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All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell, Animal Farm
I WOULD like to start by telling a story.
Two young assistant professors were hired in the same year by Sell-Out University. Socrates Smith was a brilliant young literary theorist who had just completed a PhD at August University, where, as a teaching assistant, he had been paid $6,000 a year to teach two sections of French each semester, an assignment that consumed a great deal of his time, left little opportunity for original research, and somewhat delayed his progress toward a degree. Mary Macrobucks was a brilliant young microbiologist who had just completed a PhD at Hi-Tech A&M, where, as a research assistant, she had been paid $8,500 a year to cowrite dozens of research studies, an assignment that consumed some of her time, launched her research program, and somewhat hastened her progress toward a degree.
Socrates packed his family and furniture into an inexpensive rental truck and, after a long, hard drive, arrived on campus the same day as Mary, whose moving expenses were all paid by the university. Socrates's teaching load in his first year was among the heaviest in the romance languages department-six courses a year, with four preparations and no student assistance. Mary received $200,000 in special-equipment funding to set up her laboratory and begin her research program, had two research assistants, and did no teaching her first year on campus.
Five years later, when both professors came up for tenure, Socrates had taught-without teaching assistance-twenty-eight classes (he had had two semesters in which his teaching load was generously reduced by one course) and had published-without research assistance-six scholarly articles in refereed journals. During the same period, Mary had taught-with teaching assistants to cover the labs-ten classes (the maximum teaching load in the biology department was three courses a year, but active researchers normally did less and often did not teach at all) and had cowritten fifty articles and abstracts with colleagues and graduate students. Socrates had presented papers at ten major professional meetings, at an average personal cost of only $300 each meeting for hotels, meals, and the like (the department paid for transportation). Mary had presented papers at twenty meetings, with all expenses (transportation, room, board, registration fees, and so forth) paid either out of her NSF grants or by the biology department.
And then there was the matter of salary. Socrates's starting salary was $24,000; Mary's was $29,000. Socrates's increments averaged 5% a year, while Mary's averaged 8%. The result was that after six years, Socrates's salary had risen to $30,500, while Mary's was $42,500. The salary increases, by the way, were not based on a perceived difference in quality between the two professors. Both were rated high to very high in both teaching and research, but the administration's commitment to respond to “market pressures” meant that everyone in Mary's department received more than did corresponding faculty members in other, less favored departments (mostly in the humanities). Socrates and Mary were both highly regarded on campus and were generally thought of-normally with no pangs of conscience-as colleagues.
The story of Socrates and Mary is based on exactly what happens as a matter of course on many, if not most, university campuses today. The discrepancies in treatment and rewards become even greater if we compare Socrates with his cross-campus “colleagues” in engineering, medical, law, or other professional schools. This tale illustrates what may be the most serious problem faced by institutions of higher education today: disciplinary discrimination. It is one thing for industry to look only at the infamous bottom line and to compromise human values when responding to economic priorities: however, for the institutions most responsible for the moral and intellectual formation of the nation to ignore these values and to ape the materialistic priorities of the marketplace is something else entirely.
Take a moment to think of the situation on your own college or university campus. (If you are from a smaller institution oriented primarily toward the liberal arts, you are less likely to perceive the conditions I am describing; if you are from a large state university, they will be more apparent.) How do the salaries in your department compare with those in psychology, computer science, and physics (not to mention, of course, business, law, engineering, and medicine)? The faculty groups most comparable in salary with your department are likely to be found in the arts, education, home economics, and nursing (professions, like the humanities, in which women are particularly prominent, a point to which I will return later).
But don't just compare salaries; do some investigative work and you'll find how pervasive the inequality really is.
I'm not necessarily saying that every humanities faculty is worse off than every other faculty in every one of these areas, but I do suggest that most of us are simply not as well supported in these areas as our counterparts are in the more favored disciplines. Salary is by no means the only consideration, but it symbolizes very well our second-class campus citizenship.
We are reminded from time to time that it was not for economic gain that we went into academia. And there is no doubt that this proposition is true. We are all glad that we set our own schedules rather than work a routine 8–5 day; that we can conveniently do much of our work in our own studies at home rather than have to be in the office all the time; that our profession entails the excitement of teaching rather than the routine of producing or selling products; and that we have the security of tenure, the pleasant social and professional relationships with other intellectuals, and the constant presence of art, theater, music, lectures, and so forth.
Of course, being a professor permits a comfortable, challenging, important, life-affirming existence. But note that the management, geology, and computer-science professors whose salaries are higher than those of their counterparts in the humanities also have all the other intrinsic benefits that come from holding a university professorship. It isn't that the better-paid professors give up some of the other benefits in order to justify the higher salaries they receive; on the contrary, they have it all. They truly are privileged colleagues.
But this is a contradiction in terms. Collegiality and privilege are mutually exclusive. Collegiality implies equality, rather than hierarchy; mutual respect, rather than envy; cooperation, rather than competition. True colleagues are true equals; on a university campus faculty colleagues form a community of teachers, scholars, researchers, artists, and other professionals, with shared values and mutual respect. To quote from the excellent recent book American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled, by Howard Bowen and Jack Schuster, collegiality refers to the
membership of faculty persons in a congenial and sympathetic company of scholars in which friendships, good conversations, and mutual aid can flourish. Collegiality contains in addition the ideal that knowledge within any one field is worth as much as knowledge in any other field and therefore that no faculty member should receive preferment over any other simply on the basis of academic field. (54)
But somewhere something went wrong. At some point some on the faculty became more equal than others.
Until the middle to late 1970s, there was little preferential treatment given to any segment of the professoriat. Salaries differed very little from one discipline to another (with exceptions for some of the professional schools, such as law and medicine). Think, those of you who have been in the profession for a while: when did you first hear about “market value”? In most cases, the answer is about a decade or a decade and a half ago. But at that time we-intellectual elitists with heads in the sand that we are-paid little or no attention, assuming that we were above such a mundane consideration as a few dollars more being paid to some of our colleagues. A crime was committed and the victims did not complain. Pandora had opened the box.
Once we chose to look the other way, it was evident that no one was going to call administrators to task for pandering to the pressures from the academic blackmailers who threatened to take their talents and their research grants to the private sector if they weren't bought off with higher salaries. And so weaker-willed administrators caved in and paid up. By now, disciplinary discrimination has become so pervasive that it is accepted as inevitable.
It is surprising to me how quiet we have all been about this situation, how easily we have accepted our second-class citizenship. We in the humanities, the very core of higher education, have opted out of administration and have allowed certain kinds of scientists and social scientists-a whole new academic managerial class-to co-opt the game. We've stood by and allowed the rustlers to assume the task of guarding the cattle.
Some years ago, when I worked for the vice president for academic affairs of the University of Missouri system, I took note of the academic disciplines of the fifteen major administrators in the four-campus system (people with the titles of president, vice president, chancellor, dean of arts and sciences, graduate dean). Eleven were from the sciences and mathematics; three were social scientists; one was a humanist. The effect of having major administrative decisions (including salary determinations) made by such an unbalanced group is obvious.
But, again, salary is not all. Take a look at the concept of research. How many of you are actively engaged in “research”? Some of you, especially those from social-science or education backgrounds, might legitimately claim to be. But most of us aren't researchers at all. We are scholars; we do scholarship, not research. Ask many high-ranking administrators what research means and they will respond in terms of grants. Many influential academic administrators define research as grant dollars generated; for them, research means getting grants. Nothing else. You receive a Guggenheim Fellowship and write a brilliant book on poetic theory-and you haven't done any research. But if you are a chemist who receives a $1 million grant from Dow Chemical to perfect a formula for soybean fertilizer and who doesn't publish anything-then you are an acclaimed researcher.
Research is no longer perceived as a product-a book or an article-but as a process: bringing in grant dollars to the university. Maybe that isn't the way it always was, but that's the bottom line in today's new game, in which humanists no longer control the vocabulary, the processes, or the positions of decision-making power. The greatest rewards go to those who are most successful according to these new rules.
There are some who find no fault with this state of affairs. I have discussed disciplinary discrimination with faculty members from several disciplines.
In my department there is currently a great deal of discontent about salaries. Much of the unease can be ascribed to the recent publication of some aggregate figures that indicate that salaries in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures are among the lowest on campus. These data can be misleading for several reasons: a relatively small number of faculty members in each rank and each department is examined; the number of years faculty members have spent at their current ranks, a crucial factor, is ignored; lumping together many engineers and other professional school faculty members inevitably distorts campuswide salary figures. Many of my departmental colleagues looked at these figures and reached the conclusion that as individuals and in comparison with the entire faculty on campus they are badly rewarded. Other colleagues hear of very high salaries supposedly paid to some language and literature professors elsewhere and conclude that our salaries are far below national norms even in our own discipline. If only they were at another university, these disgruntled colleagues seem to believe, they would do much better economically. But that isn't really the problem either: the Indiana tax rate, the Lafayette cost of living (especially the price of homes), the excellent Purdue fringe-benefits package, and other factors make our salaries, though admittedly not the highest in the field, competitive with those paid to humanist scholars at most other universities.
Actually, the major influence contributing to the salary problem on my campus is simply disciplinary discrimination: the commitment by the administration to meeting market demands in areas such as management and engineering. If, over the last several years, faculty members in other schools on campus had not been receiving increases at substantially higher rates than have liberal arts faculty members, our salaries would be at least a few thousand dollars higher, and there would be less perception that we are underpaid.
Nearly everyone who has recently written on the subject of salaries comments on how salary differential by discipline lowers morale:
I can attest to increasing anxiety, depression, selfpity, and withdrawal among humanities faculty members, and I share the conviction of many academics that the quality of young people entering the humanities fields has fallen in recent years. Yes, there are still some brilliant and dedicated graduates beginning teaching careers today. But too many of the best and the brightest see what is happening to today's humanities faculty and opt for careers in fields that earn both more money and more respect. Disciplinary discrimination has more potential than anything else I can imagine to change the nature and lower the quality of the university experience.
As Bowen and Schuster state clearly, the entire university enterprise, not merely the humanities, is threatened by the creation of a first- and second-class professoriat. Again, they refer to the essential concept of collegiality:
A college or university to be maximally effective must be a community to which people belong and which they care about, not merely an entity for which they work and from which they receive paychecks … A college or university is likely to prosper in proportion to the commitment of the faculty to the campus community. … The productivity of an organization depends heavily on the character of the work environment it is able to provide. The academic community … has resisted … differential pay among academic disciplines among which there are differing market conditions. The prevailing attitude has been that all faculty are members of a collegial organization, that each contributes in his or her own way, and that the financial rewards should be more or less similar for persons of equal seniority. (236–37, 249)
Imagine what would happen to public-school education if teachers were paid different salaries according to the subjects they taught. Keep art, English, and foreign language salaries relatively low, and boost salaries for accounting, math, and science. How long do you think it would take for the already weak public schools to collapse completely? Actually, I have heard serious proposals for providing salary incentives in order to attract quality teachers to hard-to-hire areas such as mathematics and the sciences. Fortunately, in the case with which I am most familiar, the idea was rejected as potentially destructive. At least for now.
Maybe it's time for a little bit of activism on the part of humanists. Little was done to combat racial segregation until blacks themselves started to stage sitins and demand their rights. If blacks hadn't initiated the civil-rights movement and insisted on full social equality, they'd still be riding on the back of the bus. If women hadn't demanded the right to vote, equal opportunity of admittance to educational programs, equal pay for equal work, and much more, they'd still be waiting for men to give them these things.
If we humanists want to regain full equal partnership in the modern academic enterprise and reestablish collegiality on our campuses, we have to take the lead ourselves in making our plight and our demands known. Though somewhat tempted, I do not recommend extreme activist means such as taking over the dean's or, better yet, the president's office and issuing a set of nonnegotiable demands. I don't recommend parades, fiery speeches, and work stoppages. But we do need to take at least some lessons from the black, feminist, and other (relatively) successful activist movements of our time. It is, by the way, not coincidental that the disciplines least rewarded today are precisely those in which women are most prominent: the arts and humanities, along with professional areas such as education, nursing, library science, and home economics. At least to a certain extent, humanities activism in academic circles might be linked with feminist activism.
One thing that we have to make clear is that this is not a matter of “comparable worth.” It is totally wrong to suggest that the academic work of a humanist is comparable to that of an engineer or an accountant, as the case is sometimes made that the work of a secretary is comparable to that of a truck driver and therefore worth comparable remuneration. No: ours is a matter of “equal pay for equal work.” We are not comparable to other professors, we are equal to them in every way. Our activities are defined in the same terms of teaching, research, and service as the activities of all other professors are. We all do the same job.
None of us comes from a campus where there is more than a single faculty senate or where the bylaws, the benefits package, the voting privileges, and so forth are defined differently for certain segments of the faculty. No, it is always the official assertion that there is a single faculty with a single set of rules, benefits, and perquisites. We have to show that these rules have been applied unequally, arbitrarily, and capriciously. And we have to insist that restitution be made.
I earnestly implore you to speak up, forcefully and often, to make the case known. We need to gather specific information about conditions on our individual campuses, to ask why whenever administrators state that they have to respond to “market pressures,” and to say no loud and clear whenever we must. Chairs of humanities departments have a special obligation to their colleagues to press the case. And I'm just quixotic enough to think that if we presented it right we could win a class-action lawsuit for millions of dollars in back pay.
To proclaim implicitly that all professors are equal but some are more equal than others is to abandon all pretense to collegiality. Whereas we in higher education should set society's standards for fairness and honesty, we have chosen to accept uncritically the lowest common denominator-raw economic blackmail-as our policy. No corporate leader confronts a moral quandary as acute as that of the academic presidents, provosts, and deans who cave in to some vague concept of “market demands” in order to justify higher salaries, reduced workloads, and other types of preferential treatment for some segments of a university faculty. If it is necessary to perpetuate the caste system on campus in the short run in order to offer quality programs in certain areas, let us at least acknowledge the nature and magnitude of the problem as we go about correcting it.
We need to find university presidents with the integrity to go to state legislators and argue for special funds not to meet market demands for faculty members in high-demand fields but to restore collegiality and overall excellence to the university as a whole. We need university administrators-presidents, vice presidents, provosts, deans, and department chairs-who have the moral and intellectual stature to do what is right, rather than what is expedient.
I don't think that salaries and privileges accorded those in the most favored disciplines should be lowered or compromised in order to achieve equity and balance (although I recognize that many will affirm that the rich should pay to help the poor). The job, rather, is to invest the energy and money needed to raise the standards for those currently discriminated against so that these standards equal those for the academic elite. It is not acceptable to sigh and say that disciplinary discrimination is a general practice and there is nothing we can do about it. Remember that it was once a general practice to refuse university admittance to black high school graduates, to have our classrooms and laboratories in buildings that were inaccessible to handicapped men and women, and to exclude women from senior faculty ranks. It has cost many millions of dollars to rectify these circumstances, but few doubt that everyone-the faculty, the students, and the nation as a whole- is better off for making the changes.
One of the distinctive characteristics of the United States throughout its history has been a sense of justice. On our campuses we do not discriminate by sex, race, national origin, religion, or physical handicap. How tragic it is that we have chosen the academic disciplines as the scene for compromising our most cherished values.
The author is Professor of Spanish and Head of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Purdue University. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar East, 1–3 June 1989, in Athens, Georgia.
Blum, Debra E. “Professors of Engineering Continue to Earn the Highest Average Salaries.” Chronicle of Higher Education 24 May 1989: A14.
Bowen, Howard, and Jack Schuster. American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.
“High Education Goals: Low Salary Increases.” Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 1988–89. Academe, Bulletin of the AAUP Mar.-Apr. 1989: 2–73.
© 1990 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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