Across the board, according to the Chronicle, the highest paid employees at research universities are not presidents. They are physicians.

Generally hired to teach at the university's hospital, a medical school professor can make over a million dollars with a combination of incomes--a school salary and the hefty fees charged in medical practice.

For Harvard, the figures look different because the University does not own its teaching hospitals.

As a result, Tosteson is the only person from the medical school on the University's top-five list, as compared to Yale, Columbia and Cornell, whose top earners are cardiothoracic surgeons and opthamologists, several of whom make more than a million.

The absence of non-medical professors from the Chronicle's lists is not surprising to many in the field of higher education.

"We do a salary survey. This year, 1994-95, salary increases were 0.7 percent when adjusted for inflation," said Iris Molotsky, spokesperson for the College and University Personnel Association. "It marked the first time in the '90s that real salaries have risen in two consecutive years."

Without the benefit of doctor's fees, the mean professorial salary at large private universities was $105,480, according to Academe's March-April 1995 issue