There’s almost nothing left in academic culture that you can’t talk about. We know the tragedies, the tenure scandals, the political betrayals, the sexual preferences, and the dirty laundry of our colleagues. Only one area still remains verboten: money. I heard a story about an incoming professor and a dean -- both very polite types -- who had a meeting to discuss salary. After the meeting was over, the prospective faculty member shook the dean’s hand, walked down the corridor, and only then realized that the subject of money had never come up. Only when the first paycheck arrived did the professor know his annual income.
When it comes to talking about money, many faculty members -- like Herman Melville’s famous scrivener -- prefer not to.
In Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, you know the instant that Darcy walks in the room how much he has per annum. In academe, however, salaries are carefully guarded secrets, quasi-sacred runes for administrative eyes only. Very occasionally, the veil is pulled aside, the Ark is opened, and the initiates on the faculty-salary committee are permitted to gaze upon the mysteries of the spreadsheet. Now, with the advent of tell-all journalism in academe, Lingua Franca and The Chronicle publish stories “outing” individual incomes. In a recent article about the University of Illinois at Chicago, for example, The Chronicle announced the salaries of Stanley Fish, Gerald Graff, Deirdre McCloskey, and John D’Emilio with the kind of publicity those scholars would have enjoyed had they signed up with the Red Sox.
Indeed, when I signed on to this same academic team a few weeks later, a Chronicle reporter asked, with locker-room intimacy, how much I was going to get. I found myself hesitating, like a shy virgin unwilling to plunge into the give-and-take of the adult world. I demurred, bolstering my wimpy response with the inevitable sports metaphor: “in the ballpark of the figures you’ve been publishing.” The paper then went on to say that my salary was “in the range of other six-figure salaries Mr. Fish has been pitching.” The vagueness of “six figures” and the continuing sports metaphors seemed to protect me from invidious comparison and venomous resentment from the four-and five-figured underclass.
I found myself wondering about my own timidity. I’m not exactly camera-shy (I’ve written in public about twice being denied tenure, having a transgendered child, even having peed behind the television in my youth), so why did revealing my salary feel like I was telling all? Why is there a don’t ask, don’t tell policy when it comes to what we earn? The pay scales of C.E.O.'s, sports figures, actors, even plumbers, electricians, and mechanics, are known and knowable. And at some institutions, such as the University of Illinois, salaries are public record. It’s not that academics are wallflowers about their publications or accomplishments. Why does braggadocio end at the bank?
A colleague of mine who is interested in social class pointed out that management likes to keep salaries secret to divide and conquer. If workers never really know what they make in relation to other workers, they can’t band together and demand equal and fair pay. Such secrecy increases in the hallowed halls because professors don’t like to consider themselves workers. Professional snootiness combines with managerial tactics to make discussing money seem déclassé.
Perhaps it all started back in the 19th century, when professors were drawn from the ranks of gentlemen. As Lewis Hyde points out in his book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, in the past, monetary concerns were considered superfluous in literary and academic circles, since intellectuals were all men of means. The use of the term “contributor” rather than “author” for academic articles in a journal or collection signals that pecuniary noblesse oblige.
In these days of a booming economy, when at least some universities are feeling flush for the first time in a while, there is a new interest in salaries. Last year, the average income for professors went up 3.7 percent, with full professors earning more than $100,000 a year on 29 campuses, up from 19 a year ago. The nationwide average for full professors at doctoral institutions topped out at $87,022. Those numbers are all the more surreal when compared with the meager incomes of the increasing numbers of part-timers. Nevertheless, this year it seems as if offers and counteroffers have skyrocketed. One dean told me that he had never seen a situation in which such extremely high offers were being met in a day or two with even higher counteroffers. “It’s a bidding war,” he moaned.
Take me. For years my salary had been very low. After my double-tenure-denial debacle, I floated around academe for 20 years -- the perennial assistant professor occupying the almost bottom place in the scholarly food chain. Sure, I wasn’t a part-timer, but that was like rejoicing that I was a proletarian but not a lumpen one. I was like the axolotl -- salamanders that reach maturity while still in the larval stage. I was living the pecuniary life of a metamorphosed adult with the salary of a larva. Hence my ponderous credit-card debts and concomitant night sweats when my kid’s tuition bills rolled in.
As a child of the working class, I understood money through the ideology of laborers. One should work hard, earn one’s bread, and not expect too much jam with the peanut butter. My father earned $5,000 a year when I was growing up, and my mother earned less than $3,000. Of course, bread was cheaper then, but not that much cheaper. I also had a sense that it would be bad to be a high roller because wealth was linked to those snotty people who scorned my parents and me -- the fat men with cigars and the overly made-up women in furs. I hated them with a resentment that would have made Nietzsche proud. Of course, I wished I had some more fat in my bare-bones bank account, which often emitted audible electronic groans when I hit gristle at the A.T.M. come the end of the month. But I didn’t wish to be rich.
As a leftist, I had a whole analysis about the origins of wealth -- primitive accumulation leading to the extraction of surplus value from the workers. I wouldn’t have wanted the surplus value of Mexican maquiladoras on my hands any more than I would have wanted the sweat of migrant workers on my grapes. I took comfort in my solidarity with part-timers and adjuncts and my lowly financial status.
Everyone loves an underdog, and I was guilty of lowly canine self-love. I would openly confess my dismal salary to colleagues and perversely enjoy watching their mental calculators melt down, trying to compute how someone who had written a shelf full of publications could be earning a cupboard-bare income. Once, an outside evaluator from some slick California institution came to assess my department, sat in my office after he had read the salary distribution, and said, “Lenny! My God! How is this possible??!!” I found myself in the paradoxical position of consoling him.
Now things have changed with my salary sprouting a sixth figure. I will now make more money than George W. Bush does for being governor of Texas (although he has a few more investments than I do). Overnight, I find myself Cinderella at the provost’s ball. How do I think of myself now? As a professor, my first reflex is to turn to my students, so I asked my graduate class on Marxist theory why they think people don’t like to talk about what they make. One student said that not talking about money was like not talking about poundage: “No woman ever likes to tell her weight.” There is some strange relation between body image and wallet capacity.
It turns out that size does matter in both the corporeal and financial realms. To quantify something seems to turn value into something absolute. Few people ask, “How many dissertations have you directed?” or “How many plenary talks have you given?” It is relatively difficult to chart the significance of those accomplishments. The beauty of salary is the absolute simplicity with which it reduces human value to a number. Salary is the SAT, GRE, and G.P.A. of the adult world, combining penis length, bra size, body-fat content, and I.Q. into one easy algorithm. And like all of the above, real or imagined income becomes part of a vast economy of desire in the university.
Academics tend to be very insecure about their desires, given the shifting ground of scholarly fame, student evaluations, and collegial appreciation. A simple abstraction like annual income cuts through the murk of preference with an Ockham’s razor of clarity. It takes the child’s open-ended “How much do you love me?” and gives it a closed calculus of dollars and cents. But what sense to those dollars? A friend of mine replied, when I asked him if he thought his salary reflected his worth (sort of like asking “Are you still beating your wife?”), “Of course not. If I did, I’d be miserable.” Growing up in capitalism, we know that we are never paid our worth, and every movie tells us that we should never equate happiness with big bucks. Money reifies, and absolutely a lot of money reifies absolutely.
Yet, we also know on some primitive level that our universities show their true love for us by what they are willing to pay. We may espouse Cordelia’s noble denial of her portion, but, when it comes to university politics, we understand more deeply Goneril and Regan’s quantification of love. Administrators, too, readily run to their corner in desire’s triangle; like spurned lovers, their passions increase in proportion to the counteroffer from another suitor school. Even the language of the star-system job market -- who is after whom, wooing whom -- is based on the intersection of reputation, desire, and money. “Getting screwed” becomes a completely overdetermined concept.
There is a strange contradiction at work here, because the more money professors get paid, the less they teach. Classroom instruction under the rule of money becomes the grunt work of the teaching profession. Those who teach the most -- adjuncts and part-timers -- get paid the least. Those who sit on the top floors of the ivory tower counting out their money have the least contact hours with students. So money isn’t just a sign of desire, of social prestige -- it also buys the luxury of time. Time allows one to maximize research, multiply publications, and magnify reputations -- all of which, in turn, garner still higher salaries.
Some universities and colleges eschew the secrecy behind a salary system based on stars and merit pay. The City University of New York Graduate Center and Hobart and William Smith Colleges have a step system that, for the most part, allows all associates -- professors who have been teaching for the same number of years -- to get the same pay. That system seems to eliminate the backbiting associated with secret salaries. However, one friend who works at such a place complains about “the glass ceiling” that the system creates. She says that all the extra work she has put into publishing isn’t being reflected in her salary, as it is in those of her colleagues at other institutions.
The new, higher salaries at many colleges in effect create an elite stratum of academe. Yet, the kinds of salaries I am discussing are, if not peanuts, at least cashews compared with the salaries of other professionals. Academics have been the T.A.'s of the professional world, with an average salary of $58,352 in 1997. By comparison, the median income for physicians in general in 1997 was $164,000, after expenses, while radiologists earned upwards of $220,000. The median income for a law partner in 1998 was $166,000, and for a chief corporate legal officer the mean income was $194,000, with 10 percent earning more than $352,000 and a number earning $900,000 or more. Of course, we professors don’t do it for the money, but neither do oncologists. Yet, given the disparity with other professions, should academics have relatively high salaries, and should someone like me take the 30 pieces of silver despite my personal beliefs and prejudices?
A strange reticence tinges the color of money. There is something about legal tender that invokes both shame and embarrassment. If I don’t take the 30 pieces, I feel like I’m worthless; but if I do, I feel like I’m stealing alms from the collection plate. The happy confluence of religion and capitalism has given us an impoverished vocabulary to describe what is a very complex relation to the production of value in our culture. We are caught in a knitted web of morality and expediency that makes taking the money equal to greed, and forgoing it an excuse for virtue. That is why everyone in America calls themselves middle class, as if the appellation gets them off the horns of that dilemma.
But let’s face it, the true color of money is red, and all money is blood money. That’s perhaps why we color our currency green, to make it appear a nonhuman, natural resource that, if not growing on trees, at least sprouts freely like grass in the median. But in reality, greenbacks are peeled off the sweat of people’s backs. The distilled essence of value is condensed through the alembic of worker labor and corporate ownership. So our guilt about making money involves, at some basic, unconscious level, the understanding that someone else has lost that money, that there are winners and losers.
In academe, that means that my six figures whittles away at an adjunct’s four figures. Essentially, academe is still part of the service sector. So, because some T.A. is working the academic equivalent of the deep fryer at Burger King, I can dine at the chancellor’s table. Service courses like freshman composition and intro to physics have become the assembly-line jobs, and the surplus value extracted from that labor allows the elite professional-managerial class to buy off the necessity of doing that menial work.
There is a lopsided distribution of wealth in academe that lets people like me take the money and run. While progressives rightly protest sweatshops in Third World countries, they forget that academe increasingly can be seen as a sweatshop itself, with its own seasonal pieceworkers. Graduate students and part-timers are only beginning to unionize against that kind of exploitation, with great resistance on the part of administrators, who recognize that they will not be able to run the shop efficiently if they have to pay real wages to the exploited legions. For women, discrimination continues, with female professors earning about 10 percent less than their male counterparts.
So, in signing my new contract, do I accept the small print of exploitation? In benefiting from the system, do I implicitly approve of it? For me, the answer is “no,” although I am sure that highly paid wonks from right-wing think tanks and magazines, as they read this sentence, are starting to click out their attacks on me and my kind as tenured radicals, armchair liberals, and spoiled rebels. The argument they make always has quasi-religious overtones, and is one in which left-wingers are supposed to renounce money while right-wingers get to luxuriate in it as a reward for their devotion to the free market. But renunciation is a puritanical, personal solution to a social problem. No one ever won a battle by forgoing a paycheck. Marx needed Engels’s factory-generated bucks to get out of the red so he could become one. And, given the putative impartiality of the market, it probably doesn’t care if I get the money or if Rush Limbaugh does.
Ultimately, the issue isn’t about taking the money, it is about fighting for a fairer and more just system by doing what we do best -- teaching the conflicts and opening the conversation. In this case, we need to teach the hidden conflict of wages, which is now neatly negotiated by a conspiracy of silence and complicity. And we need to open the conversation about whether it makes sense to have these kinds of differential salaries. The answers are by no means simple. Presumably there are great benefits for institutions that can hire highly paid faculty; there is something to the notion that merit deserves reward; and, of course, there is the apparent truism that “high waters raise all boats.” But there is also a pervasive and insidious downside that needs airing. The bottom line is that we cannot begin to have this conversation as long as we are all blissfully unaware of our place in the monetary pecking order.
Lennard J. Davis is head of the English department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent book is My Sense of Silence: Memoir of a Childhood with Deafness (University of Illinois Press, 2000). His novel The Sonnets will be published next spring by the State University of New York Press.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7
