by Aaron Warner
Governor Phil Scott earns $198,521.60/year (plus transportation expenses and other benefits). But the chief executive is not the highest paid state employee. He’s not in the top 10. Or top 20. Or even the top 50.
In fact, 93 state employees earn more than their governor, according to the Open The Books database. Almost all work for the University of Vermont. UVM’s Larner College of Medicine Richard L. Page raked in a $683,023. From him, the path to #94 is a “who’s that?” roster of UVM deans, administrators and professors.
Page’s salary is also $100,000 higher than his predecessor of five years, Dean Fredrick Morin III wh in 2017 netted $582,254.
Behind Page for 2022 earnings is UVM President Suresh V. Garimella at $484,800. Garimella has had a prestigious career as an inventor in the field of engineering, owning several patents. He also sits on the board of government contractor (FFRDC – Federally Funded Research and Development Center) Sandia National Laboratories, which is managed by Honeywell. The focus at Sandia is national security (i.e. cyber security) and part of our nation’s military-industrial complex.
Number’s three and four for earnings are Professor of Biochemistry and Director of the laboratory for cancer research Gary Stein who took in $444,908, and Pharmacology Professor Mark Nelson at $429,173. Big Medicine and Big Pharma pay well, therefore so do their public/private partners like research universities – like UVM.
Others ranking ahead of the governor include:
Sanjay Sharma – Dean for UVM School of Business ($418,677)
A look at Sharma’s bio and you come away with one certainty – he is dedicated to all things sustainable. The words “sustainable” or “sustainability” appear fourteen times as we learn about his fund-raising capability, which may explain his massive salary. Sharma also holds a highly favored position in the World Economic Forum, which lauded the business school for achieving “top 3 in the US and top 9 in the world in the Positive Impact Ratings released at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2020”.
This is the same WEF (meeting this week in Davos) whose front-man, Klaus Schwab, states one of their positive impacts is to infiltrate governments, such as Trudeau’s in Canada. This is the same Klaus Schwab who has a bust of Vladimir Lenin adorning his home office.
Randall Holcombe – Faculty Director and Chair for UVM Cancer Center ($410,000)
Of note, Vermont has been ranked the healthiest state in the country on more than one occasion. However it has one of the worst cancer incidence per 100,000 people. Both Texas and California have much lower incidence. Which begs the question, how can Vermont be the healthiest state while also having such a high cancer population? Also, should we be funding so heavily a pursuit we are clearly failing at relative to the rest of the country and even the world?
A look at global cancer rates finds Central and Northern Africa as well as the Middle East and India with rates below 50/100,000 people with Vermont and the U.S. at over eight times that (400+/100,000).
David Warshaw – Professor and Chair Cardio Lab ($394,229).
One bright spot where research seems to be paying off in improving human mortality is heart disease. Although still the leading killer in the U.S., the incidence of deaths has dropped to half of what it was in 1990 (321.8/110k) and nearly a quarter of what it was in 1950 (588.8/100k). Heart disease appears in Vermont to be more prevalent among the less affluent, noting the Burlington area is the lowest in the state while the Northeast Kingdom is among the highest. This appears to be true for the U.S. as well.
Coaching men’s basketball at UVM is worth almost twice the cost of running the state as the Catamount’s head coach John Becker slam dunked a whopping $364,971 into his account.
For the feminists who argue women only make 75% of what men do for the same job have a look at Women’s Lacrosse Head Coach Sara Dalton Graddock ($104,000) netting just over half of her male counterpart Chris Feifs ($195,200)
The hotly controversial practice of D.E.I., likened by some professionals as “teaching people how to be nice”, is worth $182,070 for Ahmer Ahmed who holds the Provost D.E.I. position at UVM.
Christopher Koliba, Professor of Community Development & Applied Economics ($173,400) “… current research program focuses on the development of complex adaptive systems models and network analysis of watershed management networks, regulatory networks, food systems, transportation planning networks, energy distribution networks and health care service delivery critical care pathways.
Director of Gender, Sex & Women’s Studies / Queer Theory / Psychoanalytic Theory ($93,664) Valery Rohy has published multiple books on the subject of queer theory. For those unfamiliar we refer you to Dr. James Lindsay’s series on New Discourses where he explains the goal of queer theory is essentially to “queer the culture” in an effort to obfuscate traditional norms such as sex, gender, and the family.
Getting into the weeds, literally, we find the recently formed State of Vermont Cannabis Control Board gets highly rewarded with Board Chair James Pepper rolling in $115,584.80 for 2022 and Executive Director Brynn Hare tokes in a tidy $98,600. Board Members Kyle Harris and Julie Hulbard jointly earn $86,684.00 each.
This series flows from the research provided by Open the Books, a non-profit used by the Trump administration to assess and begin the process of “draining the swamp”. Our goal is to elucidate what “the swamp” is in Vermont hoping to get the conversation started among all tax-paying Vermonters concerned with government waste, excess and unnecessary spending and hypocrisy among those we pay to serve us yet instead are using their positions of power to fleece or abuse the citizenry.