PAYDAZE
posted by James Reel
I wasn’t aware of this until an unhappy colleague pointed it out, but the Arizona Daily Star’s Eric Swedlund has posted a searchable online database of the salaries of University of Arizona employees (and those at the other state universities). There’s a small uproar in the comments section of Swedlund’s blog, with contributors complaining that it’s unseemly and divisive to make this information so easily available. Well, sure, there will always be people wondering why Employee A is paid $1,000 less than Employee B for similar work (Employee A will be especially curious), or why one person with substantial responsibilities gets paid less than someone with less to do, or why employees in one unit receive a bounteous paycheck every two weeks while workers in a related unit merely shake the crumbs from the cornucopia. Those are issues to be taken up between individual employees and their supervisors, and between department heads and their supervisors, and the university president and the Arizona Board of Regents. But the fact remains that this is all a matter of public record, because many of our positions (including mine) are funded entirely or in part by state funds—in effect, you, the taxpayer, sign my paycheck, and we state employees are accountable to you. So I can see why this sort of information will cause a lot of disgruntlement and infighting here at the university, but the posters at Swedlund’s blog are out of line, I think, in complaining about the salaries being made available to the general public.
Besides, it isn’t as if the information hasn’t been available all along. Swedlund says that the Star assembled the database “through state public records requests,” as if the project were the result of some heroic use of the Freedom of Information Act. But the last I heard, anybody could find UA salaries already compiled in a document held in the Special Collections department of the UA library. Looks like the Star has been wasting its time reinventing the wheel … of fortune.
