It is not about basing his salary on that of the cleaners. It is about having a limit on the range of salaries in the organization and the cleaners happen to have the lowest there. The idea is that the extra profits should be shared by all the employees and not collected by the top executives.
As to why they wouldn't just leave, well let them. You could hire better faculty members and you will have a sparkly clean university that can attract better students. Your research/teaching statistics go up and you can pick more funding. At some point other universities will follow your example and administrator salaries will normalize.
Not going to happen though .... more likely they will outsource the cleaning so that the president can earn 10x the salary of the IT stuff. Then they will probably outsource IT as well ...
As to why they wouldn't just leave, well let them. You could hire better faculty members and you will have a sparkly clean university that can attract better students. Your research/teaching statistics go up and you can pick more funding. At some point other universities will follow your example and administrator salaries will normalize.
Not going to happen though .... more likely they will outsource the cleaning so that the president can earn 10x the salary of the IT stuff. Then they will probably outsource IT as well ...