Thu 23 Jun 2005
Consider this claim by President Schapiro:
Most of the people who work at Williams could earn more money elsewhere.
This just isn’t true or, at least, it isn’t true in any meaningful way. For starters, most of the 2,000 or so employees at Williams are in support jobs that have close comparables elsewhere in the Berkshires. Is Morty claiming that Williams pays its custodians less than they could earn at Mass MOCA, its dining hall workers less than those at MCLA? I doubt it, and I hope not! While I don’t think that Williams should pay more than the market wage for such jobs, I can’t think of a good reason to pay less.
So, presumably, Morty is referring to faculty. But a (vast?) majority of the Williams faculty could not get a better paying job elsewhere. Indeed, most tenured faculty could not get tenure at a place anywhere near as nice (in terms of salary, benefits, teaching load, research resources) as Williams. Of course, this is by no means true for all faculty. Indeed, each year Williams loses professors — recent departures include Gary Jacobsohn, Tim Cook and Kim Bruce — who are certainly getting paid as much if not more by their new employers as they were by Williams.
I don’t intend this to be a mean-spirited post. As the link to Jacobsohn above demonstrates, I still look back fondly on the education that the Williams faculty provided to me. In fact, I think that some more money should be directed toward the faculty.
But, if you want to think clearly about how Williams is run and how it ought to be run, you need to get your facts straight. Morty certainly knows the facts. He would be better off levelling with the rest of us.
Print
• Email
| « Jewish Quotas | More Housing History » |
23 Responses to “More Money Elsewhere”
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post
If a comment you submitted does not show up, please email us at eph at ephblog dot com. Please note that commenters are required to use a valid email address when submitting comments.
Guy Creese '75 says:
I don’t doubt Morty for a second. I think many professors could earn more money elsewhere. In your post, you admit as much, where you switch the argument to “nice,” which is different from money.
While there are a lot of colleges where the working conditions and salaries are not as good as they are at Williams, if you’re a professorial superstar you can pretty much write your own ticket in terms of salary and teaching load.
Buy a few superstars, and it makes it real easy to build a great department. The University of Texas at Austin was famous in the 70s for turning up with a blank check to woo famous professors away from Harvard, etc. UT Austin was tired of being viewed as a backwater and they had tons of money, so they went and bought themselves a university.
Professors stay (or leave) for a wide range of reasons. My father, a professor of architectural history, stayed at the University of Illinois despite continually getting job offers because (1) it had a long history of being an architectural history powerhouse, (2) he got to teach the subject to students who could really use it (future practicing architects), (3) he loved the breadth and depth of the U of I’s library (3rd largest, after Harvard and Yale), (4) he had a light teaching load so he could do research and write, and (5) Champaign-Urbana was flat (he developed polio when he was five and so walked with canes, and getting around was just easier). You couldn’t have paid him enough money to teach at Williams.
Morty is well aware of the subtleties of faculty retention. Given that (1) I know his statement to be true having grown up as a faculty brat and (2) his specialty is the economics of colleges and universities, I’m going to go out on a limb and trust him on this one and not you.
June 23rd, 2005 at 7:27 amEmily '02 says:
My parents are both professors, and we’ve had many conversations about salary ranges and types of colleges/univesity. Most of the professors at Williams could be earning more and teaching less at a big research university. It’s a testament to Williams’ reputation, friendly atmosphere and beautiful setting that so many quality teachers choose it as their workplace.
On another level–check your facts before you make these sorts of claims. I know that the Chronicle of Higher Education publishes average salaries, and I’m sure they are available in other places as well. I understand bloggers can’t be held to the same standards as journalists, but any Williams first-year knows to at least do some cursory research before making an assertion like that.
June 23rd, 2005 at 7:53 amDavid says:
Guy notes that ” if you’re a professorial superstar you can pretty much write your own ticket in terms of salary and teaching load.” This is true. Now, how many “professional superstars” do you think that there are at Williams? Answer: very, very few. Indeed, outside of Jim Burns, I can’t think of anyone in political science or economics or philosophy or history (fields that I have a vague clue about) that would qualify.
This does not mean that there aren’t plenty of wonderful and amazing professors in economics and political science and philosophy and history. There are! I look forward to the day when my daughters have the chance to learn from people like Will Dudley, Mark Reinhardt and Eiko Maruko. There are even a few, David Zimmerman and Marc Lynch come immediately to mind, who are successful enough at the scholarship game that they might get better offers elsewhere. [Indeed, I would say that keeping Lynch is going to be a challenge in the years to come.]
But the idea that “most” Williams faculty could earn more money elsewhere is just ludicrous. Since specifics are always helpful, I challenge Guy to pick any non-tiny department and list the “most” faculty who he thinks are, right now, able to get higher paying job offers from other colleges. The academic job market, especially in Divisions I and II, is brutally competitive.
Note that I am restricting attention to professors continuing to work as professors. Many Division III professors have higher paying opportunities in industry. Presumably, there is a sense in which almost all Williams professors are smart enough that they could leave academia behind and go into law, banking, business, medicine or whatever. But I take Morty (and Guy) to be making a claim about the tenure/tenure-track opportunities at other colleges/universities available to Williams professors.
June 23rd, 2005 at 7:57 amDavid says:
Emily urges me to “check your facts before you make these sorts of claims.” What makes you think I haven’t? Long time readers of EphBlog will know that salaries at Williams are a topic of some interest to me. Anyway, for Emily’s education, I am happy to provide a link:
The article does provide some evidence that, in specific departments (economics and computer science), there may be issues. The article is also 5 years old, but I am fairly sure that nothing major has changed.
So, it seems beyond dispute that very few Williams faculty could get higher paying jobs at colleges like Williams. Now, it is also clear that many (but not, I’d wager, most) professors at large research universities get paid more than their counterparts at Williams. But how many Williams professors could get a tenured position at a large research university? Whatever the answer to this question, there is no way that it is “most.”
The whole notion that Williams profs as a group would be underpaid relative to their peers when, for most practical purposes, they run the College (and the College has huge resources), is just laughable.
June 23rd, 2005 at 8:24 amfrank uible says:
Strictly speaking, his statement is probably true for any person working a job anywhere in the U.S. Additionally, Morty like most CEOs is at least 20% BS. It’s a requirement.
June 23rd, 2005 at 8:40 amKim Daboo '88 says:
As a former staff member at Williams, I think it probably applies to much of the professional staff. In computing, private sector jobs pay far better.
It’s definitely not the money that keeps me working in higher ed computing.
June 23rd, 2005 at 10:29 amDavid Ramos '00 says:
I’d like to echo Kim Daboo’s comments. From what I’ve seen, the school struggles to find professional staff people who are both willing to take the pay cut that comes with a higher-ed position, and happy to relocate to the Berkshires. Williams hires good people into its salaried positions – but searches take a long time.
June 23rd, 2005 at 10:35 amRichard Dunn says:
It is difficult to compare the University of Wisconsin with Williams, but maybe some of this will be helpful.
June 23rd, 2005 at 12:50 pmThe starting salary, i.e. just out of a grad program, here at Wisconsin is in the neighborhood of 85,000. Amoung the full professors, the salary ranges from 120,000 to over 200,000. The requisite to get this salary is obviously tenure. Before we can compare the salary of econ professors at Williams and those here, it might seem that we have to ask the question, “Could a Williams professor get tenured at Wisconsin?” This seems to be the question Dave is asking.
I think it is the wrong question, but I will answer it anyway. Peter Pedroni was a professor at Indiana, Steve Sheppard was a professor at Virginia Tech, Peter Montiel has worked extensively with the IMF, Jon Bakija has a well-regarding book “Taxing Ourselves.” Do I think these folks could get a tenured position at Wisconsin?
Maybe, which goes to highlight the problem with the question.
To get tenured, you need to publish. Had Ralph Bradburd taken a position at a research university, I have no doubt in my mind that he would make much more money today than he does at Williams. The same is true for Gordon Whinston, Henry Bruton, David Zimmerman, Doug Gollin. If the young professors we have in the department went someplace else out of grad school with a lighter teaching load, I also think that 20 or 30 years down the line, they would have made more money. And this all ignores how much they would make working at the UN, State Department, DOJ, Treasury, IMF, WB, IBS, Bell Labs, etc.
The problem is endogeniety. You come to Williams recognizing the non-pecuniary benefits of the place. That means you accept at the very beginning, or very close to it, that what you must do at Williams will disrupt your research, and how much you can make 10 or 20 years down the line. Asking whether any econ prof today could make more in another position is only a piece of the decision so any analysis comparing salaries is incomplete and potentially misleading.
In general, with any economic problem, causation runs both ways, and you can only ignore it at your peril.
David says:
I agree with most of what Richard says here, although I hope to return to the question of the Econ department specifically in a later post. Perhaps we can interpret Morty’s statement in two ways.
1) “If most professors at Williams now had made different choices earlier in life — either by going into non-academic fields or by taking academic jobs at research universities — they would be making more money today.”
2) “Most professors at Williams now have the opportunity now to take higher paying academic jobs elsewhere.”
The second statement is clearly false and is also, I think, the way that almost all readers of the Alumni Review would have interpreted Morty’s claim. I am ready to believe that the first statement is true (especially for people like Ralph Bradburd), but it isn’t the point at issue.
Note that I made no claims about causation running one way or the other or both. I am making an empirical claim about the job openings actually available to “most” Williams professors right now.
June 23rd, 2005 at 2:21 pm(d)avid says:
Let’s see according to the AAUP in the March-April 2003 issue of Academe, the average salaries for Williams professors were:
Full: $106K
Associate: $76K
Assistant: $61K
According to the same issue, here is the average salary for other baccalaureate granting institutions in New England:
Full: $86K
Associate: $62K
Assistant: $51K
Of course, this is averaging across well endowed schools (like Amherst) and not so well endowed schools (like Albertus Magnus).
However, if you look at full professors in private PhD granting Universities, Williams professors fall a little short:
Full: $118K
Associate: $77K
Assistant: $67K
I’m guessing the natural sciences (and perhaps economics) is driving the full professorship salaries. It is possible Morty’s claim rests on a boast that most Williams professors could make full professor at well endowed private PhD granting universities. Possible, but given the added teaching demands at Williams, probably doesn’t apply to everyone.
More likely, is that the professors could make more in the private sector. And I’m not talking making differet decisions earlier in life. Companies will pay good salaries to smart people who they think can be trained to perform high skill tasks. Pretty much everyone learns on the job, so the lack of experience isn’t paramount. Instead, the companies are taking the PhD AND landing a good gig at a top school as a signal for ability. These wouldn’t be people dropping out because they couldn’t hack it, but because the lifestyle didn’t agree with them for one reason or another. Happens all the time in the natural sciences, but is not unheard of in other fields such as English or History. Writing and critical thinking skills are always in demand.
Kind of a pointless to nitpick Morty’s comment, though. He was just trying to come up with a rhetorical way of expressing the commitment to teaching. The vast majority of professors at Williams (and other liberal arts schools) are there because they love teaching, the subject matter, and the life of inquiry. They are well compensated, but chose an academic career for non-monetary reasons.
June 23rd, 2005 at 3:43 pmRichard Dunn says:
First, a surprising moment when Dave and I agree. My endogeniety warning was general, not directed at Dave’s post per se, and indeed, that wasn’t Dave’s question in the first place. I just thought it might be helpful in thinking about the problem more generally.
Maybe Dave was holding this until a later post, but in economics (probably computer science, as well), Morty is most likely correct, given the outside options available to those with such a background in government, business, and finance.
I’m not sure what the pay is as a researcher at a private institution for the sciences, so I won’t speculate, but I’ll put it on the table that our sciences profs could do better as well. Again, without knowing for sure, the teaching load at Williams must cut into their research time, which in turn limits the amount they receive in grant money, which in turn limits how attractive they are to big universities and research institutes (endogeneity again).
As I write, it seems that our math and art history departments would happily be swiped by a larger research university, so maybe they fit exactly the group that Morty is talking about.
The theatre folks, given their experience are probably exportable as well, and at higher cost.
I believe there is a third option that Dave neglected, “are we talking about higher wages as professors, or just higher wages.” Morty is vague enough that in running through the list of departments, the following have at least a 50-50 chance of falling into the “could get SOME job that paid more.”
Economics
Math
Comp Sci
Biology
Chemistry
Physics
Theatre
Art History
It seems possible that these make up about half the professorships at the college. I’m not invested in this argument, but it seems at least feasible that Morty is correct once we do throw in our bigger names from other departments: Darrow, Just, Bell, Fix, Jim Shepard, Raab, etc (no offense to those left out).
June 23rd, 2005 at 3:45 pmRichard Dunn says:
I guess dave and I were writing at the same time…much better than working on a dissertation I guess.
June 23rd, 2005 at 3:46 pmAnonymous says:
You’re all missing the point. It’s not necessarily that professors could get higher paying jobs at other colleges, but that they could get higher paying jobs in other fields. If they had achieved the same level of education and gotten a J.D. or an M.D. instead of a P.h.D., they’d be making tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars more elsewhere.
Think of a chemistry professor. If he went to work at Pfizer instead of Billsville U, he would be rolling in dough.
June 23rd, 2005 at 3:58 pmhwc says:
Here is a link to a sortable search engine database published by the Chronicle of Higher Education of average prof. salaries for the 2004-2005 academic year at 4-year baccalaureate colleges.
This link is the same thing, but including all colleges and universities.
Note, that average salaries at undergrad colleges and universities are not directly comparable. The university averages are greatly increased by professional school salaries, especially by superstars in the Law, Biz, Med, and research fields that have little or nothing to do with teaching undergrads. Think Alan Dershowitz. Also, many of the high priced professors are also tasked with finding the grant funding for their own research positions.
It’s important to keep in mind that a tenured faculty position at a really top LAC is a fantastic life-long gig, particularly one that offers a paid sabbatical for every three years of teaching.
Finally, the average for full professors at comparable colleges is largely dependent on the specific age distribution of the faculty. A college that had a bevy of tenured profs nearing retirement age would have a higher average than a college that had just had that same bevy retire.
June 23rd, 2005 at 3:59 pm(d)avid says:
HWC, do you think the age distribution is true with wage creep? In many institutions, incoming faculty often make nearly as much as older faculty who stopped publishing years ago. Maybe LAC’s have a better system of ensuring that senior faculty members make much more than junior faculty members (since publications aren’t as critical to the job description).
June 23rd, 2005 at 5:47 pmhwc says:
To be honest, I only really pay attention to the LACs. All of those (Williams, Swarthmore, etc.) appear to have rigidly fixed numbers of tenure track faculty positions. Adding a new tenure track position is a big deal. So when a Lane Faison or a Don Gifford or a McPherson retires, the slot is almost always filled from within. It’s interesting to see so many of the senior full professor slots at Williams now filled by the young whipper-snapper assistant profs when I was there — some of whom weren’t really that exciting at that stage of their careers.
IMO, Morty is telling the truth when he says that profs could possibly make more elsewhere. But, the part he is not being totally forthcoming about is the degree to which young PhDs would KILL to land a tenure track position at a Williams or a Swarthmore. It’s a great gig if you enjoy teaching.
I could handle living in Williamstown or Swarthmore. Great environmnent. Good students. Relatively little of the typical academic politics and pressure to generate revenue. Alas, it is virtually impossible to land those jobs.
June 23rd, 2005 at 6:08 pmRichard Dunn says:
I have to agree with dave on this one. The starting salary at Wisconsin has increased by almost 20,000 over the past 5 years. To snag a top recruit requires a lot of money, and almost brings their starting salaries to the level of a tenured prof who has been here quite a while. So, it isnt a matter of filling tenured positions from inside, its that first year hires are inching closer to salaries of their already tenured colleagues.
As for taking a position at Williams or Swarthmore, I think you overstate the desire for such a job. These jobs are pressure cookers come tenure time because you have to excel at both research and teaching. Both take time, and it is a rare occurance to find those who succede at both. Williams had a pretty poor tenure history in econ, and indeed, some departments dissuade students from taking these type of positions. In Econ, there are always jobs, and you can move into the private sector or move down a tier in academe. If a prof is rejected for tenure in other fields (English, for instance) you are essentially writing their professional death certificate. High reward, but high risk.
June 23rd, 2005 at 7:34 pmhwc says:
The average pay this past year at UWisc was $64k for an Assistant Prof., $74k for an Associate Prof. and $98k for a Full Prof.
The assistant level is the same as Williams. The others are below the pay scales at Williams.
When looking at these pay scales, factor in benefits, too. I don’t know Williams’ policy, but Swarthmore’s is a full-salary semester sabatical for every six semesters of teaching. I assume Williams has a similar policy.
June 23rd, 2005 at 10:46 pmKen Thomas '93 says:
First, I think there’s some lingering confusion about whether MS was referring to compensation of faculty, of professional staff, or of general staff positions. Each area is different and deserves separate consideration. During my time at Williams, Williams paid dining and custodial staff 25-35% less than comparable positions in Amherst/Northhampton, and less than half the Boston/Cambridge area, not considering benefits. There are underlying issues of social responsibility here, which have been raised by MS and others, and Williams’ responsibility to the region. As well, over the past century, I would claim Williams has suffered from the increasing economic and social isolation of the Berkshires, and out of its own interest should be participating in a regional development strategy.
But as this thread has focused on professorial salaries, I’ll follow that lead. My first suggestion is that we really need some way of comparing Williams professors, and their career paths and options, with their equivalent peers elsewhere. Depite “pressure to publish” and tenure-related problems, my quick instinct is that most Williams professors are getting very good compensation– even if you take into account the higher teaching load at Williams. And certainly several beginning Williams professors have said that to me over the years.
I also do not believe that the high-salary examples given here reflect the overall reality of academia very well. Certainly there are “superstar” positions for well-known academics (of which Mark Taylor has some interesting discussion). But the general trend in academia over the past 15-20 years has been to lower the number of tenure-track positions, offering generous “golden parachute” packages for those who would depart them early, and to transfer teaching loads to lecturer, non-tenure-track associate, and similar positions. This is relatively well-covered and bemoaned in the Chronicle of Higher Education, among other places.
I have discussed this with several university presidents in the mid-South and elsewhere, all of whom bemoan the state of affairs, and wish as much as I that a clear economic alternative was available. The net effect is that education is an increasingly impoverished profession, especially in the first post-doc years. This is roughly true across fields– and it is interesting to see chemistry mentioned, as most chem Ph.D.s (in academia or industry) can expect less than $30K/yr in the first post-Ph.D. years if they move to “post-doc” positions. (One high-school friend is a Ph.D. running a pharmaceutical start-up here at WKU and gives me a regular dose of the profession; chem production, like so much else, is far too internationally competitive to regularly yield the salaries mentioned here).
As background, I should mention the long-term and enormous decrease in national support for education. Writers such as Gore Vidal have long questioned whether we educate Americans at all, and I might certainly wonder whether much education occurs outside the narrow band of institutions such as Williams.
Back to salary, to give an anecdote in academia, a professor whom I taught under at Berkeley was a Ph.D-ed lecturer, about five years my senior. Counting benefits, he was paid notably over a thousand dollars less than I — not to mention that I had other sources of support, including tech consulting. He later took an tenure-track position at a midwestern university, beginning under $40K.
The general trend at Berkeley was therefore to delay awarding Ph.Ds until the student had acquired a position, because pay as a student “Graduate Assistant” instructor was superior to that of a lecturer. This was certainly also one reason that Berkeley had a very high number of grad students who had been there more than 10 years.
Certainly, such salary considerations are subject to a wide amount of variance when you consider multiple disciple and the possibilities of certain disciplines in industry– at the time I left Berkeley to found a start-up, minimum Bay-Area salary for an administative assistant was $65K. But that, as well as the once-high demand for comp-sci graduates, has changed dramatically.
Regardless, generally, if a highly talented person wishes to follow the direct path of their academic training, their salary options are highly limited. One can of course be creative in finding employment, but it is hardly the norm, and grad departments not the best place to gain industry-specific knowledge about career-building. Moreover, outside a few departments in the sciences etc., the mere mention of a career outside the University is taboo (and legitimate standing in the academic community is directly linked to your appearance as an academic dedicated to pursuing an academic career).
Mark Taylor (and his written comments on setting up GEN) is much in my mind here– beginning with his comments that academia is a different culture which simply doesn’t see the alternate world of the modern workplace. To me this is an incredible failing of academia, and (in the Humanities alone) more fluid relationships with the work world would benefit both sides. In PR and advertizing, everyone I’ve worked with recognizes the extreme potential value of humanities training– some firms intentionally locate near campuses– and most knowledge workers would jump at the chance to teach part-time and be supported by their employer. In fact I am sure most firms would welcome formalized relations with academia.
RE: “star salaries,” the net effect has been to lower economic opportunities for academics, dramatically. Mark Taylor started advising his students NOT to go to graduate school three years after I graduated, a position he re-iterated the last time I dropped through Billsville. The MLA has declared yearly for over 10 years that grad departments should dramatically lower their admissions due to lack of post-grad positions. The situation is truly grim: my department, considered one of the best in the nation, placed under ten candidates (of over 100) in the six years I was there. This is somewhat of a mark of how Berkeley works– departments and professors at Wisconson and Urbana-Champaign will find their acolytes jobs– but that is also hardly the norm.
In most tech areas, the overwhelming sense I get from professionals is that we are still in a very difficult marketplace, just as my chemistry associates keep telling me. I will also mention the tremendous negative effect of the H1B visa program in this regard, though H1Bs are a different issue.
In my position as an entrepreneur, all the above seems a remarkable sub-optimized state of affairs. Both industry– and a wide variety of educational institutions– need capable “knowledge workers” and a variety of skills which are very close (but not the same) as what grad departments produce. This is also a direct result of what (partially in response to reading Mark Taylor) I’ve come to call the “Ivory Cave” of academia. Most of the corporations and practical endeavors I’ve worked with desperately need “good people”– responsible hard-workers who can absorb knowledge, find solutions and get things done, but academia itself approaches a closed system wholly blind to these needs.
But “good,” intelligent, creative, well-trained people is exactly what Williams and the liberal arts produce; they are what grad departments are best able to produce.
But within academic departments (and academic career counseling) there seems to be a near-total disconnect between activity and the realities of the global workplace, if not a downright hostility to “practical” endeavors. More than one department head has told me that the fundamental assumption of academic departments is they are training people to be academics– professors– and not people who will enter (or, more productively, cross in-and-out of) industry, government and service. At Berkeley, friends in political science who wanted to move to into government or think tanks often commented that they simply couldn’t say this in front of faculty. This leads to a situation where academia more-or-less totally ignores the reality of market needs, the value of knowledge, or how to connect learning to challenges and tasks.
For my part, I believe that students need a realistic image of the global workplace beginning day one of college– in the Kentucky school system, I’ve been advocating that in primary school, which is another challenge. I also believe we are shortchanging both those students and our future if we do not do this.
For years, Mark Taylor has also been a quiet advocate of the idea that colleges should take some responsibility for the future econimic well-being of their students– I believe he planted a few of these thoughts in my head around ’91. For Williams and other LACs, I’ve thought for some time that “Career Counseling” must offer the same perspective, guidance and career-path-mentoring that is offered by professional (one-to-one) career counselors– in short, a realitic assessment of one’s skills, available development paths and market needs. This could well begin with handing every frosh a copy of Richard Florida’s _The Rise of the Creative Class_ and entry discussions.
In the end, aligning students’ efforts and perspectives with the realities of the workplace and telling them to PLAN NOW would simply make them better at developing their lifetime skills– marketable or not– better able to apply the lessons of a place like Williams to our world’s challenges.
I know that a lot of academics might call that “corruption,” but they are simply wrong. Learning is “for life,” and you only master your only delusions by sitting in an Ivory Cave and talking about the shadows on the inside walls. Changes such as the above are desperately needed, and as likely to improve the quality of academic thought as it is to further the moral purposes of the university and “save” our world. And it is hardly inappropriate to close this by mentioning the enormous challenges which face our world– in goverance– corporate, academic, and national; in energy; in global security; in economic systems and the path of globalization; etc. It has always been places like Williams who have produced the leaders who solve such problems.
June 23rd, 2005 at 11:28 pmfrank uible says:
David: The intimately interested really came out of the woodwork on this question. Previously I hadn’t appreciated how numerous and apparently widely spread (geographically and otherwise) this ordinarily passive general segment of your viewership might be. They hopped on this item like a careerist on a job opportunity. But as the street people say, “money talks, bull shit walks”.
June 24th, 2005 at 5:08 amGuy Creese '75 says:
Ken Thomas’thoughtful and well-informed post highlights the changing nature of academic compensation. For a long time, it was an unwritten rule that faculty had to be independently wealthy, both to afford the necessary degrees, and then to live on the poverty salaries.
This began to change in the late 60s. All of a sudden, teaching in a genteel setting seemed a hell of a great lifestyle choice compared to getting shot at in Vietnam. Since being a professional student earned you a deferment, students streamed into the teaching profession. Their desire to teach nicely mapped to an increased need for teachers, as college enrollments skyrocketed due to a culture that began to regard a college degree as a “requirement.”
Accordingly, universities entered a several decade boomtime of open positions and steadily increasing salaries. This era is now gone, especially at public universities hit with budget cuts caused by decreased state revenues and a general legislative desire to hurt these “bastions of liberalism.”
In fact, I have heard Morty allude to this issue, and note that the college has picked up some great professors who wouldn’t have left their positions otherwise but were tired of being under siege at their previous universities. In short, due to the need to staff the tutorial program, Williams is hiring when the market is down.
I agree with Ken’s assertion that the academic marketplace is highly dysfunctional; but at least Williams seems to be using such dysfunction to its advantage.
June 24th, 2005 at 7:09 amAnonymous says:
Let’s not forget the biggest benefit of them all. Tuition. All College employees from custodians to the all-star profs receive money up to half of Williams’ tuition to pay the tuition for up to four children at ANY four-year college in the United States.
If all four children went to a pricey Ivy or NESCAC, that would amount to more than $80,000 in compensation each year for four years. If the children decided to go to UMASS, the Williams tuition rebate would cover all university expenses.
So when you say that Williams’ custodians are underpaid compared to those at MASSMoCA, don’t forget to factor in that hunk of change. My custodian told me once that she had to work at Williams for that reason alone. Most colleges don’t come close to that sort of deal.
June 26th, 2005 at 9:15 pmspringstreets says:
Whatever the reason a number of faculty are leaving the college soon, at least according to rumors on Spring Street. They are: Mark Taylor, Goethals, Kassin, Kotchen, Love and Stamelman.
June 27th, 2005 at 11:18 am