Call it “putting the profit into nonprofits.”
Executives at New York cultural institutions collect salaries and benefits rivaling (if not exceeding) their private-sector peers. The news from The Wall Street Journal last week is just one more example of how far modern nonprofits are from classic charities.
Museum of Modern Art chief Glenn Lowry had a base pay in 2013 of $739,620, but total compensation of $3.4 million, including bonuses of $1.6 million. MoMA’s 24 top employees average $544,000 a year.
Also getting six- and seven-figure packages are the heads of Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History, among others.
For all their claims to serve the public, these nonprofits do an awfully good job of serving the folks who run them.
The standard excuse is that high rewards are the only way to draw top talent — notably, talent that can raise big money. But if the MoMA chief were, say, a retired CEO happy to do the job for $1 a year, that’s $3.4 million the museum wouldn’t need to raise.
It’s all legal, but still unseemly. As are the vast sums paid to the CEOs of nonprofit hospitals and the presidents of countless universities. All at institutions, mind you, that benefit hugely from tax exemptions.
At times, they come off as white-shoe versions of the sleazy social-service non-profits at the center of so many New York political scandals — where the lining-your-own-pockets stuff proceeds with less care for the law.
Yes, museums, orchestras and the rest enrich the city no end. But when a nonprofit’s top brass are raking in the dough, it’s hard to see the outfit as a true charity.