Last modified: Thursday, December 18, 2008 2:47 AM EST GUEST COLUMN: College leaders, cut your salary BY DR. STEPHEN J. NELSON The supposedly venerated title "CEO" is beginning to look more like Clueless Executive Officers. The spectacle of the leaders of the Big Three automakers appearing like so many deer in the headlights trying to answer congressional inquiries is the latest evidence. In a stupendously stupid move reflecting their tin ears and arrogance, these execs flew to the first congressional hearings in private jets. Showing that they have some capacity for learning, the second time around they mercifully chose the common transportation of the vehicles they make and market. Grilled about their massive salary and compensation packages, one demurred: "I am OK where I am." This self-absorbed corporate sector CEO behavior instantly makes them poster children for disgraceful leadership. At the same time higher education produced its own horrendous example: the president of Suffolk University, Boston, was revealed to be pulling down a purported $2.8 million. This less-than-glowing campus image problem has since been offset by a spate of presidents voluntarily taking pay cuts. A number of these campus leaders are taking immediate reductions in the range of 5 to 10 percent. These and other presidents have committed to similar cuts next year. Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, for example, has given $100,000, about a 10th of her annual compensation of slightly over a million dollars, as a gift to the university. These are tough times. One way or another nearly everyone feels the painful pinch of too few dollars chasing too many needs. Though college presidents returning modest portions of their compensation may be a drop in the bucket, these actions are symbolically important. Who better than college presidents to lead the way to turn around the ever-escalating excesses of salaries paid to leaders and the widening gulf between their comfortable lives and the struggles of their "line" employees? College presidents can and should be influential national leaders who must show what top executives - colleagues foremost in the auto but also in other major industries - can and should do in these times. Presidents possess the critical leverage of their bully pulpits. College and university presidents have organized successfully to make critical stands in the past. They should do so again. College presidents taking pay cuts are making these stands on the turf of their campuses. But their voices are being heard far and wide by committing to pull back from unnecessary "keep up with the Joneses" competition that has led to their high, though in many respects terribly justified salaries. In today's strained economic environment, excessive salaries and compensation are increasingly difficult to justify, whether for college presidents or any CEO's. Fairly or not, colleges and universities and their presidents are held to a higher standard than other institutions and leaders. I would urge every college president to commit to a minimum 5 percent immediate salary cut and pledge a similar decrease or more for the next academic year. Aren't our college presidents a different breed of leader and CEO than the dreadful performance of self-interest, self-protection and self-absorption so featured by the recent appearance of corporate executives in front of congressional leaders? It is time for our presidents to stand up and be counted. STEPHEN NELSON is assistant professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State College and senior scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. His latest book is Leaders in the Labyrinth: College Presidents and the Battleground of Creeds and Convictions. Forthcoming next summer is Leaders in the Crossroads: Success and Failure in the College Presidency.