AKMA’s Random Thoughts

My concern isn't about the salaries--I agree that talented scholars should be recognized as such, and very talented scholars should be very recognized.

But with that high salary should come high expectations. What galls me are scholars like Saul Bellow, who teaches one class per year for a high salary: his only real purpose at BU is advertising fodder for the university, not as a teacher, writer, student advisor, or accessible member of faculty. That was my point in drawing a connection between recruitment/promotion of faculty and athletes: both are often done for PR purposes rather than educational purposes, and I'd like to see a bit more frankness about that. To further your baseball analogy, the first guy on the roster gets paid more than the 25th, so is expected to play more and play better. In academia, the 25th plays more often (though perhaps just as well), and gets paid far less.

While faculty stars do impact the position of adjuncts, it's the uneven work loads (especially when it means actually teaching the class the star can't show up to) that concerns me more than the finances. I don't think teaching is quite the be all end all of scholarly life (though I think it's of primary importance), but nothing is more annoying as a student than signing up for a class with a poster professor and getting some grad student or adjunct (like me) instead. That smacks of bad faith and the old bait and switch. It also makes professorial complaints about the commercialization of college sports ring very hollow indeed--especially when the AT&T Chair of Communication Technologies is doing the complaining.

The highest paid member of the faculty at my alma mater was the most inaccessible person in the department. All this despite this speech every year that "his door his always open."

Yes, I realize that this one instance does not make it so and that there are always exceptions, but in my experience the lowest paid professors teach more classes and consequently have more students waiting outside their doors during office hours.

So if these high paid profs are not teaching classes and connecting with students, what are they doing? Are they then acting as "advertising fodder for the university?"

Maybe so. But I can hardly blame the professors.

This, I think, complements my point (excepting Saul Bellow, whose position sure does sound like pure advertising).

The problem derives not from Professor X getting overpaid so much as professors generally being paid too little, and professors generally being esteemed in ways that don’t align with what others might want of them. But even Saul Bellow excels at one of the functions of a faculty member: to communicate the presence of the institution to the world outside that institution, and to bring the interests and points-of-engagement of other spheres into the particular institution. Okay, “excels” overstates the case, since he’d be Saul Bellow the literary lion no matter what instituion he affiliated with, if any, but nonetheless it’s part of his function, and it’s a part that Prof. Jones, who’s a really fine classroom instructor but will never publish a syllable or present a scholarly paper anywhere, doesn’t contribute a bit to. Should the world value Bellow’s contribution more than Jones’s? That’s a different question from “Should Bellow be paid so much in the first place?” and I can envision pro and con arguments. But I’m going steadfastly to resist any argument that anyone should be paid less for academic work, since we’re already paid far too little.

And (after all) while your example of the underpaid, low-rank, popular teachers holds as a general rule, I’ve certainly known obnoxious, inaccessible instructors and assitant professors. One can view the low-ranking positions as pressuring a teacher (on one hand) to devote all her energies to generating a set of noteworthy publications and the devil take her students, or (on the other hand) to cultivate a responsible relation to an enthusiastic body of well-instructed students, thus attenuating the prospects for research and writing. To the extent that this binary alternative holds true, it’s incumbent on those who benefit from academic labor — practically everyone, though one wouldn’t guess that from populist anti-intellectualism — to push for more humane possibilities. But some folks manage to squeak out some publications while also doing diligent work with students, too.

I prefer to think of Bellow as an awkward step in the right general direction than as a mistake. When you gents attain the eminence you so amply deserve, and dedicate yourselves all the more to both students and studies, I’ll be first in line to defend the scale of your salaries. But I’m not going to agitate to lower what anyone expects any professor to be paid; that way lies the terrain of universal adjunctification, and I won’t go there.

'But I’m not going to agitate to lower what anyone expects any professor to be paid; that way lies the terrain of universal adjunctification, and I won’t go there.'

AKMA, I agree completely. It is nice to see at least partial recognition that scholars and their work do matter. And hopefully that will translate into all scholars being valued more highly, and paid more appropriately. Part of what troubles me, though, is the sense that Niall Ferguson, say, isn't being paid what he's worth as a teacher/thinker/writer but as a lever for the PR office. That seems, to me, to demean the profession rather than strengthen it. Just as the influx of big money into college sports is often accused of shifting their mission.

As Ryan says, that's not the professor's fault for accepting what they are offered--in the Globe article Ferguson says he knew it was 'now or never' for NYU's offer. I think I've mistakenly suggested that I begrudge Ferguson or Bellow what they get, rather than highlighting my real frustration with the disingenuousness of the star system: if I come to University X because of the presence of a particularly literary lion, I'll be royally pissed when that lion turns out to not teach or even keep an office on campus. It's not the lion's fault, but it doesn't make me any happier about the tuition increase that paid for his appointment. And it won't make me any more well-disposed toward whoever actually does the teaching.

I guess what bothers me is that this seems like an extension of the two-tier system often remarked upon at IA's. As the commenter labelling him/herself "Dept Chair" demonstrates, the top tier often manifests a lamentable lack of awareness and concern for the situation of the bottom tier.

Overpaying the stars gives administrators a cheap excuse for rampant inequity -- "well, if everybody produced like this they'd be paid like this!" -- which is obviously garbage because the system wouldn't support it, but who's going to argue?

Certainly not the stars themselves -- and that's a terrible shame, because by virtue of their star status, *if they made a stink, something might actually happen*.

So it's just one more way to give voice to people who don't need it and won't use it. Or so I see it.

from an outsider's point of view, a view with an economist bent, the questions I have are, who makes the salary level decisions? and why do they choose to do it that way?

I'm sure it's different from school to school (and state to state for gvt schools). Also, an economist might ask, why do people choose to become academics if the pay is so lousy?

I'm not an economist, just a hobbyist.

Correct me if any of this is wrong, I'm not that close to the actual situation in the academy except from following some of the blog discussion here and at IA's blog. Most of the discussion seems to have centered more around the humanities, so there isn't that much "pure research money" as with sciences and technologies. The direct applications in commerce justify a lot of commercial money that just isn't around much for the Arts generally.

Paul asks a very good question, more generally, who writes the checks and budgets the resources? If the government is going to get out of funding anything the least bit controversial, then it is absolutely necessary to fund the "civil society" needs of the culture another way. When the state legislature says cut everything 10% accross the board, the boards of state run institutions are squeezed and pass that on to their labor pool in one way or another. Private institutions are another matter, but neither should be making the professional staff pay in wages and benefits.

When you get right down to it, if you really want diversity in the academy, once you qualify for a graduate program, you should be more employee than student. You would be an apprentice while completing degree requirements and a junior member of the profession, and once graduated a full member. As far as allocating funds and such, I really think that academic departments should be self-organized/run enterprises that are in a sense given a large pile of money and a mission and be expected to manage it wisely as a group. Sometimes part of this mission will be to educate a large number of undergraduates in the lower levels of your discipline while encouraging the few who may pursue the discipline further. In this context, the oversuply of particular specialties or other labor supply problems become the problem of the departments that can't place their people. Then there is the whole issue of moving into and back from industry in research and consulting roles. In many fields this is an important source of new ideas and grounding in practice. The arts are trickier in this way because good practice and good teaching don't always come in the same package, and if your school is hiring popular practitioners as stars without a sense of obligation to teach and lead ... I would suggest that the best professors will combine practice, teaching and leadership, and that a good practice would be not so much to award a huge salary, but instead a large endowment to use to further the work and support the entire community of the work. Wouldn't it be even better than tenure to control the budget of your research and teaching operations of your work group (not individually, as a group)? Yes, those individuals who attract large amounts of funding control the group in a sense, but the brain is not more important than the heart or the stomach. This could still break down if the groups and their leaders don't live up to the implied contracts and ethics of the profession (as commonly understood by members).

The Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.

Inside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.

But some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.

Each Stack Frame represents a function. The bottom frame is always the main function, and the frames above it are the other functions that main calls. At any given time, the stack can show you the path your code has taken to get to where it is. The top frame represents the function the code is currently executing, and the frame below it is the function that called the current function, and the frame below that represents the function that called the function that called the current function, and so on all the way down to main, which is the starting point of any C program.

This back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.