Faculty Salaries: A Red-Letter Year

When Dean Henry Rosovsky sits down each year to figure out how much money he is going to pay the 350-odd tenured professors who work for Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, he must observe only one formal guideline, aside from keeping within the Faculty's budget. President Bok annually establishes a maximum salary for all professors in every Harvard faculty--"not that we expect people to meet those standards, but to make sure we have limits," explains Financial Vice President Thomas O'Brien.

For 1982-83, that figure is $80,000, up from $70,000 in 1981-82 and $60,000 in 1980-81, Faculty financial officers say. The only Faculty members who will draw that top rate are the University Professors, a select group of scholars granted the honorary distinction of not being confined to a single department. There will be six next year: historian Bernard Bailyn, literature scholar Walter Jackson Bate. Nobel-winning physicist Nicolaas Bloembergen, economist John Dunlop, historian and Harvard Librarian Oscar Handlin, and philosopher John Rawls.

A few professors in other faculties--most notably at the Law School--also earn the University maximum, says Melissa Gerrity, associate dean for financial affairs. But in Arts and Sciences, financial officials place the next highest '82-'83 salary at $65,000. That fee will reportedly be garnered by libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick at 41 years old a comparatively young Faculty member. Moreover, Nozick received tenure at Harvard relatively recently, in 1969. After Nozick, officials say, tenured Faculty salaries next year will range down to $34,500, with a heavy concentration of professors earning salaries in the $40,000s.

Nozick, like the rest of the Faculty, will not officially learn his next year's salary until the dean's office mails out a stack of letters on June 30. A Faculty member who wishes to learn his '82-'83 salary before then--to include it in a grant proposal, for instance--must obtain special permission directly from Rosovsky, financial officials say. If, for some reason, a professor calls the dean's office to check on the figure for his current salary, the office will hang up and ring him back, to make sure the call did not come from a scheming colleague or a nosy reporter.

Yet for all their diligent secrecy on the subject of individual earnings. Faculty officials are surprisingly willing this year to generalize about professors' salaries. Rosovsky and Gerrity boasted of an average rate of increase in senior Faculty salaries that topped inflation for the first time in several years, its 11 percent rate of increase out-stripping the inflation rate by five percent. Junior faculty salaries leapt even more spectacularly, by nearly 17 percent; in 1982-83, they will range from $19,200 to $27,500--up from $16,700-$23,800. And earlier this year, at the urging of President Bok. Gerrity's office came up with a complex and unprecedented five-year plan to monitor the growth of Faculty salaries.

Rosovsky and Gerrity are loath to say they put a special emphasis on Faculty salaries in general this year--"Faculty salaries have always been a priority," insists Gerrity--but they do admit they made an unusual effort to raise the pay scale for professors at the associate, assistant, and instructor levels.

In recent years, the Faculty was experiencing great difficulty recruiting junior members, Gerrity explains. "Department chairmen have been screaming at the dean." With inflation, she says, the real value of all Faculty salaries plummeted 12-15 percent over the last decade, and a recent confidential survey of about 15 competing universities placed Harvard "near the bottom" in junior-level pay scales.

"I think we all just said to each other, "We've got to do something about this," Gerrity recalls. "We were basically just playing catch-up ball for the last decade. We all saw next year as the first time we might be able to really do something about it....It's just like deferred maintenance: you can only prolong it for so long."

Along with an unusually low inflation rate, another new development in Harvard's financial picture made this year a fertile one for raising Faculty salaries: receipts from Harvard's massive $250 million fund drive have begun to trickle in. Beefing up salaries in the Faculty is one of the campaign's leading goals, and $82 million is budgeted towards that end. That figure will probably increase if the University, as expected, hikes the goal to $350 million. The budget for Faculty salaries includes $22 million for endowing junior faculty positions, a strategy Harvard has never used before--and one that got off to an astonishing start when investment banker John L. Loeb '24 kicked in $7.5 million in November for endowing 15 associate professorships.

But even with the cushion of the Campaign, the Faculty's zealous salary-raising took its toll in tuition costs, which soared this spring, bringing the total cost of spending the '82-'83 academic year at Harvard to $12,100. "You just have to balance one against the other," shrugs Gerrity.

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If any single statement sums up Harvard's philosophy about its Faculty salaries, it is this recent pronouncement from Rosovsky: "We have the view that we are one Faculty. A Harvard professor of English is at valuable as a professor of Biochemistry."

In an age when high-paying jobs in scientific industry--particularly in the rapidly expanding field of bio-engineering--are increasingly tempting alternatives for academics in the sciences. Harvard's old-fashioned approach to compensating its professors is growing rare. Many universities are unabashed about letting the free market dictate their salary structures, paying the highest salaries to the most sought-after professors--typically the scientists with lucrative industry offers. "You couldn't possibly have a standard salary scale from anthropology to physics," says Dzidra Knecht, the executive for Boston University's College of Liberal Arts. "Salary scales differ in the outside world from field to field."

But Rosovsky professes to pay no attention to the job market in the world outside the Yard in determining how much to pay Faculty members "Our differentials between salaries in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences are smaller than they are at almost any other university in the country," the dean says. "This has an important impact on the morale of the entire Faculty: we're all engaged in a common intellectual enterprise."

As Rosovsky describes it, the Faculty's salary structure depends on a criterion that holds more currency at Harvard than the exigencies of extramural commerce: age. This is verifiably true of junior-level salaries, which are determined according to one of two fixed public scales that apply uniformly to all junior faculty members, no matter what department they are in. Departments can choose which scale to adopt--one offers less but comes with a paid semester's leave of absense. In either case, the salaries vary only according to title and experience; thus, all third-year associate professors earn the same salary, for instance, as do all fourth-year assistants professors, and so on.

Few other institutions have such a uniform system for determining junior faculty salaries, says Associate Dean Phyllis Keller. But no such scale exists for tenured Faculty members, all of whose salaries Rosovsky determines on an individual basis. Administrators are stingy about the statistics they will reveal about full professors' salaries, but they insist that those figures are also mostly a function of age and experience, Nozick's case apparently notwithstanding.

The Faculty's method of fixing salaries is unusual not only in its low regard for marketplace realities but also in its tight consolidation of authority. At most other universities, says Gerrity, department chairman have a hand in setting their colleagues' wages. Princeton, for example, has no scale for junior or senior professors; a faculty committee determines all salaries based on an elaborate series of recommendations from department members.

When the dean sits down each year to determine salary raises, Gerrity explains, he will start by making broad adjustments without looking at specific names, deciding the rate at which each general range of salaries should rise.

But Harvard administrators state with pride that Harvard does not have "superstars" on its Faculty--professors paid for national reputation rather than experience. While this policy may boost morale in the ranks of the Faculty, it invariably hinders Harvard's recruitment of top scholars, officials say. "We're competing against institutions that have star systems," says Gerrity with a sigh. "You find out when you go after that one person you want that he's a star, and his institution is either matching what we're offering or bettering it. They've just decided they're going to put their eggs in that one basket."

Gerrity and other administrators demur when asked to cite specific recruiting efforts that have broken down over the issues of salary. "There are all kinds of reasons people withdraw from being considered for tenured openings," says Robert Kaufman. Gerrity's predecessor as associate dean for financial affairs. And officials flatly deny that any professor has ever left Harvard out of dissatisfaction with his salary. "I've been dean for nine years," says Rosovsky, "and I can't think of a single individual who left here on a salary issue."

The name of Steven Weinberg invariably comes up when this question is raised. Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, left Harvard last year for a reported six-figure salary at the University of Texas at Austin. "Steven Weinberg wanted to stay here," Rosovsky says. "He left because of his wife," who joined the faculty of the University of Texas law school. Weinberg himself has an unlisted telephone number and was unavailable for comment.

Faculty administrators state with equal conviction that Harvard has not lost any of its tenured scientists to better paying jobs in industry, although they acknowledge that many junior professors make that jump. Here, the name Walter Gilbert comes up: another Nobel Laureate, Gilbert announced this year his plans to leave the Faculty to run Biogen, the genetic engineering company he founded. Gilbert's case is a special one, administrators say--he was not strictly lured away by industry.

Kaufman, who left Harvard in 1980 to become headmaster of Doerfield Academy, has perhaps the most perceptive view of the question of salary competition between Harvard and other universities--one that points up the ultimate incongrapy of wheeling and dealing in the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of a university, "Very few faculty members would ever admit they left Harvard for a better officer," he says. "In an academy, that's just not an acceptable reason."

'We all saw next year as the first time we might be able to really do something' about raising real faculty salaries. --Melissa Gerrity

'I've been dean for nine years, and I can't think of a single individual who left here on a salary issue.' --Henry Rosovsky Junior Professors Income Year  Associate Professor  Assistant Professor '78-'79  $18,900  $16,400 '79-'80  $20,300  $17,700 '80-'81  $23,100  $20,000 '81-'82  $26,100  $22,200 '82-'83  $31,100  $25,200