Special report: Why do COS theater professors make so much more than their colleagues across the state?

By Donald Munro

An investigation led by Doug Hoagland (with me in a supporting role) is the latest installment of watchdog journalism from The Munro Review. James McDonnell, who teaches costuming, makeup, and directs productions at Visalia’s College of the Sequoias, has been COS’s highest-paid employee in seven of the past 12 years, according to Transparent California, a public salary database. Chris Mangels, who also directs and teaches, ranks third on the college’s payroll for 2023 behind McDonnell and Superintendent/President Brent Calvin. (Salary figures for 2024 are not yet available.) According to Transparent California, McDonnell took home $367,152 in 2023. With benefits included, his compensation since 2012 totaled $3.6 million. During the same period, Mangels earned $2 million in total pay, including a reported $314,272 in 2023. With benefits, he received $2.6 million.

The startling salaries aren’t the result of fraud or hidden bonuses but contract provisions that allow the two instructors to teach twice the standard course load — collecting extra pay for every extra course, including popular film appreciation courses that attract hundreds of students. McDonnell and Mangels have legally turned this workload loophole into paychecks that some experts say are unheard of in American theater education, all funded for years by local taxpayers.

McDonnell and Mangels appear on track to keep earning large paychecks in the 2025-26 academic year, which begins on Aug. 11.

I built a special page to present this story. One of the quirks of WordPress is that people who are signed up for email notifications for new posts don’t receive those notifications for pages, so I’m sending out this additional post to alert those subscribers. Click here to read the scrupulously reported complete story, which runs 4,000 words. (There’s also a shorter summary version available for those who don’t have the time to read a magazine-length piece.)

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