Coach Class in Academia

In my student days, sporting distinction in cricket, tennis, or whatever was rewarded with what was called a university "blue." The award of a blue was essentially symbolic, rather like the tasseled velvet caps my grandfather received each time he played rugby for Ireland.

In my day, there were no sponsorship deals, no athletic scholarships, no endorsements, no under-the-table payments. I'm not saying there wasn't the odd bit of jiggery-pokery, but, in the main, the amateur ethos (think Chariots of Fire) prevailed.

Today, collegiate athletics is a big (and sometimes downright nasty) business. It is a source of continuing embarrassment to many members of the professorate. But I'll say no more on that aspect, since others have described the system and its many flaws in great detail, among them my IU colleague Murray Sperber (Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education, Holt, 2000).

Mike Davis, IU's head basketball coach, recently signed a multiyear contract. It consists of $800,000 in guaranteed annual income—a sum, I might observe, that would go a long way toward paying the annual faculty salary bill of IU's School of Library and Information Science.

What does that say about relative institutional/social values? An interesting aspect of Davis's contract is that there is the possibility of an additional incentive payment of almost $140,000 based on game results and the grades of the student athletes. If the team's average GPA (grade point average) exceeds 2.3 (on a four-point scale), more dollars flow to Davis. It should be pointed out that the IU average GPA is 3.01. If the team's average GPA is above 3.3, a further bonus kicks in. Lastly, Davis will receive $300,000 just for honoring his contract until July 1, 2005.

This got me thinking. What if I, as dean, had my remuneration tied to the mean GPA of my students, the number of graduating students, the frequency with which doctoral students presented conference papers, the number of National Science Foundation grants my faculty secured, my fundraising success, etc.? What if I promised to remain as dean until 2005 in the face of all other blandishments? You get my drift. Obviously, Mary Sue Coleman understands the realities of contractual life; the new president of the University of Michigan has a compensation package that includes a retention bonus of $500,000 if she remains president for the full five years.

Translate such thinking to Libraryland, and imagine a scenario in which this kind of performance-related remuneration model is applied aggressively to library directors. Perhaps a high-flying library manager could negotiate along the following lines: 1) a progressive salary increment if circulation figures grow at a compounded annual rate of X percent; 2) a flat-rate bonus if operating costs are pared back by an agreed amount over a two-year period; 3) a one-time merit payment if patron satisfaction levels are shown to have risen beyond a certain threshold by the expiration of the contract; and 4) a bonus if more than $Y million is secured for capital and other projects from federal agencies and/or foundations.

Maybe the time has come to create Libraryland's equivalent of the market for "academostars" (T. Spurgin's "The Times Magazine and the Academic Megastars," The Minnesota Review, 52–54 [2001]: 225–238), those high-visibility professors whose talents are in such demand that they can virtually write their own conditions of employment and recompense.

Only the other day I was reading a report from the Audit Commission in the UK (Building Better Library Services, 2002) that noted that since 1992–93 visits to public libraries in Britain had fallen by 17 percent and loans by almost one-quarter. The report also noted that spending on books was down by one-third. Could the decline documented by the Audit Commission be arrested and reversed? Perhaps it is now time, in the UK at least, to move away from nationally negotiated pay scales and introduce radical performance-based measurement for public sector library managers.

More generally, it is certainly worth considering whether, how, and at what cost a properly "incentivized" manager (or administrative team) could produce a reversal. Has the time come to create, or recruit, a cadre of turnaround artists—entrepreneurially inclined librarians who combine professional knowledge with business talent—to reinvigorate public sector libraries?