You recently reviewed Morton Schapiro’s first four years as Northwestern president.
 He’s a distinguished academic administrator with many paradoxes. He 
earns $1.2 million a year — the 17th highest-paid private, nonprofit
 university president in the United States — but refuses to support a living wage 
for NU employees. Morty wrote an article comparing elite university
 tuition fees with the cost of jailing California convicts. But there’s
 a big difference. Convicts don’t have to pay off huge loans when they 
leave prison. NU students do when they graduate. Morty recently told
 parents that no NU student will graduate with a debt higher than
 $24,000. Big deal. That’s like St. Augustine saying: “Lord make me 
chaste, but not yet.” Twenty-four thousand dollars is a huge burden for graduates in low
-paying careers like journalism. Bankrate.com, a financial website,
 calculates that it takes an average of 32 years for journalism grads 
to pay off their student loans. That’s indentured servitude, but 
there’s an easy fix. NU can do what 75 other universities and colleges 
do: Use its endowment to convert student loans into paid grants. If
 North Carolina’s Davidson College, with a $500 million endowment, can 
accomplish this, then so can NU, whose endowment is bigger than
 Anthony Weiner’s.

Morty also spoke about his busy travel schedule, including seven months of
the past four years spent overseas. Having a well-stamped passport is not 
a good credential. His mission is to run an elite and expensive
 university, not compile frequent flyer miles. Maybe if he spent more 
time in Evanston, he’d be more aware of students’ problems and could
 help solve them.

Richard Reif is a board member of the Medill Club of Greater New York and a retired McGraw-Hill staff writer.