Quick, who is the highest-paid state employee in Indiana? Certainly not the governor, who gets a paltry $95,000; he's not even in the top 3,000 when it comes to base salary (4.5 percent or 3,601 of the state's 80,161 employees make $100,000 or more) No, not Purdue University President France Cordova; she makes $450,000 a year. Indiana Supreme Court justices get $151,328 a year. Give up?
If you've been checking out The Indianapolis Star's annual database of state employee salaries, you probably have a pretty good idea it's the basketball coach at Indiana University.
Yep, Tom Crean (below) tops this year's list with a base salary of $600,000 -- or about the same price as seven regular faculty members' salaries in IU's astronomy department.
Tom Crean's job is to win basketball games. The team's record was 6 and 25 last year. This year it was 10 and 21, and the team almost became the first one in the school's history to lose 12 in a row. State troopers average $49,281 a year and library worker $38,283.
