Across campus, students at Stevens turned to various social outlets — Facebook, Instagram, Slack — to discuss an article recently published in The Stute, which detailed the general financial conduct of the university in 2016. The article raised many questions and concerns for students, prompting them to wonder if the high price of tuition is worth the cost.
A primary point of contention for students was President Nariman Farvardin’s earnings. In 2016, Farvardin earned “$734,013 in base pay as well as several other forms of compensation, such as an $827,800 bonus,” wrote Eric Londres of The Stute. The article also found that other top administrators each made more than $500,000 and that Stevens invested over $27 million in the Caribbean and Central American regions.
Reactions to this news from students ranged from shock to outrage to ambivalence.
“I was very frustrated. The numbers are a little outrageous,” wrote Lucas Gallo, a fourth-year student and President of the Student Government Association (SGA), in a statement to The Stute. “Salaries as high as they were in that report are a little ridiculous for any job, but knowing that so many students are very financially burdened by coming to this university, it hurts even more.”
Marianna Fleming, a fourth-year student and SGA Vice President for Academic Affairs, posted various screenshots of The Stute article onto her Instagram Story (a feature on Instagram that allows a user to post a temporary photo in a slideshow-like format). In these screenshots, Fleming highlighted different sections, overlaying her own questions — “Are there no potential students in all of the Caribbean and South America?” — and underlined points that concerned her.
“I was surprised to see that they were only recruiting from certain regions and I’d be interested as to why that is,” Fleming told The Stute.
Emily Raque, a fifth-year student, shared The Stute article on her Facebook feed and thanked the article’s author for “looking through these documents to let the greater Stevens community know just what our school spends money on.”
Raque was concerned with the undescribed investments in the Caribbean and Central American region and was not surprised that Farvardin’s salary is high, she told The Stute. “But I still think [Farvardin’s salary] is excessive,” she added, “especially when it puts him in the top ten paid college presidents, of both public and private colleges.”
A second-year student, Jill Roumbanis, said, “It’s ridiculous to know how much Farvardin made. I don’t even know what he does.”
Some students casually mocked the findings.
One first-year student, Karter Singh, memed a portion of Stevens’ tax documents in the “Stevens Institute of Technology Class of 2022” Facebook group (an online discussion board used by students to advertise campus events and make general comments about Stevens). The post, which earned over 400 percent more reactions than other posts in the Facebook group, contained two items — (1) an excerpt of The Stute article detailing the $27 million investments in the Caribbean and Central American regions, and (2) a screenshot of Wagner Moura portraying Pablo Escobar in the Netflix series, Narcos, surrounded by bricks of cocaine.
Singh’s facetious suggestion: perhaps the money invested by Stevens in the Caribbean and Central American regions is used to purchase an extraordinary amount of coke.
The Facebook post was strictly satirical, Singh told The Stute. “Although I joked about Stevens funding a now-dead Pablo Escobar, I think [investing in this region] is a safe bet and one of which I would do myself,” Singh said. “I do not believe Stevens is running an international cocaine business.”
Eric Londres, the author of the article, received “widespread and almost universally positive” praise, he said. “I received many texts and comments from people I barely knew thanking me for writing it. It started a long conversation in my year’s group chat about it,” Londres said. “People, in general, were concerned with the amount of money the administration was making and the general lack of transparency with the higher-ups.”
Londres said he plans to continue looking further into questions raised by this article.
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