Colleagues described Salhanick as "eminent." In 1971, a $500,000 chaired professorship was established specifically to dissuade him from pursuing opportunities at other universities, according to the History of Named Chairs published by the Secretary of the University.

Salhanick said he felt pressured by changes in his department to surrender his chair.

"The problem was that there was a new head of a department going in a different direction. I was the only person doing biological science in the department," he says.

Salhanick was "bounced around a little bit," faculty in the medical area say, each time to a smaller office. His office was moved to another building, outside of his department, making it more difficult, he says, to pursue his research--which is particularly necessary in the SPH where professors are responsible for raising large portions of their funding for salary and research through outside grants.

Faculty say Salhanick's department was never particularly lab science-oriented but since a change in department heads, it became even less so. Its name was changed from the Department of Population Sciences to the Department of Population and International Health.

Salhanick is a lab scientist--his initial work was done at the Harvard Medical School, not the SPH--and this shift in the department meant pursuing his research interests was more difficult.

"As a department reorients itself, you get more and more reoriented in the grant process. The process of getting money was not as difficult as getting general support for those research directions from the department," he says.

Salhanick says he has observed a general shift in the philosophy and goals of faculty and administration.

"In my opinion, academic relationships don't conform to big-business relationships," Salhanick said.

"In business, you pay for a certain kind of productivity. It depends on how many apples you sell. In the university, it may depend on how many ideas you create and stimulate. If you put an apple on the balance, you get a weight. If you put an idea on the balance, you don't get a weight--or you may even get a negative weight," he adds.

No Standard

Other faculty expressed concern that the SPH has no standard for how much to offer a retiring professor.

"I think there should be a public, uniform policy. The school should say, 'Yes, we will create incentives [and] we've identified this formula,'" says Joseph D. Brain, Drinker professor of environmental physiology in the faculty of public health.

Robert H. Hayes, Caldwell professor of business administration and senior associate dean for faculty development, was on the committee charged with developing the incentive plan now used at the Business School.

"There has to be an objective formula so that all people feel they are being treated according to a rule that they understand, and not some friendship or deal," Hayes says.

The goal of the incentive plan, according to Hayes, was to facilitate faculty turnover, bringing new ideas into the institution. With the end of mandatory retirement, research universities face the possibility of rising faculty ages and a longer wait on the part of younger faculty for the opening of tenured positions.