Few other institutions have such a uniform system for determining junior faculty salaries, says Associate Dean Phyllis Keller. But no such scale exists for tenured Faculty members, all of whose salaries Rosovsky determines on an individual basis. Administrators are stingy about the statistics they will reveal about full professors' salaries, but they insist that those figures are also mostly a function of age and experience, Nozick's case apparently notwithstanding.
The Faculty's method of fixing salaries is unusual not only in its low regard for marketplace realities but also in its tight consolidation of authority. At most other universities, says Gerrity, department chairman have a hand in setting their colleagues' wages. Princeton, for example, has no scale for junior or senior professors; a faculty committee determines all salaries based on an elaborate series of recommendations from department members.
When the dean sits down each year to determine salary raises, Gerrity explains, he will start by making broad adjustments without looking at specific names, deciding the rate at which each general range of salaries should rise.
But Harvard administrators state with pride that Harvard does not have "superstars" on its Faculty--professors paid for national reputation rather than experience. While this policy may boost morale in the ranks of the Faculty, it invariably hinders Harvard's recruitment of top scholars, officials say. "We're competing against institutions that have star systems," says Gerrity with a sigh. "You find out when you go after that one person you want that he's a star, and his institution is either matching what we're offering or bettering it. They've just decided they're going to put their eggs in that one basket."
Gerrity and other administrators demur when asked to cite specific recruiting efforts that have broken down over the issues of salary. "There are all kinds of reasons people withdraw from being considered for tenured openings," says Robert Kaufman. Gerrity's predecessor as associate dean for financial affairs. And officials flatly deny that any professor has ever left Harvard out of dissatisfaction with his salary. "I've been dean for nine years," says Rosovsky, "and I can't think of a single individual who left here on a salary issue."
The name of Steven Weinberg invariably comes up when this question is raised. Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, left Harvard last year for a reported six-figure salary at the University of Texas at Austin. "Steven Weinberg wanted to stay here," Rosovsky says. "He left because of his wife," who joined the faculty of the University of Texas law school. Weinberg himself has an unlisted telephone number and was unavailable for comment.
Faculty administrators state with equal conviction that Harvard has not lost any of its tenured scientists to better paying jobs in industry, although they acknowledge that many junior professors make that jump. Here, the name Walter Gilbert comes up: another Nobel Laureate, Gilbert announced this year his plans to leave the Faculty to run Biogen, the genetic engineering company he founded. Gilbert's case is a special one, administrators say--he was not strictly lured away by industry.
Kaufman, who left Harvard in 1980 to become headmaster of Doerfield Academy, has perhaps the most perceptive view of the question of salary competition between Harvard and other universities--one that points up the ultimate incongrapy of wheeling and dealing in the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of a university, "Very few faculty members would ever admit they left Harvard for a better officer," he says. "In an academy, that's just not an acceptable reason."
'We all saw next year as the first time we might be able to really do something' about raising real faculty salaries. --Melissa Gerrity
'I've been dean for nine years, and I can't think of a single individual who left here on a salary issue.' --Henry Rosovsky