Stargazing

YOU COULD CALL Harvard physicist Sheldon Glashow a million-dollar baby in a five-and-ten cent store.

Glashow, the Higgins Professor of Physics, has been sedulously wooed this fall by Texas A&M University, whose administrators have apparently been murmuring promises of fabulous six-figure salaries for the Nobel laureate.

But his current boss makes it a practice not to single out professors for "star" treatment when it comes time to set faculty salaries. Achievement and celebrity count for very little in gauging Harvard professors' wages, administrators say, age and experience are the two most important criteria. And under no circumstance can salaries top the university-wide ceiling of $80,000.

So it Glashow decides to pick a university on the basis of money alone. It will be a very quick choice, and one that will keep the physicist a good deal warmer in the winter. But in choosing between a Harvard paycheck and a Texas A&M paycheck. Glashow is not only confronted with two disparate salary policies, but also with the two diametrically opposite educational philosophies they reflect.

Texas A&M administrators are unabashed about their willingness to shower lucre on a few desirable luminaries. "We're interested in attracting key people of high quality for our faculty," says Pieter Groot, the university's assistant vice president for academic budgets. "In order to get these professors, we have to go to higher salaries."

This attitude is grounded in a keen awareness of the academic marketplace. In an age when job opportunities for Ph.D.s vary widely from discipline to discipline. Texas A&M pays close attention to competition outside the university in setting faculty salaries. Groot says.

Naturally, scientists come out the best at Texas A&M, since they have recently become hot property in the eyes of industrial recruiters. For instance, the most recent beneficiaries of the university's largesse were its engineering professors. "The competition was becoming so heavy we had to increase our salaries, just to keep our faculty," Groot explains.

Aside from the exigencies of competition. Texas A&M's chief factor in calculating salaries for its professors is individual achievement, says Groot. "After we've considered the competition, to figure the rest of the salary increase we strictly look at merit--peer evaluations and specific accomplishments."

HARVARD'S APPROACH to faculty salaries is as different from Texas A&M's as clam chowder and chili. The vicissitudes of the university marketplace, so carefully weighed at the Texas institution, are all but ignored at Harvard, officials say. "Our differentials between salaries in the sciences and humanities are smaller than they are at almost any other university in the country." Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky has boasted. "This has an important impact on the morale of the entire Faculty: we're all engaged in a common intellectual enterprise."

As for salary raises, they are first roughly calculated faculty-wide, and only then subjected to case-by-case adjustment. To explain this effort to downplay individual professors' merit and achievement. Harvard deans like to smile and say. "All our professors are stars."

But what Harvard calls intellectual unity. Texas A&M calls managerial blindness. "It's much easier to determine raises across the board, but we don't think it is better," says Groot. "Even though we've been growing we've attempted to maintain individual attention to our professors."

Groot admits, however, that his thinking is conditioned as much by pragmatism as by solicitousness. "We don't have much choice," he says. "If we didn't adjust our salaries to respond to the market, we would lose our faculty."

That is a difficult argument to criticize. If a university is in genuine danger of having its faculty lured away from it, then raising salaries to maintain stability seems an appropriate response. This is especially true of a college as wealthy as Texas A&M, where administrators can afford to play. Monopoly with their professors without diverting funds from worthy areas like student aid.

But there is a difference between defensively boosting a professor's salary to keep him on the faculty on the one hand, and rewarding him with a raise for meritorious achievement on the other, which Groot indicates is also a Texas A&M practice.

The peculiarity of the academic profession is that it has no precise gauge for measuring success. Quantity is no-clear indicator: while one professor churns out a stream of papers, another may be hidden in a laboratory quietly curing cancer. As for quality, that is something only an academic's colleagues can judge, not his administrative superiors. But even peer judgments are imperfect in academia, suspect as they usually are to internecine methodological disputes.

The very concept of tenure, in fact, has its roots in the difficulty of assessing academic performances. Universities take the extraordinary step of granting lifetime appointments precist'y to dispense with the impossible task of constantly reviewing scholars' work.

It will be a loss for Harvard if Sheldon Glashow is lured away to Texas by the siren-song of a six-figure salary. But the only way to prevent such losses would be to make a far sadder compromise and engage in the sort of academic astronomy. Texas A&M practices: peering out over the faculty each year at salary-setting time and deciding which professors look like stars.