Student loan

The $430,000 Law Professor

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From a New York Times article on the Massachusetts Senate race:

The Brown campaign has already tried to use Ms. Warren's Harvard salary — about $431,000 from January 2010 through December 2011, according to her disclosure form — as proof that she is an out-of-touch elitist. Ms. Warren, a longtime consumer advocate, has campaigned as a champion of the middle class and said that corporations and the wealthy unfairly get to play by a different set of rules.
On Monday, when Ms. Warren criticized a planned doubling of interest rates on student loans subsidized by the government, known as Stafford loans, the Brown campaign shot back that her annual salary as a Harvard professor would cover a year of tuition for "more than nine full-time students" there.

It's a good thing Mitt Romney now agrees with President Obama that the taxpayers should keep subsidizing those student loan rates so the professors can keep making $430,000. Amazing. If Harvard Law School and its donors want to pay the professors $430,000, it is fine with me. But it is not fine with me to take my tax dollars by force so that the tuition-paying students don't feel the full price of those salaries. It's a reverse-Robin Hood — money is being taken from taxpayers, many of whom earn less than $430,000, and given to professors earning $430,000. And, as Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, a law professor himself, notes, Professor Warren also has a 20-year interest-free loan from Harvard. Update: As many of the commenters below, who were more careful readers than I was, point out, the $431,000 appears to be for a period of two years, or slightly less, so I was overstating it in an earlier version of this post.