A Sunday exposé in the Seattle Times names Washington State U. vice president of business and finances as the face of an unethical exploitation of retirement laws occurring throughout the state. For the last seven years, Greg Royer has been collecting both a $304,000 salary and a $105,000 retirement pension simultaneously, while presiding over some of the greatest budget cuts WSU has ever seen.

We are graduating into the depleted job market of our unstable economy with massive student debt. We cannot allow our investment in higher education to be polluted by the hidden agendas of university staff. As students, we entered college trusting that our education would be useful. The university is making a huge mistake, sacrificing the trust of their students for financial gain.

While WSU President Elson S. Floyd was not responsible for permitting Royer’s retire and rehire, his response to the situation was untimely and seemed prompted solely by media inquiries. He announced in April that the university would stop rehiring retirees without an open and competitive job search, but Royer did not announce leave from his position until this week — after the Times article was published.

From an administrative standpoint, this loophole saves the university the high cost of a job search, but from a student perspective, Royer’s double dipping means we will be indebted to him for cutting the quality of our education. We will have to pay both as students managing a financially strangled university education, and as taxpayers to a pension plan currently underfunded by an estimated $4 billion, according to the Times.

The situation reeks of irony — the man overseeing our budget cuts has so horribly abused the financial trust of the students he represents, and he is not alone. The Times identified 58 state employees who retired and were rehired within three months.

This exploitation of financial power seems reminiscent of the Wall Street banking crisis — another cost that will fall to current students and future taxpayers. We must take control of our institution — the only institution that promises to prepare us to break patterns that have left us with this pile of national and global issues — before it becomes too big to fail.