Might this be cultural? Most of my professors in grad school also drove rather inexpensive cars. It certainly wasn't because they couldn't afford better. They would have been thought somehow 'unserious' to buy an expensive car.
A little shocking at first, but most of the people are deserving.
http://www.kansas.gov/KanView/
Go to "Pay Rates By Job Title". It used to be only those above $100k, but was recently expanded to include everyone. I personally think it goes too far in including names. I could understand breaking it down by position, but giving names seems like a violation of privacy.
Except it is different in that _all_ employees are listed by name with their salary. A lowly Programmer Analyst II has no ability to determine anyone's salary, much less his own, yet is listed by full name.
Granted, I have worked in government and seen first hand that when leadership changes, suddenly there are a ton of new hires (all the friends of the new leader), so this kind of tool could be useful to make sure these new hires aren't paid over-generously. It seems like that duty could be handled by an internal auditing agency, which would have access to individual names, whereas the public would just see the range/mean/stddev for each position title.
I'd imagine that this policy might put some strain on the HR department because professors would compare salaries.
On the other hand, he probably pulls more than the rest of the department put together...