Sometimes it’s OK to brag.
Last week, The Cavalier Daily bragged about a former editor-in-chief winning a Pulitzer and a former managing editor being part of a team that was a Pulitzer finalist. The managing board was bragging on behalf of Lane DeGregory, who won a Pulitzer, and Lindsay Wise, who came very close.
DeGregory and Wise were at the paper long before I was associated with it, so I don’t know what kind of journalists they were while they were at the University. But I do know, after a quick visit to the internet, that DeGregroy is a double Hoo, spent 10 years working at The Virginian-Pilot and has won more than a dozen national awards for her journalism.
And you should read some of her stuff. I didn’t learn so much abut Wise.
But the managing board wasn’t just bragging about DeGregory and Wise, the board was bragging about The Cavalier Daily’s performance as an example of student self-governance and as a training ground for journalists. It’s still a journalists’ training ground. One thing The Cavalier Daily’s staff learned recently is that not everyone is pleased to see their salary in the newspaper.
Some folks are used to that kind of treatment. The Chronicle of Higher Education and other publications regularly publish the salaries of college presidents. All sorts of publications, Web sites and television shows regularly blab the pay collected by college coaches. Other college employees are not so accustomed to such treatment.
The Cavalier Daily printed five pages of employees’ salaries last week, and not all of them were happy about that. Zachary Wheat, director of the interactive media group in the strategic communications section of the University’s office of development and public affairs, wrote to complain.
“… [T]his is highly private information,” he said in an email. “I have never been told that my salary is public information and likely to be published in the student newspaper.”
Let me correct that.
Mr. Wheat, your $71,719 annual salary is public information and likely to be published in the student newspaper. It is also, by the way, $34,524 more than the median household income in Charlottesville.
Wheat also wrote, “I hope that next year, the CD re-evaluates the need to publish all of this, and that you will exclude publishing lower level staff salaries. “Regarding the staff salary data, I also hope that whatever department gave you this information will re-consider its obligation to provide it.”
I certainly hope that the custodian of these public records won’t reconsider the obligation to release public records to the public. Hiding public records from the public is illegal.
I understand it can be uncomfortable to see things such as your salary hung out in public, but surely someone working at the University founded by Thomas Jefferson understands that the public has a right to know how public institutions spend their money. And yes, I know the state provides a much smaller portion of the University’s budget than it used to. But there’s other public money involved and the University is still, technically, a public university.
“When a man assumes a public trust,” Mr. Jefferson said, “he should consider himself as public property.”
Working for a public university could be considered a public trust, it seems to me.
Having said all that, I have to say I’m not completely opposed to Wheat’s position. Part of his complaint was that the headline said the list of staff salaries would include those over $200,000 a year and the list below it included folks who make much less than that. That was clearly a mistake. And it suggests a more basic question. What’s the purpose of such lists?
The salaries are public record, so they certainly can be published. Should they? What’s the point?
There is clearly some value in keeping an eye on what the University’s most handsomely paid people get for their service. There is certainly value in being able to compare what University employees are paid compared to people with similar jobs in the private sector. How far down the salary list the published version of that examination needs to go seems a debatable question. Maybe the $200,000 threshold would do. Or $100,000. Or twice the city’s median household income. Or maybe it should be everybody who gets any money from the University.
There’s no right answer in cases like this. But there can be wrong answers. The Roanoke Times, for instance, published online a complete list of everyone who has a Virginia permit to carry a concealed handgun. And their home address. It was perfectly legal. But it made enough people angry enough that the General Assembly changed the rules. The information is still public record, but it’s much harder to collect the whole list now.
Journalists, Pulitzer winners or not, have to think about questions like that all that time.
Tim Thornton is The Cavalier Daily’s ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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