia Avenue through the campus as a sort of sop in the wake of the closing. Actually, UK should do that anyway, as well as forget the request to close Rose, on which tens of thousands have been spent in just the last 3-4 years to make it more campus/community-friendly.
Todd should take the lead in addressing this problem. The Urban-County Council actually voted to close the second-most important street in the city – Vine Street – a few years ago before finally coming to its senses under tremendous citizen pressure and rescinding its action. It is ALWAYS a mistake to close a main artery, and Todd, with his engineering background, should, of all people, recognize this and take the lead in rescinding the university’s request to close the street. Just contemplating the difficulty and consequent time-lost of ambulances in getting to the UK Hospital Emergency Room in the absence of Rose Street at that location boggles the mind, unless extensive, further, costly arrangements are made.
Is Todd worth it? Yes. However, he also has a responsibility to the people of Lexington.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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