Asan employee of The Daily Illini, I typically experience two responses whenever the topic of the paper’s Salary Guide comes up in conversation.

“I saw [Professor X] makes [a lot of money]. That’s outrageous!”

… and …

“Why do you guys do that every year? It’s so invasive.”

The first, it would seem, is to most be desired.

But the second response – along with all the criticisms we receive about Salary Guide’s invasiveness – are what we hope this guide precipitates.

For the highly paid employees, this should at least help them feel accountable for the thousands of dollars they receive from Illinois taxpayers and University students. But I don’t hear those complaints quite as often from the top earners – those people are used to, at least to some extent, being under some degree of public scrutiny.

For me, it’s always harder to respond to the lower-earning employees. I can’t go to a counselor earning $30,000, and tell her that I’m publishing this simply because it’s a public record. There are lots of public records – some sensitive, some not – that we don’t publish.

It’s about performing a valuable service, and by having and publishing that record, we are holding the University accountable for what it pays all of its employees, not just its top earners whose pay is regularly scrutinized. So this is a tool for you, the reader, whomever you may be. When you’re an employee who suspects you may be earning less than others performing the same job, this Salary Guide becomes a tool for that you. At a time when graduate students are negotiating a contract, when salaries and hiring are thawing out, it’s somewhat advantageous to have every one of these data points completely transparent and available to the public.

The DI first started doing the guide amid an unprecedented level of fiscal constraints in March 2010. Faculty were taking furlough days, pay was being cut, and hiring freezes were common.

So looking at the numbers this year, feel free to muse on the simple arithmetic that we’ve left up to you. After a year of enormous payoffs and golden parachutes – like former President Michael Hogan’s chief of staff, who received a lump sum of $175,000 to agree to walk away quietly – you should wonder how fair that is to those like Jeremiah Buchanan, who earns a mere fraction of that working full-time as a laboratory helper.

This guide, and its sister database, is by no means exhaustive, but we hope this helps readers understand more how money is spent on this campus.

Nathaniel can be reached at [email protected].