TJ Walker exposes salary disparity at public universities: a UNC basketball coach earns $50 million over six years while adjunct professors make $20-40k annually. He proposes capping public university salaries at $400k, the President's wage, to redirect funds to teaching and reduce tuition.
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Ultimize. The University of North Carolina just gave a basketball coach $50 million over just 6 years. $50 million plus another $4 million a year for his assistants. And this is at a public university. Let's put that next to something real. An adjunct professor at UNC, the people actually teaching students, grading papers, doing the core educational work can make roughly $3,000 to $5,000 per course. That's often as little as $20,000 to $40,000 a year if they're lucky enough to string together enough classes. So just so we're clear, one person is making $8 million a year to coach basketball. Another is making maybe $30,000 a year to teach actual students at the same institution, supported by the same public tax system. And we're supposed to believe this makes sense. That's not capitalism. That's not socialism. That is the worst version of both. It's socialism when it comes to funding because taxpayers directly or indirectly are supporting this institution and all public institutions. And it's hyper-capitalism when it comes to salaries because a handful of people are extracting enormous income at the very top. It's a rigged hybrid. Losses are socialized, gains are privatized, and the result is exactly what you'd expect: massive income inequality funded and legitimized by public institutions. And here's the part that should really bother people: we aren't just tolerating this, we're encouraging it. We are creating a system where wealthy donors pour money into so-called booster clubs, nonprofit entities tax advantage, and those funds fuel an athletic arms race. Bigger salaries, bigger facilities, bigger deals, all wrapped into the language of education and nonprofit mission. That's not education. That's a semi-professional sports league with a tax subsidy. So here's my proposal again, and let me make it very clear. If you work for an institution that receives taxpayer support directly or indirectly, You cannot make more than the President of the United States. That's $400,000. That's a lot of money. That's my proposal, a cap for anyone working at public institutions directly or indirectly receiving tax dollars. Your job is not— and I realize not all of us think the president is worth his $400,000 right now, but as a basic level cap, there's no reason to pay any public employee more than $400,000 a year. And before people say, well, then you'll lose all the best coaches. Let me stop you right there. No, you won't. First of all, the world will survive if 30 or 40 of the best basketball coaches in America have to make $400,000 a year instead of $8 million. We're not talking about surgeons in a war zone. We're talking about coaches. Second, if someone truly believes they're worth $8 million, great, go coach in the NBA, go to the private sector and where the market is fully private and not tied to public funding with a few caveats. Don't get me started about stadium funding. Anyway, that's how capitalism is supposed to work, but don't come into a publicly supported system and extract private market salaries. That's not capitalism, that's a loophole, and it's a very lucrative one. Now let's talk about priorities. Universities are raising tuition, students are taking on debt, families are stretching to afford education. At the same time, we're telling the world that the most valuable employee on campus is the basketball coach or a football coach, not the professor, not the researcher, not the person educating the next generation, but the coach. That's not just a budget issue, that's a values issue. And values eventually show up in politics because voters may not follow every detail of higher education finance, but they understand unfairness. They understand when something feels out of balance. Nothing feels more out of balance than a publicly connected institution paying one employee $8 million while another struggles to make a living teaching students. So this isn't about being anti-sports. It's not about being anti-success. If private companies want to pay people $50 million, go for it. That's the market. That's capitalism. But when public institutions are involved, there has to be a line. There has to be a ceiling. There has to be some connection to reality. And the cleanest, simplest, most defensible line is this. No one on the public payroll directly or indirectly should make more than the President of the United States. Because if we can't agree on that, then we've completely lost the plot. Now, I realize this doesn't make me popular. I realize I've not convinced all of you, but I think it's an absolute, frankly, despicable obscenity. When I ask people this one question, I've never heard a single person give a good answer. What is the worst thing that could happen to our society as a whole if there were this cap and one university couldn't essentially get involved in a financial arms race to attract a coach with more money? What's the worst thing that would happen to society? Absolutely nothing. Maybe your team wouldn't do as well next year. Why does that matter? If you're at the point in your life when you look around at the world, refugee crisis, world hunger, a billion people in the world have no clean drinking water, and you're thinking the biggest problem in life, the area where I need to spend my donations, my charitable contributions, and my tax dollars is to win a few more games. There's something perverse and sick about you. I'm sorry. I realize that doesn't make me a lot of friends, but this is in obscenity, and this is an area where Frankly, it's a blight on both Republican and Democratic parties because Republicans are supposed to be against socialism. This is socializing losses. If you are a coach and you get a $50 million contract and you lose every game, and then you're fired after a season and a half, you still get almost all the money, you get 80% of the money. So it's heads I win, tails you lose situation. And the money is coming directly and indirectly from tax dollars. So if you're a Republican, you should be against that. If you're a Democrat, you're supposed to be in favor of equality. This is creating mass inequality. Think of how much tuition could be lowered if you could take the TV revenues from these big sports leagues and put it towards teacher salaries and reducing tuition. So Democrats, this is a stain on your hands as well. You don't need a complete life overhaul. You don't need a 10-step system or a 90-day transformation. Most of the time you need a small shift repeated often enough that it sticks. That's it. If you're listening to this and thinking, yeah, I'd like to tighten up a few things, go to ultimize.com, U-L-T-A-M-I-Z-E dot com. There's a free course there for you, communication skills or habit building, and it's designed to give you something simple. Something you can use and repeat every day. Not overwhelm you, no complexity, just something you can use. Go to ultimize.com and start. Ultimize.
