In 10 years, Capilouto stabilized UK. Now he needs to move it to same high rank as his salary.
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Man With a Plan
Eli Capilouto became the president of the University of Kentucky in 2011. In the 10-plus years since, UK has invested nearly $3 billion in campus improvements.
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At a time when higher education is being fully corporatized, Eli Capilouto was the perfect CEO for the University of Kentucky.
The state flagship was stuck, embroiled between lower state funding and higher aspirations. Capilouto quickly recognized that without better facilities to attract more students, UK would be unable to move forward. He put together a massive private-public partnership to build more dorms and leveraged private donations and UK’s burgeoning healthcare dollars into a total of $3 billion of new facilities. Those facilities were soon filled with record enrollment of more than 30,000 students.
He also did two things that receive much less notice, but I believe were deeply important for UK moving forward: He became the first president to make the semi-professional sports franchise of UK Athletics put some of its massive coffers toward academics, by paying debt service on the new Jacobs Science Building. And he approved the work of administrators in creating the UK LEADS program, which identified students hampered by unmet financial need and targeted them with grants so they wouldn’t drop out.
His actions around COVID — which included massive sporting events to keep revenue coming and choosing not to enact a vaccine mandate — were deeply unpopular with faculty and many residents, but kept an engine that has become too big to fail from foundering. As a public health expert, some of his actions may have seemed counterintuitive, but he also opened up UK’s facilities to the public for much-needed and widespread testing and vaccination.
True to the corporate model, UK has also grown in administration and administrative salaries, capped off this year by a poorly timed and enormous raise for Capilouto. It is a sign of the complete corporate takeover of UK that he would receive a raise that puts him so far above faculty and staff as though UK were a Fortune 500 company.
But instead, Capilouto should use it as a challenge for whatever time is left to him at UK’s helm.
The country’s highest paid public university president should now return to the goal of making UK one of the country’s best public universities. Yes, UK has fabulous student spaces and dorms and e-games and food and many, many corporate sponsorships. Students have all the bread and circus they could ever want. But are all those tens of thousands of students who come here prepared to take advantage of UK’s stellar faculty and staff? Are they succeeding? Yes, graduation rates have improved, but they were woefully low to begin with.
What will Capilouto do about faculty and staff morale and the ever-widening gap between the pay of top administrators and the rest of campus? Is he truly committed to shared governance, especially when it comes to filling leadership roles at UK?
UK is paying more attention to unmet financial need for students, but it took protests and a 2019 hunger strike by students to get the administration to pay attention to food and housing insecurity on campus. UK is still becoming more and more unaffordable for average Kentuckians who might want a good education more than a Tempur-Pedic mattress and 18 different kinds of dinner.
Where is Eli Capilouto as a state leader on higher education in Kentucky? He is adept at shifting political winds (one of the reasons he declined to enforce a vaccine mandate), but we have yet to see him use his tremendous clout to take a strong leadership role in making the case for more public dollars for higher education.
In true corporate fashion, the UK Board of Trustees mistakenly thinks salary confers respect. In their announcement of his raise, they bragged about his salary rank among SEC schools. But salary rankings (or athletic ones) don’t matter nearly so much as academic ones. Let Capilouto earn more than $1 million a year by pulling UK up alongside him.
