Professors Playing for Fame and Free Agency

A University of California vice-chancellor was on the phone the other day recruiting a $100,000 scholar. Once upon a simpler time, only professors in business schools, medical schools and law schools could command such major academic salaries--along with chancellors, vice chancellors and deans. Not these days. Free-agent humanists, like free-agent shortstops, are demanding upper incomes, too.

Philosophers now find themselves in bidding wars for wise men with big names--the university equivalent of “Star Search.”

This might seem silly to CEO headhunters or agents for athletes and entertainers, since the upper ranges of academic salaries are still much less than a successful Vegas lounge act will draw, not to mention an arbitrager or a kid fresh out of law school. But the fact is, having joined the money game, institutions of higher education display a greater love of reputation than a love of learning. The values of the star system corrode the life of mind.

Plato wrote in “Republic” that the pursuit of wisdom was incompatible with the pursuit of fortune and glory. Try telling that to today’s marketable humanists. Plato thought the effort necessary for achieving understanding was all-consuming, as it is with earning money or politics. The consolation of philosophy was supposed to be the wisdom it brought, wisdom that made public reputation or private wealth pale by comparison.

So it was no accident that the scholar’s life had always been a modest one. Throughout the Middle Ages, most scholars never married. They were poor. The 1950s college teacher who wore out his corduroys was respected because of what that shiny seat said about his dedication. In time, as salaries rose, college teachers joined the middle class--often apologetically.

All this has now changed. The consolation of the academic life in higher education is no longer as rewarding as higher compensation. Then, when the push for pay begins, the pursuit of wisdom turns into a scramble for reputation. The importance of the classroom, higher education’s high purpose, fades.

A six-figure scholar is not the sort to spend his time grading papers or correcting student grammar. He or she is likely to demand a teaching load of a couple of courses a year, maybe less. Most of the major players prefer to teach the same old thing, at least to undergraduates. A UCLA philosopher tells me that he prepares his lectures on the way to class. University professors are more like talking heads than the real teachers who do all those boring things like writing comments on term papers or keeping office hours. And students who once wrote 25-page papers now do five-page briefs--so much easier to read.

An eminent British philologist describes his teaching in America as being on sabbatical.

Established scholars devote their time to research, where they spend more time writing than reading, because reading is too time-consuming. Scholars simply could not write as often as they do if they had time for reading, too. To read everything that’s been written, on whatever topic, would leave no time to publish one’s own views. Consequently, the new way to read a book is to scan a book review or else read a single chapter, for cocktail party understanding. Salary and reputation cannot wait for years of contemplation. Yet distinguished journals often have subscription lists of less than 500 institutions and individuals; the publishing runs of prestigious academic presses can be even smaller. Scholarly writing is now a form of advertising, more to sell the scholar than ideas.

Since professors are reading less, as more is being written, those on the way to fame and richness must parlay academic reputations by cultivating the VIPs--Very Important Professors. This self-appointed group of scholars, at the better schools, are the arbiters of academic appointments all across the nation. Their judgment is trusted by those who have never read their work, who only know their fine reputations.

We have a self-fulfilling cycle: Important scholars are important because they are said to be important by important scholars. This is most true of interpretive academic disciplines that have no independent measure, where professors are the measure of all things, functioning like literary critics. There are, doubtlessly, exceptions, but a scientist at Cal Tech recently told me that this is even how the Nobel Prize is won. It could, of course, be sour grapes. Yet wisdom does not lend itself to lists. Scholarship is more of a collegial, communal effort--at least it ought to be.

None of this enhances public confidence in higher education or in the use of taxes that pay those fancy salaries--or the tuitions people pay to put their kids through school. Private liberal arts colleges may still do a good classroom job because their support depends on a loyal, generous alumni. In the public sector, the quality of undergraduate instruction is too often compromised; educated students are far less important in the scheme of pay and perquisites than the esteem of peers. A well-known linguist, teaching at an Eastern college, recently turned down big bucks from the University of California because he found undergraduate instruction so appalling and the faculty so indifferent to instruction.

Presidents of public universities claim that they have to pay to field a distinguished faculty. They must compete for scholars if the campus reputation is to thrive. Research universities focus on graduate programs, training grounds for the next generation of scholars and college teachers. Scholars with reputations are said to be necessities as drawing cards for students. But as the quality of undergraduate instruction fades, so does the product of graduate schools--Ph.D. dissertations little better than Master’s theses, not to mention students without values. I suspect public campuses and even graduate schools would do better with professors dedicated to the life of the open mind rather than the open market.

The baseball analogy proves instructive. Before free agency reached 1980s frenzy, only a superstar could command a few million dollars. Now someone who hits .250 does. The same phenomenon, minus a couple of zeros, will repeat itself with academic salaries as those scholars of repute discover the rewards of speed on the career paths. But how to measure a free-agent scholar? Where are the stats for a heavy-hitting historian? A smooth-fielding philosopher? The pursuit of wisdom has no box score.

Higher education is best approached from the bottom up, not top down, by providing decent wages and working conditions to grammar school teachers first. That’s where the real work begins. Distributing money more diffusely would also help, emphasizing community colleges and four year schools, instead of pouring so much of the pot into elite universities and the favored few.

Directors of foundations and dispensers of federal grants who share complaints about America’s universities ought to reexamine how they distribute funds, whether they themselves have been playing the fame-fortune game. The money given out, with all the best intentions, may be partly to blame for the loss of values in the schools.

The great American superstar may be a natural in left field but he doesn’t have a key position in the lecture hall. Educators ought to be coaching students to write real papers for real teachers who will really read them.

America has the best universities money can buy; that may be the problem.