Baby, you’re a rich man*

Continuing the theme of faculty compensation, Tenured Radical has posted Part III of the conversation she started earlier in the week.  In Part III she gives an overview of the wide range of responses to her question of faculty salary and notes that only one commenter, the difficult to pronounce Squadratomagico, was not worried by the current state of affairs.  Squadratomagico (it is difficult to type, too) details her reasons for this at her own blog, including the argument that this is part of the deal we accept when entering the nonprofit world.  Along these lines, I thought that academics largely accept the fact that they are not going to get rich in academia and that if they wanted doctors’ and lawyers’ salaries they should go to school to be doctors and lawyers.  I remember hearing this several times, though not quite so bluntly as this or this.

Given the wide range of salaries in response to TR’s original post, it is clear that many academics are struggling in low-wage conditions.  There are others, however, bringing home comfortable salaries despite recent stagnation.  As one professor told me in grad school, no matter how much he made, he never seemed to have any extra money (he mentioned the more expensive houses, vacations, etc. that tend to come with higher incomes, but he may as well have said this).  Beyond the fact that we should have known what we were getting into before becoming academics, I have a hard time finding sympathy for an individual making more than twice the median income of U.S. households as we slowly make our way out of an economic crisis (even controlling for the higher cost of living in certain areas).

The larger question, though, is whether the salary freezes that have frustrated even well-paid academics are temporary or part of a new world order of higher education.  Given rising costs and decreasing budgets, academic pay is likely a double-edged sword.  As Squadratomagico notes, “The larger the gap between what it costs institutions to sustain a full-time line with benefits, and hiring an adjunct, the more adjunctified the university becomes, pure and simple.”  Ultimately, it seems that the solution may need to come from larger public investments in education, which is a double-edged sword in itself.  For the foreseeable future, it appears that we’ll need to revel in the non-monetary benefits of academia if we have a desire to consider ourselves rich.

 

*This post has a soundtrack, which has reentered my consciousness thanks to its excellent use in The Social Network