 "Kannan Ramaswamy")
Kannan Ramaswamy, a global strategy professor with Thunderbird School of Global Management, is among the top-paid professors in the US. His salary in 2011 was $700,096, even more than the then Thunderbird President Angel Cabrera’s $ 584,789. Cabrera left Thunderbird in July 2012.
His salary has raised controversy in the US, after the school decided to sell its Arizona campus to a for-profit organisation. The decision to sell the campus has kicked up a storm with two board members resigning and 2,000 of the school’s alumni signing a petition contending that agreement with Laureate Education Inc. would "cheapen the value of the degree”.
MIT President Susan Hockfield was paid slightly over one million dollars in 2011 (the first for any MIT President) including retirement and other deferred compensation and Harvard’s President was paid $875,331. There are around 40,000 T-Birds, as the school's alumni are known, are spread across 147 countries. They include such prominent executives like BP (BP) CEO Robert Dudley and former Morgan Stanley (MS) International Chairman Walid Chammath.
According to the Thunderbird website, Ramaswamy is an MBA from the University of Madras in India; and a BS in physics from the University of Madras. Ramaswamy is known for his expertise on global strategy, emerging markets – including India and South Asia, the energy sector, corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions and global management. Ramaswamy is now a US citizen.
US media has been critical of the school's high salaries in which over 10 people account of over Rs 4 million despite the school not garnering enough endowments or grants. In fact, the school has 24 million in debt and made a loss of $4 million in 2012. The number of students for full-time MBA has fallen from over 1,500 in 1990 to 380. And the placement statistics have also been spectacular. Some 76 per cent of Thunderbird's class of 2012 were without jobs at commencement, reported Fortune.
About Ramaswamy's salary, the Fortune is quite harsh: “It's not unusual for a world-class faculty to be paid so generously, but the highest paid business school professors tend to be widely known and publicly visible figures at universities that can afford them, not at a troubled school that has been in a long-term fight for survival."
Another website, Poets & Quants is ever harsher. “The highest paid professor at the Thunderbird makes more than the dean of the Harvard Business School. Or his boss. Or, for that matter, President Obama. Yet, he is little known outside his Glendale, Arizona-based school, not widely quoted in the media, nor broadly recognised as an expert in his field. He doesn’t even make the list of the top 50 business thinkers in the world.”
Another website, Poets & Quants is ever harsher. “The highest paid professor at the Thunderbird makes more than the dean of the Harvard Business School. Or his boss. Or, for that matter, President Obama. Yet, he is little known outside his Glendale, Arizona-based school, not widely quoted in the media, nor broadly recognised as an expert in his field. He doesn’t even make the list of the top 50 business thinkers in the world.”
The site goes on to add ‘He is hardly alone in getting big pay at Thunderbird. In fact, the highest paid ten professors alone in fiscal 2011 were paid some $4.3 million, more than the $4 million deficit reported by the school, red ink that forced it into a highly controversial partnership with for-profit educational provider Laureate Education.’
