The Selective Attention of the New York Times

My favorite national corporate newspaper of record, the NYTimes, has a story today by NYTimes reporter, Tamar Lewin, which is on the story researched by the Chronicle of Higher Ed regarding private college presidents' pay (I guess you could say Tamar blogged it for the Times).

The gist of the story is that 23 college presidents make, hold onto your coffee cup, more than a million dollars per year, with the top college exec making almost $1.5 million a year. I know--I am shocked, too, and saddened that in a world of market-based salaries and accountability, there is no accountablity in higher ed. On what profit-based metric can these CEO wannabes justify their exorbitant salaries? Over a million!

I decided to search the Times to see if I could find a similar story on corporate CEO pay, with the neat graphics that the Times staff put together for this public shaming of college presidents. Couldn't find one.

But I did find one at Forbes, where multimillion dollar CEO pay is a badge of honor, rather than one of shame. The latest I found was for 2008, and Larry Ellison of Oracle topped the list with $192.92 million annually. In fact, I had to go 20 pages deep into the chart to find a CEO that made under $1 million per year. Poor Donald Hoaglin of Huntington Banschares comes in at #483 on the list with only $980,000, although he had $7.5 million over the five year stretch.

Oh yes, I found another story that the Times did not bother to report. From UPI, "World's Top 100 Universities Named":

SHANGHAI, Nov. 2 (UPI) -- U.S. universities were tops among the world's top 100 institutions of higher education, a report found.

Once again American universities dominated the world rankings as they have for the past six years, taking all but three of the top 20 spots, The University World News Web site said.

Three U.S. universities took the top three positions. Harvard ranked first, Stanford second and the University of California Berkeley came in at third place.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ranked 5th, the California Institute of Technology ranked sixth, Columbia University ranked seventh, Princeton University rated eighth on the list and the University of Chicago came in at number nine.

The universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Tokyo ranked fourth, 10th and 20th respectively. Emory University in the United States was allocated the last slot in the top 100 institutions.

The Web site said 67 of the top 100 universities are located in the United States, 13 in Britain and five in Japan.

Israel's Hebrew University in Jerusalem ranked 64th, data released by the Center for World Class Universities and the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University said Sunday.

The rankings were based on criteria which included the number of scientific publications released by institutes and the number of graduates who won the Nobel Prize.