Ever since the heyday of the late Sen. William Proxmire and his Golden Fleece Awards, scientific and academic research deemed frivolous has been a target of ridicule. In one respect, at least, no such criticism can be leveled at the Dartmouth College faculty, some of whom in recent years have applied their research and advocacy skills to the most practical of real world matters: getting themselves a pay raise.
As staff writer Rob Wolfe reported recently, the college’s arts and sciences faculty in the spring of 2015 petitioned the board of trustees to review their compensation with an eye to increasing it. Their plea found a receptive audience. This September, the trustees pledged to boost faculty compensation to the level of peer institutions. “With a focused dedication to academic excellence,” the trustees said, “Dartmouth is committed to recruiting and retaining faculty who are internationally pre-eminent as scholars and teachers in their disciplines.” To achieve that, they declared, “compensation must be competitive in relation to select peer institutions.”
In these Trumpian times, it may be a little hard for the public to sympathize with the economic plight of the average tenure-track faculty member, who in 2015 made about $177,000 in salary and benefits at Dartmouth, or the 390 full professors who on average made $233,500 in the past academic year. Indeed, come the revolution, academics may not be treated kindly by what Pat Buchanan, a Trump precursor, delighted in calling “peasants with pitchforks.”
Until then, though, the laws of supply and demand still obtain. And it turns out that Dartmouth faculty are among those many Americans whose incomes never fully rebounded from the Great Recession years of pay freezes and nominal wage increases. Eric Zitzewitz, an economics professor, released a study in 2015 making the case for increased compensation. It described the extent of the pay gap between Dartmouth and other elite institutions such as Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale, where full professors make, respectively, $278,000, $260,000 and $245,000. Tenure-track faculty at Dartmouth — that is assistant, associate and full professors engaging in the career-long tenure process — make about $15,000 less than their average Ivy League counterparts.
This is somewhat puzzling, given the building binge Dartmouth has been on in recent years. Bricks and mortar do not a pre-eminent university make. The pay disparity is important, Zitzewitz and others told Wolfe, because it is more difficult to attract and retain the best faculty if pay isn’t comparable. As a result of the gap, he said, “we fail to attract the people we’re trying to hire, and we fail to retain the people we’re trying to retain.”
Additionally, academic reputation is linked to faculty compensation, and, according to Zitzewitz, even a small difference in pay can have big implications for the college’s standing among peer institutions.
We get it. On the other hand, one imagines that there are other ways in which to measure compensation. Teaching a couple of courses to extremely capable and engaged students on a beautiful campus in an idyllic New England landscape while pursuing research of intensely personal interest is not everybody’s idea of heavy lifting.
But enough of such romanticizing. The trustees directed administrators to develop benchmarks by which to measure compensation, although they set no timetable for doing so.
Here are a few benchmarks we propose in the full expectation that they will not make the final cut: Higher pay for faculty whose teaching demonstrates academic rigor rather than grade inflation; a pay raise for writing books and articles on important topics that are accessible and influential to the general reader as well as to an academic audience; a bonus for professors who inspire in students a lifetime of intellectual engagement. Those kind of accomplishments, of course, are their own reward.