Posted by T. Greg Doucette on Oct 23, 2015 in
Unsolicited Commentary From the News & Observer:
Spellings’ salary near the top for public university leaders
By Lynn Bonner | lbonner@newsobserver.com
Margaret Spellings will be one of the highest paid public university administrators in the nation when she takes over the UNC system in March.
With a starting base salary of $775,000, she will make more than outgoing UNC System President Tom Ross, who earns $600,000 a year.
Spellings will have the opportunity to earn money on top of her salary by meeting performance goals she and the Board of Governors agree to. She will also be eligible for salary increases with each annual job evaluation.
For comparison:
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When Molly Broad retired as President of the UNC system in 2006 she was making $312K.
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The Board of Governors then hired Erskine Bowles at $425K, but he donated $125K of it to a scholarship fund (since the guy was already wealthy).
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After Erskine retired in 2010, despite the intervening recession, Tom Ross was brought in at $500K — then given a 1-year boost to $600K when the BOG decided to fire him last year.
And now we have Spellings at $775K.
From a nearly-all-Republican, ostensibly “conservative” Board.
Appointed by a Republican-controlled, ostensibly “conservative” General Assembly.
Now I’m not that great at math, but by my count that’s a 148% increase in less than a decade. In-state tuition at NC State has gone up 72% in that same time frame ($4,783 to $8,206.16).
Meanwhile, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, North Carolina families’ average annual wages have only gone up just 20% over that same period: from $37,439 to $44,973. And that’s not adjusted for inflation or increases in the cost of living.
Something is seriously wrong here y’all…
Tags: "Real" world rants..., Money Money Money, UNC Board of Governors
Posted by T. Greg Doucette on Oct 22, 2015 in
The After-3L Life Surprise! It’s a blog post!
I’ve given up trying to preserve the smilies here at law:/dev/null. Not sure when I’ll have the time to go into the archives and replace them in old entries, but from hence forward I’ll do my best to embrace the emojis that are now built-in to WordPress. 😱
Fees earned are still trending up
TGD Law officially finished three years back on September 20th. I still owe y’all a breakdown of how things turned out from Year 2, so add the Year 3 breakdown to that list. Suffice to say fees are still trending upward but the struggle with costs remains… well… a struggle.
On that same note, we opened an office in Charlotte!
Kinda cuts against the whole “Hey we really should contain costs!” narrative from that last paragraph, but I figure I’ve learned enough about how not to run the Durham branch that I think we can make a second office work. 😂
“Wait, did you say ‘we’?”
I did — I’ve actually got two associates who are still able to put up with me! 😮
At some point I’ll have to come up with blog-suitable nicknames for both of them, but one has been my paralegal since March who recently passed the bar exam; I’m hoping she’ll be my #2, once we get her over the whole fear of having never been a lawyer before.
The other has actually been a friend on Twitter (true story!), who I met for the first time during one of my Startup 101 presentations in Charlotte. We had drinks in Raleigh the following Friday, and her skillset was uniquely suited for a multinational corporate fraud case I was working on; she started work sitting in on a deposition I had the next Monday. Hence the impetus for the Charlotte office.
Finances and associates aside, we had what I consider one of our marquee wins since the firm opened — torpedoing a baseless defamation case on summary judgment, after systematically dismantling an opposing counsel who was needlessly confrontational the entire time.
The Patton reference made me smile
We’d represented a nudist group whose board members were sued after they removed another board member for inappropriately touching somebody; the ex-member actually found a lawyer willing to file suit, arguing that he was “defamed” by the removal. Lots of First Amendment issues, and then us discovering he actually had a pattern of groping multiple women over a number of years.
At the onset of the case I got some guidance from Ken White over at Popehat — I’ve been a shameless fanboy of both him and Patrick at the same site since just before I took the bar exam — and gave them a shout-out when the judgment order arrived in my inbox 😊
Of all the motion hearings and trials I’ve had since I started practicing law back in 2012, that one was my most-crisp and thorough. And the case helped me continue develop my knowledge of First Amendment law that I’d started building from representing the Moral Monday protestors in Raleigh (37 of 39 dismissed) and one of the Black Lives Matters protesters here in Durham (also dismissed).
In my personal world, Nan is doing worse 😞 She finally had the operation to take her thyroid out a week or so ago. Apparently at some point during that operation the doctor nicked her parathyroid which (news to me) regulates the body’s store of calcium — while she’s also on medication that hinders calcium absorption. So long story short I’m sitting at my desk yesterday and see my Aunt Diane calling, which I just knew meant Nan was in the hospital. She was taken to the ER where they discovered she had almost no calcium left in her system. She’ll be there for at least 4-5 days until there’s some improvement. I’m crossing my fingers that things will turn around but I’m not optimistic.
Samson is still a pain in the butt. We’ve reached a détente of sorts with him destroying the apartment, but he’s taken to scratching at the doors to the bathroom and my bedroom, and (when that didn’t do the job) chewing at the wood paneling around them. Needless to say I won’t be getting my security deposit back.
There’s been more since then — asked by MDG to volunteer with the Salvation Army Boys & Girls Club, creating a new endowment at the NCSU Libraries to focus on collections on student leadership, my frustration with both parties in the General Assembly when it comes to the economy and our court system, etc etc etc — but hopefully I’ll do a better job of updating things here and will have those as future topics.
Hope all of you are doing well!
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From the law:/dev/null archives:
Tags: Competence FTW, é›…é›…, MDG, Money Money Money, Nan & Pops, NCSU Libraries, Post-L, Samson
