I’ve always felt uneasy about publishing people’s salaries and I’ve generally refrained from doing so: It feels to me like an invasion of privacy, even though this information is publicly available, as it should be, on the annual 990 tax returns of nonprofits.
But every time a journalist gets hold of information about the salaries of the top officials of major cultural institutions, the resulting story makes these public servants seem overpaid.
The most recent example of this was the NY Times piece last November about the compensation for Paul LeClerc, president and chief executive officer of the New York Public Library. No one who has read my investigative piece on the NYPL for the Wall Street Journal can accuse me of being soft on LeClerc. But I feel that major cultural institutions do well to pay their top officials well. Otherwise the best people will be lost to private industry, leaving culture in the hands of mediocrities.
That said, disclosure of the compensation of officials at the J. Paul Getty Trust is newsworthy, thanks to the much publicized governance and financial irregularities under the regime of deposed president Barry Munitz.
The Getty has now quietly posted on its own website an updated list of salaries of its top officials, including Michael Brand, the new director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, and James Wood, the incoming replacement for Munitz.
I’ll let you click the salary link yourself. The most recent information is on Pages 7-9. (Previous pages give salary information for fiscal 1995—also interesting if you haven’t already seen it.)
My only comment on these generous figures: We can clearly see why Wood came out of retirement, but if he solves the Getty’s antiquities mess and other pressing issues, he’s worth every penny.
Penny? Did I say PENNY???