BIG APPLE BOUND? Less than a year after losing the star economist Jeffrey D. Sachs to Columbia University, Harvard University may be on the verge of saying goodbye to another top economist. While Columbia is paying a reported $300,000 for Mr. Sachs, the business school at New York University is trying to lure Andrei Shleifer with an offer of nearly $500,000.
David K. Backus, vice dean of NYU’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, confirms that the school is trying to recruit Mr. Shleifer, a 41-year-old economist and protégé of Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers. In 1999, Mr. Shleifer won the American Economics Association’s John Bates Clark Medal, which honors the country’s most outstanding economists under 40.
“We’re always looking for good people,” says Mr. Backus. “Andrei is an absolutely first-rate scholar.”
According to a source familiar with the negotiations, Mr. Shleifer, who is on leave from Harvard this year, has been spending time in the Stern school’s finance department over the last several months, giving lectures and talking to faculty members. His decision may hinge as much on lifestyle concerns New York City vs. Cambridge -- as on money, according to this source. Mr. Shleifer did not respond to telephone calls or e-mail messages.
Mr. Shleifer has been a professor at Harvard since 1991 and is known for the breadth of his expertise, which spans such topics as economic reform in Russia, capital markets, and stock-price movements. He is also at the center of a $120-million civil suit the U.S. government has filed against Harvard, charging Mr. Shleifer with mismanaging federal funds while directing a Harvard program on Russian economic reform in the mid-1990s.
Mr. Shleifer has denied, through lawyers, that he did anything wrong. No one at Harvard could be reached for comment on NYU’s efforts to recruit him.
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BACK TO COURT: Graciela Chichilnisky, a tenured professor of statistics at Columbia University, has received some hefty support for her sex-discrimination claims against the institution. The legal-advocacy fund of the American Association of University Women has recently given $15,000 to back her second lawsuit against the university.
Ms. Chichilnisky, 66, first sued Columbia in 1991, alleging that the university paid her less than male professors of similar experience. The university settled the case in 1995, paying her a lump sum of $500,000, raising her salary to $107,000 from $62,975, and promising her $50,000 a year both for the Program on Information and Resources, which she directs, and for an endowed chair created for her and partially financed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Now Ms. Chichilnisky has concluded that the university breached the settlement agreement by ending those annual payments, denying her adequate office space, and attempting to do away with the Unesco chair, in effect retaliating against her for filing the original suit.
Ms. Chichilnisky says she decided to go back to court after she entered the program’s offices in February 2000 and saw her computers “lying on the floor, disconnected,” including those containing key research and sensitive files. “The cables were severed. They looked like spaghetti. I couldn’t even walk into the room.”
Officials told her they were moving the entire program, with seven offices’ worth of equipment, to her small academic office in another building, Ms. Chichilnisky says.
In 2000, she filed her complaint against Columbia in a New York state court, which issued an injunction stopping the university from dismantling her offices. She is asking the court to permanently enjoin Columbia from retaliating against and harassing her, and she wants $1-million in damages. The case is in the discovery phase. A Columbia spokeswoman declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.
“It’s painful to talk about,” says Ms. Chichilnisky, but she hopes her case will help prevent further discrimination against female faculty members. “The only way you can alleviate this pain is by helping others.”
Sylvia Newman, president of the Legal Advocacy Fund’s Board of Directors, says that Ms. Chichilnisky’s case illustrates the continuing hurdles faced by female scholars, even after they’ve broken through the glass ceiling.
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http://chronicle.com Section: Short Subjects Volume 49, Issue 18, Page A8