Last June UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin received $150,000 just for hanging around. She was scheduled to get another $250,000 had she stayed into June of this year, but instead she’s leaving for Columbia University. Her last day at the UW will be sometime around commencement in May.

By most accounts Mnookin did a good job. Enrollment, fundraising and state government financial support are up. The Madison campus has returned to the top five universities for research grants — at least before Donald Trump’s war on science turned all that upside down.

And she found a way to navigate a hostile Republican Legislature. When she made her announcement, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos had warm words for her and wished her well in her new post. Related to that, and something that didn’t go unnoticed at Columbia, she handled the protests following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent campus protests against the Israeli response more effectively than chancellors at a lot of other places.

In short, she hasn’t just been a good academic leader; she’s a good politician, and that has become a necessary qualification for the leader of any university anywhere.

So I don’t have a problem with her million-dollar salary here or the much higher pay she’ll receive in New York. But I do think the retention bonuses were a bad idea. Clearly, they didn’t retain her. If it was all about the money, that $250,000 pales in comparison to the millions more she’ll receive in her new job. And of course, it’s not all about money. The substantial prestige of the Madison campus can’t compare to that of an Ivy League school.

The whole idea that someone at that level will stick even for a few hundred thousand dollars is questionable at best. Moreover, the bonuses are essentially an automatic pay increase since there is no standard for her performance beyond an undefined requirement that it has been “satisfactory.”

In fact, what if her performance had been middling or even pretty bad? Case in point is Badgers football coach Luke Fickell. He gets an automatic $100,000 pay boost every year, regardless of how his teams perform and his teams have gotten worse each of his three years on the job. Fickell’s increase isn’t called a retention bonus, but for all intents and purposes it’s the same thing.

And Fickell’s immediate boss, Athletic Director Chris McIntosh, has his own automatic pay increase of $50,000. Every year. Regardless of performance. And that was a contract “negotiated” by Mnookin when she inexplicably extended McIntosh’s contract after Fickell’s first disappointing season and after a string of poorly handled decisions that have left long-time fans perplexed and annoyed.

And don’t get me started on the golden parachutes enjoyed by both big time college coaches and corporate CEOs who get richly rewarded even when they drive their teams and their companies into the ground. A few years ago Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher was paid $77 million just to walk away. He holds the NCAA record for highly compensated failure.

Most of us live in a world where free market rules generally apply. We do well in our jobs and we get rewarded. We do poorly, we don't get that raise or that promotion and we may even find ourselves on the street with a small severance if we’re lucky.

The irony is that the people at the very top — who have more to say about the success or failure of organizations, often with thousands of workers beneath them — are immune from experiencing the downsides of their own failures.

I hope the Regents can find a new chancellor as effective as Mnookin has been. But the evidence shows that they don’t need to pay them a bonus unrelated to their performance. If they’re really good we’ll probably lose them anyway and if they’re so-so they haven’t earned it.

Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.