OK, I'll bite. I'm professor at Northwestern now, and I can tell you: salaries range immensely, across departments and individuals. In a life sciences (but not industry friendly) Dept, tenure track positions start at less than $100k, and some full professors who have been here 30-40 years still don't make much over $110. But, some superstars may make $200k/yr. These are typically people who bring in over $1m/year in grant money. In other (more industry-friendly) Depts, salaries are higher, and I'm pretty sure that's especially true at the top end, where folks bring in $10s of millions of dollars in grants (multi-million per year). All of this is dwarfed by salaries to coaches here (and many assistant coaches of the football team).
As to the idea that private donations, or revenue, pay for athletics.... Partly true, but debatable. For one thing: While I was a grad student at U Oregon (middling school, but strong in my field), I checked out their budget. That was a year that UO made a bowl game for first time in a while, for which they took in over $1m appearance fee. Guess what? They spent more than $1m on attending the game. Travel paid for boosters, administrators, and so on. The overall athletic budget lost money that year. (This was before Phil Knight starting showing UO with big bucks).
Studies have shown that only a very few big time athletic programs in Power 5 conferences actually make money. Part of that is that much of the revenue is spread across sports. And part of it is that they spend like crazy to maintain their "competitiveness" with fancy facilities (generally not available to the rest of the student population).
But what about private donations/gifts, like Nike and UO? That's right, they get a lot of money and it funds the athletic machine in a whole variety of ways. But it doesn't spread beyond athletics. That belies the standard argument that having a great football or b-ball team lifts the whole school.
The Chronicle of Higher Education once compared two Universities that were going in different directions. This was a while back, so I'm not sure, but I think it was Oklahoma (which chose to de-emphasize football and athletics, following some scandal) and Oklahoma St. But could've been other Big Eight (then) school(s). Anyway, the crux of their finding was that increased spending on and success at big-time athletics was associated with general academic decline, while the academic fortunes of the school de-emphasizing athletics improved markedly.
Now, I love athletics, and competing, and I think there is something to be gained by both participating and supporting. But, it's out of whack in D1 college system. Of course, this is much less applicable to track/cross -country, but there may be some carryover.