When General David Petraeus begins his stint as adjunct professor at a New York university later this year the former CIA Director will be paid $150,000 annually - about six times the salary of a first-time teacher without access to state secrets.
In April of this year the City University of New York announced that Petraeus would teach public policy at Macaulay Honors College, located in Manhattan. In a statement released at the time Petraeus said he was excited to lead a seminar “that examines the developments that could position the United States – and our North American partners – to lead the world out of the current global economic slowdown.”
Petraeus, who will deliver two lectures through the semester and be helped by a group of graduate students who will, do “course research, administration, and grading,” will earn a paycheck in the six-figure range. He was originally slated to earn $200,000, according to Gawker, but took a pay cut and claimed he will donate some of the proceeds to unspecified “veterans’ organizations.”
Petraeus, 60, was hailed for orchestrating the American counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq before US President Barack Obama named him CIA Director in September 2011.
It was in the summer of 2012 when Jill Kelley, a Tampa, Florida socialite and friend of Petraeus family told the FBI she had been receiving threatening emails sent anonymously. The Bureau traced the messages to Paula Broadwell, Petraeus’ biographer, and soon discovered that Petraeus and Broadwell began having an affair sometime in 2011, a relationship that ended in the summer of 2012 with a dejected Broadwell reportedly suspecting Jill Kelley as Petraeus’ new mistress.
President Obama accepted Petraeus’ resignation on November 9, 2012. The Associated Press reported that, to avoid detection, the couple had shared a Gmail account, saving messages for each other in a draft folder without ever sending them in order to communicate.
Along with teaching at CUNY, the former four-star general is scheduled to begin teaching part-time and mentor veterans at the University of Southern California.
CUNY is a majority publicly funded collegiate system with over 500,000 students enrolled throughout the New York City area. Sixty-two per cent of the university’s budget, according to Baruch College, comes directly from city and state tax dollars. After five straight years of budget cuts students, professors and community members successfully lobbied for an additional one billion state dollars for the 2013-2014 academic year, although it was unclear how General Petraeus' salary factors into those plans.
Regarding Petraeus’ new post, the CUNY Director of Communications told Gawker that “the University is in the process on fundraising for this position.”