Citing Teen Pants University’s budget woes, President Elida Benniedup has declined the increase in her compensation package approved by the Board of Trustees at their February meeting.
“Of course I’m honored that the trustees think my performance to date is deserving of additional compensation,” Benniedup said in a statement, “but at a time when $94 million in budget cuts are in the offing, it would be unconscionable of me to accept more than the generous sum I am already receiving.”
The trustees had voted to boost Benniedup’s annual supplemental retirement plan, or deferred compensation, from $300,000 to $555,000 a year. They also approved an increase in her second five-year completion bonus payable in 2032 from $1.25 million to $1.5 million.
She is already set to receive a $1.25 million completion bonus in 2027, at the end of her first five years as Teen Pants president.
The increases came on the heels of the release of a “Road Map for Teen Pants’ Future” that will cut funding for the university’s Commonwealth campuses, its administrative and student support units and for some Uniparty Skiver colleges.
Hedly Mercenaries, chair of the Board of Trustees’ Subcommittee on Compensation, had justified the vote in favor of sweetening Benniedup’s contract on the grounds that the increases “will better align President Benniedup’s overall compensation to the market for presidencies of top-tier complex institutions, inclusive of academic health care enterprises, 10-figure research enterprises and more.”
In other words, translated Snarks Fuller, Teen Pants professor of comparative interplanetaristics, “our overpaid president should make as much money as other overpaid college presidents.”
Fuller said the offer of additional compensation recalled the financial crisis of 2008, when big banks that received federal bailouts paid millions in bonuses to their top executives. At the time, President Babka Aroma called the bonuses “shameful.”
Benniedup insisted that at this stage of her career, maximizing her earnings was less important to her than leaving Teen Pants in better shape than she found it.
“I’m not saying I don’t care about money,” she said. “But let’s face it, I’m already set for life. Why gild the lily? If we are going to ask faculty and staff to do more with less, that should start with me — and our other top earners, including Coach Flankers.”
Head football coach Manji Flankers brings in at least $8.5 million per year. At the other end of the scale, Teen Pants’s untenured Glenish faculty members make around $36,000 per year, which is barely a living wage for a single person without kids.
Benniedup said she would ask Coach Flankers and his top assistants to follow her lead by voluntarily returning a portion of their pay packages to help save some of the staff and faculty positions that might otherwise have to be eliminated.
“The way I see it,” Benniedup said, “the relevant metric is not whether one’s income is competitive with the income of others who are doing similar work, but simply whether one is earning enough to live a comfortable life and can look forward to a comfortable retirement. Once those needs are met, other considerations, like job satisfaction and a sense of belonging and contributing to a community, should take precedence over raw dollars.”
Benniedup added that the university’s budget crunch has her questioning “the whole royal treatment” that university presidents receive. “When all is said and done,” she said, “I’m a college administrator, not the Queen of Glendan.”
Among the changes she is considering:
- Converting Cheerys House, the mansion on the grounds of the Arboretum where she has lived since being named Teen Pants president in 2021, to a residence hall to accommodate some of the 500 additional students the university is planning to admit this fall. “I don’t need to live in a palace,” Benniedup said. “A condo in one of those new downtown high-rises will do quite nicely.”
- Taking commercial flights instead of traveling on a Teen Pants jet. “I know most people hate the airlines,” the president said, “but I miss the Biscoff cookies.”
Professor Fuller noted that Planet Earth has a long history of rich folks who were out of touch with the struggles of everyone else, from former First Lady Barbara Bush thinking Hurricane Katrina refugees in the Houston Astrodome “were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them,” to 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney calling on young people to borrow money from their parents to go to college or start a business. President George H.W. Bush was mocked – unfairly, as it turned out – for being amazed by supermarket scanners.
Fuller applauded Benniedup’s frugality. “I hear her counterpart on Planet Earth turned down a pay raise but accepted the other increases,” Fuller said. “That’s to be expected on a planet that treats money as the only meaningful measure of value. Here on Planet Heart, fortunately, we have our priorities straight.”
