How much does your president make?

Give credit to the Hamilton Spectator. And its investigations editor, Steve Buist. The newspaper has sparked a paradigm shift in university transparency — at several southern Ontario schools, anyway.

Last week, McMaster University finally acquiesced to a freedom-of-information request filed nearly two years ago by the Spectator, and released Mac President Peter George’s contract. The Spec published the details of George’s employment agreement with his university—and then the floodgates flew open. It turns out that the Spec had requested the contracts of quite a few other university presidents—and after Mac decided to go public (having been ordered to do so by the provincial information commission, note), so did those other universities.

Today, the paper published the fruits of its labour on its website, making available the contracts of:

• Peter George of McMaster University
• Paul Davenport of the University of Western Ontario
• Max Blouw of Wilfrid Laurier University
• David Naylor of the University of Toronto
• Sheldon Levy of Ryerson University
• Alan Wildeman of the University of Windsor
• Mamdouh Shoukri of York University
• Alastair Summerlee of the University of Guelph