Editor,
UNM hired Steve Alford as the new head coach of the men's basketball team for an annual salary of $975,000. Alford is no doubt a very good basketball player and coach, but I am appalled by what his salary says about UNM's educational priorities.
Let's do some simple math. For his $975,000, Alford will teach the 13 members of the men's team to play better basketball at an educational cost of $75,000 per basketball student, per year.
I am one of 10 tenure-track assistant professors in the UNM Psychology Department, and we make an average of about $60,000 a year. For our salaries, we teach an average of 50 psychology majors each at an educational cost of about $1,200 per student, per year.
Apparently, UNM believes that teaching basketball players to toss a 9-inch, fake leather ball through an 18-inch hoop is 62 times more important than teaching psychology majors to gain empirically validated, life-changing insights into human nature and mental health. Put another way, if UNM valued the education of each psychology student as highly as it seems to value that of each basketball player, we would each be paid $3.75 million per year.
Salaries are salient to us this month because we undergo the annual process of having our research and teaching rated by senior tenured faculty, to see how this year's average raise of 4.5 percent will be allocated among us. How exciting. Next year, we will make about $2,700 more than this year, while Alford's salary might stay flat. At this rate, UNM will value real education as highly as it values athletics in about 1,360 years. New Mexicans will have to wait until only the year 3367 for their leading research university to get its priorities in order.
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If we don't want to wait that long, UNM students, faculty and staff could start asking the Board of Regents and the new president to signal a renewed commitment to the actual business of a university. That business is teaching and research - not entertaining ESPN viewers or trying to increase alumni donations by showing off better ball-tossing abilities than our rival
universities can.
Geoffrey Miller
UNM faculty
