There's A Reason Coaches Earn More Than Professors

WASHINGTON - Faculty-lounge grumbling at Kansas State University has erupted into tirades. Irate professors are saying that the football coach, Bill Snyder, has gone the whole nine yards financially and that his annual salary of $126,504 is extravagant. In addition - addition as not taught in the math department - Coach Snyder is guaranteed a yearly 7 percent increase, an annual $10,000 bonus, a $70,000 radio and TV deal, a $3,500 country club membership, the use of two cars and performance-based bonuses.

If Snyder has only the conventional talents of a coach - motivational skills, the ability to discipline and inspire - he's worth every dollar and perk he's negotiated. College and high school coaches who take their calling seriously influence the minds of their kids - as well as shape their hearts - in ways that few classroom teachers ever do. Why shouldn't they rake it in?

College athletes, especially those in football and basketball programs, which are the high-visibility revenue-producing sports, are often enough academically unmotivated when first coming to campus. In college, coaches are usually the only teachers to whom they listen. Coaches often end up saving kids who otherwise wouldn't have made it. That's not the academic ideal, but conscientious coaches are as proud of the graduation rates of their students as they are of won-loss records.

At Georgetown University, John Thompson, the basketball coach for 21 years, had a graduation rate of 98 percent through 1990. Deservedly, he's Georgetown's highest-paid employee. Thompson and education-minded coaches like him are more responsible for their kids' well-being than, say, English professors are for English majors. It's full-time mentoring, not a class or two a week, a test, and see you around.

If an athlete messes up off campus - arrested for drunk driving, a barroom tiff - the media call the coach for a comment. If it's an English major who's in trouble, does the department chair get a call?

She or he might be hard to find. America's 524,000 professors have work schedules - profs prefer "workloads" - that earn full-time salaries for what is often leisure-time exertion. Gene Maeroff of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching reports that the average college teacher spends about 10 hours a week in class with students, with 50 percent saying they devote less than four hours a week either to counseling students or attending meetings. About the same number say they spend less than five hours a week on research or scholarly writing. For the strenuousness of that, full-time professors at universities average $66,780.

The difference between the workdays of professors and coaches is the difference between a hammock and treadmill. The easygoing life of the professorate - not including hardworkers and especially not part-timers who get no benefits and are the stoop laborers of academia - affords ample time to grouse about coaches like Bill Snyder who labor year-round, are with their charges four and five times more than professors, have no tenure, get fired for losing seasons and live under intense media scrutiny. How often do reporters visit classrooms to describe boring lectures?

The philosophy of dedicated coaches is one with Gary Yeatts of Fairfield, Ohio, High School and USA Today's 1991 baseball coach of the year: "We really believe it is important to win but also to lose with dignity and class. I like to feel you can enjoy the kids on both sides. It's still a game we're playing. The real role is handling kids. . . . Coaching is like being a sculptor. You take what you have and turn it into something beautiful."

Not all coaches are like that - some are winning-obsessed fanatics - and many professors are also sculpting the beautiful.

Think, though, of just the quality basketball coaches of recent decades - John Wooden, Frank McGuire, John Thompson - and then imagine the legions of student-athletes whose character they helped shape. For that, coaches can't be paid enough. They trade in the priceless.

(Copyright, 1993, Washington Post Writers Group)

Colman McCarthy's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times.