The Great Divide

Concerns grow over pay gaps between professional-school professors and everyone else

Chronicle May 30, 2003

By KATHERINE S. MANGAN

The way Marvin Johnson sees it, business professors at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa get up every morning, teach classes, do their research, and advise students -- just as he does in the university's music school.

So when he learned last fall that the average assistant professor in the business school was earning $72,691, while the average full professor in the humanities made $63,531, he was shocked, he says. "It seemed completely out of whack."

As he began poring over salary records that were provided by the university's institutional-research office, he discovered that the spread between some disciplines was even larger. For example, he learned that the highest-paid faculty members -- those in the law school, with an average salary of $102,462 -- were earning nearly three times as much as those in library science, the lowest-paid discipline at $35,991. (The university's medical school, which is on a different campus, was not included in the data.)

He decided that something had to be done. At his urging, the university's Faculty Senate voted last month to endorse a proposal that would put a cap on raises for the most highly paid professors on the campus, many of whom are in law and business. Schools that still wanted to pay their professors more could do so by charging higher tuitions, the proposal says.

The recommendation is unlikely to go far. Faculty members in law and business have fought back, arguing that their salaries are dictated by what they could make in the private sector. The university's president, Robert E. Witt, a former business dean, agrees.

But the Alabama proposition reflects a growing concern in academe about the disparities in paychecks between those in professional schools and those in other fields. While many academics have accepted the inevitability of the differences, others believe that salaries in professional schools are out of control. Critics worry that not only money, but attention and a sense of importance, is being diverted from core academic disciplines to the professional programs.

"There's a tendency to value very obvious practical gain over human enrichment," says Charles W. Nuckolls, a professor of anthropology at Alabama. "That's why it's easy to see why professional schools, which emphasize their practical focus, get more money," he adds. "The long-term consequence will be the erosion and eventually the demise of the liberal arts, particularly at state-supported schools."

The salary differences have been exacerbated because the market for top talent in law, business, and medicine has become increasingly competitive. In business, that's largely because of a shortage of business doctorates. In other professional schools, the obsession over a program's ranking is often said to account for much of the intense competition -- and higher pay -- for "star" faculty members. Whatever the cause, professional schools are shelling out big money to attract new hires.

Mary W. Gray, a professor of mathematics and statistics at American University who has conducted salary studies for the American Association of University Professors, says faculty members who go for years without substantial raises resent the higher prices being paid to fresh recruits in some disciplines.

"In fields like finance, people are being locked in at very high prices, and that salary continues, even when there's no longer a shortage," she says. "The effect is that resources are being drained from other parts of the university, including the liberal arts."

As a result, she says, "people are more likely to feel disengaged from the university, and because of the differential in salaries, they no longer think of themselves as university professors -- they identify with their discipline."

Roger J. Dennis, provost of Rutgers University at Camden, agrees that the mood of a campus can be affected. "It can be difficult, from a morale standpoint," says Mr. Dennis, who was previously dean of the law school there. "It's not like the young finance professor is working any harder than the English professor or that she's any more qualified." But, he adds, "unfortunately, we have to pay these salaries to attract quality faculty. We can't fight the markets."

But fighting the markets is just what Mr. Johnson thinks universities should be doing, not encouraging such disproportionate pay scales.

In his quest for salary information, he discovered that last fall, a new assistant professor of finance was hired for around $125,000 -- about double what full professors with decades of experience in the humanities were earning.

"The notion that someone who's devoted his or her life to a field and has earned two promotions is somehow less worthy than someone right out of graduate school is ludicrous, but that's the way it is," he says. "It isn't just about money. The whole value system is skewed toward professional schools and their needs at the expense of traditional disciplines."

The 3-Percent Solution

Nationally, average pay for all full-time faculty members rose 3 percent this year, to $62,484, according to the latest salary report by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The report, released this month, looks at pay across academic disciplines, but excludes medical salaries.

The fastest-rising salaries are, not surprisingly, in fields where nonacademic jobs command high pay.

"Up until the current recession, salaries for M.B.A.'s and lawyers were soaring, ... and you had to compete with those salaries if you wanted to recruit faculty members to those fields," says Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a professor of industrial and labor relations and economics at Cornell University, who conducted a salary study, released in April, for the AAUP.

"You don't have to pay law professors the same salaries as partners in large firms," he says, "but you do have to pay them enough to give up that opportunity."

Full professors of law earned an average nine-month salary of $123,086 this year, while associate professors earned $92,781 and assistant professors, $74,443, according to the survey by the college-personnel association.

Lucrative Practice

Nowhere in academe are salaries higher than among medical-school faculty members, where a specialist with a lucrative practice can earn $1-million or more. Last year, for instance, a full professor specializing in thoracic and cardiovascular surgery earned an average of $515,000, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

In fact, on many campuses, top medical professors earn considerably more than the president. Take the University of Virginia, where the president, John T. Casteen III, was No. 12 on the list of the institution's 50 highest-paid employees last year. All 11 above him were in the medical school, according to a survey by the university's student newspaper, The Cavalier Daily.

The mean total compensation for faculty M.D.'s in the clinical sciences was $187,600 in 2001-2, while in the basic sciences, faculty members with doctorates earned a mean salary of $94,700, according to the medical-college association.

Those figures, which represent an increase of about 4 percent over 2000-1, cover a full year, while most academic salaries are measured for nine-month academic appointments.

It's not always easy to decipher how much medical faculty members make because their income is broken up into several components, including base and incentive pay and income from faculty practice plans. (The plans, which are either part of or closely affiliated with medical schools, handle the business end, including billing and scheduling, of faculty members' patient care.)

A growing number of medical schools are requiring clinical faculty members to generate much of their own pay by guaranteeing them a fairly modest salary and making the rest contingent on their ability to draw research grants and clinical revenue.

"Clinical faculty members make more than faculty in the arts and sciences because they generate much of their pay," says Robert F. Jones, vice president for medical-school services and studies at the medical-college association.

But sometimes, requiring medical faculty members to come up with so much of their salaries can create tension. Nineteen medical professors at Georgetown University sued the institution after it instituted a plan that tied their pay, in part, to how much grant money they won. The university scrapped the plan in 1999, and the case was settled out of court.

In another health-care field, nursing professors are reaping the benefits of a bidding war. After years of declining or stagnating enrollment, nursing programs are starting to expand at the same time that waves of faculty members are retiring. A nurse practitioner with a doctorate can earn $72,000 a year in private practice, so nursing schools are being forced to increase their salaries.

Nursing professors with doctorates saw their 12-month salaries rise 3.8 percent this year, to $94,932. Nursing professors without doctorates received raises averaging 8 percent, which brought their salaries to $77,923.

Inversions in Business

Some of the strangest pay gaps are opening up in the nation's business schools, where new hires are earning significantly more than many longtime associate and full professors -- a condition known as salary inversion.

Business schools are enjoying booming popularity with students, yet fewer people are earning doctorates in business subjects. In fields like finance, a new faculty member can earn a starting salary of $145,000 or more for a nine-month job, along with perquisites and a signing bonus.

Average salaries for faculty members with new business doctorates soared 34 percent from 1998 to 2002, to $88,200, according to a survey conducted by AACSB International: the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

That's higher than the average business-school salary across all ranks, which was $87,500 in 2002-3.

Dennis E. Logue, dean of the University of Oklahoma's Michael F. Price College of Business, says faculty members who feel they are underpaid may cut back on their college commitments and focus more on outside consulting.

"If a faculty member was making $120,000, a 5-percent raise is about $6,000 -- you can go out and make that in a day or two on the outside," he says of the amount corporations are willing to pay for expert business advice.

Salary inversion in business schools is making many senior faculty members "a lot grumpier," he says. Even though they understand the market forces at work, "it's kind of like the shoemaker's kids having no shoes," Mr. Logue says. They still think they should be making more than the market commands for them.

Thomas S. Robertson, dean of Emory University's Roberto C. Goizueta Business School, says top business schools are also competing for a small number of hot prospects in fields like finance, driving salaries up to record levels.

"This star system means that a very limited number of people are getting all the money and many people are not sharing in that abundance," he says.

The effects of salary inversion hit home to James P. Cover, a professor of economics on Alabama's Tuscaloosa campus, when the university hired an assistant professor of finance fresh out of a Ph.D. program for a nine-month salary of around $125,000. Mr. Cover, who has been teaching at Alabama for 20 years, earns $72,000 -- on the low end for full professors in his field. He says he isn't bitter about it, though. "It's inevitable, given market forces," he says.

But some faculty members in the arts find it harder to shrug off pay differentials when they are earning less than $50,000 a year.

'You'll Never Catch Up'

The Faculty Senate's recommendation to level the playing field, which squeaked by in a 14-to-13 vote, would use a complex set of formulas to reallocate some money that would otherwise be used for raises in professional or high-paying disciplines. The funds would be redirected to disciplines on the lower end. The limits on faculty raises would apply only to state money and tuition, not funds that schools received from endowments or as gifts.

Even so, President Witt, who served for 10 years as dean of the University of Texas' business school, told the professors that he could not accept a plan that would hurt the schools of business, engineering, and law.

"I do not believe that outstanding scholars in these fields will accept positions at the University of Alabama if they know that subsequent salary increases will not keep pace with the salary increases of their peers at comparable institutions," he wrote in a letter to the Faculty Senate. He added that he hoped, over the next five years, to raise the salaries of all faculty members.

The university's interim provost, Judy Bonner, notes that the 14 professors who voted for the proposal represent a tiny fraction of the total faculty.

"The majority of the faculty believe that we have to address the problem," she says, "but I'd be surprised if there were widespread support for taking money away from law and engineering and commerce.

Mr. Cover says his colleagues in the business school are not worried that their salaries will be clipped anytime soon.

"Their reaction was that the president and the Board of Trustees are market people and they understand that if we can't pay market salaries, we won't get good people," he says. "They basically feel that the faculty who support this proposal are just envious of our salaries."

But not all professional-school faculty members oppose efforts to shrink the salary gap. Wythe Holt, a research professor of law at Alabama, angered a lot of his law-school colleagues when he pushed for the Faculty Senate's proposal.

"The enormous pay differential distorts people's sense of self-worth," he says. "I want to be part of an academic community where people feel valued."

Such a system would not be unprecedented. The University of Rhode Island adopted a pay system 20 years ago that divides the faculty into different tiers, based on pay scales.

"If you're in the lower-paid group, you get fatter raises as you get promoted," says Frank R. Annunziato, executive director of the university's chapter of the AAUP. "If you're an English professor, you'll never catch up to the engineers and the finance professors, but you'll get closer over time."

Pressure From the Faculty

As they head into salary negotiations this spring, AAUP officials at Rhode Island expect more pressure from faculty members at professional schools who have seen their relative pay slip over the years.

The university's marketing professors, for instance, this year earned 21 percent below a national salary average that's published each year by Oklahoma State University, while music professors earned 15 percent above that average, an AAUP official says. Ten years ago, all professors were several percentage points below the average.

The head of economics, finance, and legal studies at Alabama says he would rather allocate salaries based on merit and experience, but adds that he cannot afford to ignore market conditions.

"We have a choice. We can either hire people and pay them salaries that will allow them to stay, or we can close up shop," says Billy P. Helms. "It's not the way I would design the system, but it's the reality we're faced with."

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