Mon 30 Nov 2009
Afford To Retire
Posted by David under Cost Cutting Ideas, Faculty at 12:58 pm
An anonymous professor (call him Professor X) writes:
Just saw you want to hack into my salary, Dave. One aspect of the situation you may or may not have thought of (no one mentions it in comments that I saw): what hit the endowment also of course hit retirement funds of faculty members, so the question arises of when (if ever) a possibly quite significant number of faculty now in their 50s and 60s will be able to afford to retire. I’m thinking, for me, never, especially if I’m flatlining or worse on my salary, and I know others in this age bracket who are thinking the same thing. Is it good for Williams if lots of us hang on into our 70s? Our 80s? Our 90s? With no new faculty slots for youngsters, because we aren’t giving ours up? As one colleague put it, “Well, they can freeze my salary forever, and I won’t be able to retire, and they can start cutting my salary, and I won’t be able to retire….” The demographics could get ugly.
Comments:
1) X is not the same anonymous professor who described visiting professor hiring procedures. EphBlog’s sources are legion.
2) Previous discussions of faculty salary here and here. And, yes, I have been writing on this topic for more than 5 years.
3) I have worried for years, as have other higher ed watchers, about the intersection of tenure and the end of mandatory retirement ages for faculty. Assume that you are, say (pdf), Lawrence Kaplan ($223,184) or Stephen Sheppard ($220,610) or Jay Pasachoff ($212,472). (Annual salary/benefits in parentheses.) Just what incentive do you have to retire? Sure, it might be nice to have some more free time, to not have to teach all those classes. But, if your savings are down, it sure is tempting to stay for another year or two or ten. After all, once you retire, you can’t come back. You lose the option of earning that fat salary.
4) When I have investigated this issue in the past, I have been told that Williams has never had a problem with faculty not retiring when they “should.” The College, by offering various incentives, has been able to get professors to retire when it wants them to. I just worry that this won’t always be true and, moreover, that it could become a big problem very fast. Right now, if a professor tries to stay on, Williams can point out (correctly!) that this just isn’t done. It isn’t the Williams way. Everyone before him retired at the appropriate time and so should he. But, as soon as one or two professors refuse to go, this sort of moral suasion via community standards disappears.
5) What should be done? First, end life-time tenure. Going forward, an award of tenure should be for an explicit time period: 25 years or however many years until age 65 or whatever. This, obviously, won’t solve the problem in the near term, but trustees like Greg Avis should always be thinking about positioning Williams 50 years from now. Second, bribe current faculty members into, voluntarily, swapping their current life-time tenure for the same fixed period contract. An extra $5,000 or $10,000 per year now (along with the (mostly) built-in raises to come) is probably more attractive to the typical associate professor than some hypothetical keep-teaching-even-though-Williams-doesn’t-want-me option to be used decades in the future.
6) If this professor really wants to protect his salary, then I would urge him to take the realities of the budget crisis much more seriously. The reason that Williams does not have enough money to pay him what he wants (and deserves!) is because it is wasting so much money on other stuff. Start here.
I would Cancel the Bolin Fellowships (200k) Close the Boston Investment Office (1 million), End all one or two year positions (1 million), Cancel Questbridge (200k), End Green Spending (2 million), Close the Office of Campus Life (200k), Stop Giving to Local Charity, (750k), Make Significant Cuts in High Salaries (2.5 million), Cut the Budget for WCMA (1.4 million), Cut Visiting Professors (500k) and Cut Faculty Benefits (200k). Total savings of about $10 million.
The best way to avoid cuts in faculty salaries is to push for cuts in other areas. As it is, all (?) that the Administration and Trustees hear from the faculty is a demand to not cut anything. The sooner you and your colleagues cancel the Bolin, for starters, the sooner they will take your opinions more seriously.
7) If I were a Williams professor, I would never retire. I would love teaching so much that they would have to drag my cold dead body out of the classroom.
8) I thank Professor X for sharing his views with us. The more that these important issues are discussed throughout the Williams community, the better.
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52 Responses to “Afford To Retire”
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hwc says:
Throwing the “tenure card” down is certainly among the weakest of the many possible arguments for lifting the faculty pay freeze. As DK suggests, the easy answer to that one is to simply end the tenure system.
Get out your popcorn and lean back to watch the show as colleges around the country (students, faculty, alumni, et al) suddenly realize that “this budget-cutting thing” is not some hypothetical fiction and that it is a zero-sum game. If you don’t gore one ox, you have to gore another.
I disagree with DK’s suggestion to continue the pay freezes for a couple of reasons. First, continuing to address the budget shortfalls with band-aids puts off the eventual systemic cuts that must take place. Second, peer schools are planning to life pay freezes next year; Williams would find itself at a competitive disadvantage. The fact that they would even considering hiring Bernard Moore suggests that Wiliams must already be having extreme difficulty attracting qualified candidates (hard as that is for me to believe).
Derek says:
A couple of quick points on this:
1) To be consistent, even if I agree with this professor, I need to say: I cannot imagine why this person needs to be anonymous.
2) If Williams ends tenure as it now exists I’m not certain what effect it would have. Let’s say Williams gives tenure for 25 years. First thing that happens is that the AAUP starts sniffing around, and Williams’ reputation drops long before the first person’s tenure expires. The second thing that happens is you consign young PhD’s to knowing they become most vulnerable at the two stages of their careers when they can least afford it — the beginning, which they learn to live with, and then at the end, which they may not be able to live with. The third thing that happens is that Williams loses professors once this policy is enacted. Third, what happens when that timeline expires? The expiration of tenure would not mean the expiration of a job. All it would mean would be that you could then theoretically have a post-tenure review with some teeth to get rid of deadwood that I do not think Williams has. In other words, I’m not certain what benefits you think Williams would accrue from this given that an untenured senior person would still be in their job and in serious senior status to boot. Start getting rid of those people, even if they “lose” tenure in your scenario, and once again, AAUP is sniffing around and Williams’ reputation takes a huge shot.
3) I still question this assertion that Williams does not have enough money for raises. And I would imagine that the Williams economy will look better this January than last, and will look better January 2011 than it will in 2010. And so I’d be willing to bet that faculty swallowing a salary freeze now are going to expect a commensurate salary hike when things are substantially better.
dcat
Ken Thomas '93 says:
Dear anonymous troll,
Nice to meet you. Friend of David’s, eh?
David says:
1) “I still question this assertion that Williams does not have enough money for raises.” Just to be clear, I think (like hwc) that Williams does have enough money for CPI-linked raises. The endowment looks much better now then it did when we were discussing these issues in March. So, while I still want to see lots and lots of cuts, I do not think that we need to forego raises and/or trim larger salaries. But, at the same time, if the Administration decided to do so, I think that would be defensible as well.
2) “Williams would find itself at a competitive disadvantage” I think that this sort of talk is mostly gibberish. First, incoming students care zero about these issues, so our yield is unaffected. Second, to the extent that Williams competes against other schools for faculty, the coming year or two will generate such a glut of applicants relative to open spots that Williams will still be able to get new professors that are as good as the ones it was hiring 5 years ago. Third, to the extent that you really worry about a competitive disadvantage, then solve the problem by adjusting junior faculty salaries while freezing senior salaries.
3) “Williams’ reputation drops”
Among whom? Yes, I can imagine a world in which Williams offers 25 year tenure while Amherst offers life-time tenure and that this difference would cause some faculty to choose Amherst over Williams. But these losses would be trivial in the larger scheme because, as described above, the new Ph.D. applicant glut is huge. And, as well, many/most of the new hires that Williams has “lost” in the past have gone to research universities, many with finances infinitely more shakey than ours. Do you think that lifetime tenure is as safe a financial proposition at a California state school as a 25 year tenure contract from Williams?
Huh? You really think that there are professors at Williams who a) Can get another equal job (in terms of pay/teaching load/benefits and b) Are so concerned about this that they would switch to another (financially stronger?) school with a different policy? Again, tenured Williams professors already have tenure. None would be forced to switch.
Exactly correct. This is just what you need to avoid the concern raised by Professor X, that faculty would refuse to retire when they really can’t do the job anymore.
Derek says:
Dave –
We’ve talked some of these issues over a gazillion times before and so it’s not worth hashing over them again. Once again it’s clear to me that you think you know more about the profession than I do. But can I ask you nicely not to refer to a professor’s views of the professoriate as gibberish? I engage with you because I think you are operating out of good faith. But when you presume to know more about my profession than I do and when you s=dismiss it with words like gibberish, it re-enforces all of the things many of us think about you.
Yes, many Williams professors would be in a position to move on to other jobs. You have this bizarre view of what Williams is. When it is convenient for you you dismiss the ability of Williams professors to move on to good jobs. Then again, when it is convenient you seem to deny that there are any other good jobs out there. If I were a Williams professor with a 25-year tenure clock I would apply for jobs every year. And even if every professor does not get a bite, guess which ones would? Yep. The best ones.
Yes, cutting tenure would hurt the college’s reputation (and if it did not do so immediately, the possibility of being on the AAUP’s shit list might not help). It would certainly harm the college’s reputation vis a vis our equals, such as Sawrthmore or Amherst, which would not do much for us nationally.
And again: No need for anonymity from that professor.
dcat
David says:
Derek,
1) I apologize for the use of the word “gibberish.” Your point on the importance of assuming good faith is well-taken.
2) I think it would be helpful to get into specifics:
To be clear, my position is:
Williams professors, we all agree, are wonderful, talented and hard-working. EphBlog praises them all. But the world of academia is so competitive and the pay/benefits/requirements at Williams already so high (top 5% of all schools), then very few could move.
Analogy: The members of the Williams mens soccer team are all wonderful, talented and hard-working. But very, very few of them (less than 10%) could play professional soccer.
But let’s get into specifics so that we can make progress. Consider the Williams history department. How many of the 16 tenured members of the department could get a job elsewhere with equal or higher pay/benefits/requirements?
I pick History on purpose because, obviously, it is the field which makes the best use of your professional knowledge.
rory says:
*sees the Bolin bait*
*ignores it*
frank uible says:
See altruism in academia – alive and healthy.
Derek says:
Dave –
All of them would get jobs. I will not drag specific names into this debate who did not ask to be dragged into this debate.
The soccer analogy is silly — Williams has fine DII soccer players, but Williams is not to academia what DIII is to professional sports. In the academic world Williams is not the minor leagues. It is the majors, and high majors at that. But unlike the majors, there are not only 30 teams.
The point: Slap Williams faculty in the face and they will go elsewhere. Maybe not next year. Maybe not all to what we would see as Williams caliber institutions. But we would lose lots of folks. And our best would have many very good options. And losing our best would be the biggest problem.
In any case, Williams is not about to get rid of tenure. And if Williams is smart it will not freeze faculty salaries. When you screw your faculty, you end up screwing your institution. Williams has no interest in doing either, I hope.
dcat
hwc says:
I thought Williams was the high majors, too. Then, I look a the mediocre qualifications of the new President and the abysmal qualification of what was, apparently, the best minority candidate for a political science job and I have to wonder? Maybe the location is an real impediment? I don’t know.
rory says:
@Derek: it ain’t worth it. we’ve got all of hwc’s and david’s baits…bolin, moore, endowments falling faculty disrespecting, anonymous e-mails on which to base a more global claim, rational actor based theories of what will happen.
it’s a cornucopia of the same-old, same-old sky-is-falling concern trolling masquerading as something new.
Derek says:
Rory –
Yep. hwc’s last comment in particular reminded me that just because I hear a jackass braying in the field I should not feel any need to bray back.
dcat
David says:
Derek: Please try not to mislead our readers.
The issue is not: Would history professors from Williams be able to get “jobs” stocking shelves at Walmart or teaching lecture classes for low pay at the local Community College. The issue is: Could they get “jobs with equal or higher pay/benefits/requirements.”
Again, I am making an empirical claim.
Rory classifies this fact as “faculty disrespecting.” But it is what it is. The first step in having an intelligent opinion about faculty policies (in terms of pay, raises, benefits and so on) is to have accurate knowledge about the job market for history professors.
Since you are quick to call out various anonymous professors as “cowards,” I had hoped that you would be willing to use your knowledge of the history professor job market to educate all of us on this topic. If you would rather not talk about “specific names,” that is fine. But surely you are honest enough to admit that not every single member of the department could get an equivelent job elsewhere?
No one wants to “Slap Williams faculty in the face.” Do you think that declining to give, say, Professor Charles Dew a raise is a “slap” given that Williams is already paying him over $179,000 per year?
PTC says:
My understanding is that Williams pay for subject matter expert visiting profs is already very low… not sure about full timers? I would guess the more technical experts could make more at larger institutions with big research departments… am I wrong?
David’s suggestions would be academic suicide. You do not get good people without paying them well. The better profs and pros who can work elsewhere will go and publish and research elsewhere- and Williams would be dead in the water with sub standard faculty.
I don’t understand any of this logic… trying to save a dime at the expense of academic excellence at a place like Williams (a small rural elite college) does not make a bit of sense to me.
rory says:
@David: and@Derek:
Kaneblog: where writing this:
“Slap Williams faculty in the face and they will go elsewhere. Maybe not next year. Maybe not all to what we would see as Williams caliber institutions. But we would lose lots of folks. And our best would have many very good options. And losing our best would be the biggest problem.”
is misleading readers because you said this as well:
“All of them would get jobs.”
SMH.
PTC says:
180k a year is not a lot of money. To be honest, I am shocked at how little some of the higher paid profs are making. They must stay because they like the place.
PTC says:
I don’t know Dave… looks to me like the competition is pretty damn fierce.
PTC says:
2008 salary comparisons
College Average Salary
1. Wellesley College $139,100
2. Barnard College $132,000
3. Amherst College $131,700
4. Claremont McKenna College $129,900
5. Pomona College $129,100
6. Harvey Mudd College $128,500
7. Swarthmore College $126,500
8. Williams College $126,400
9. Middlebury College $125,800
10. Wesleyan University $124,500
Williams pays less than both Amherst and Swarthmore… not sure a pay cut would make much sense?
Here is how it stacks up against University pay.
Top 10 Private Research Universities in Average Salary for Full Professor
University Average Salary
1. Rockefeller University $191,200
2. Harvard University $184,800
3. Stanford University $173,700
4. Princeton University $172,200
5. University of Chicago $170,800
6. Yale University $165,100
7. University of Pennsylvania $163,300
8. Columbia University $162,500
9. New York University $162,400
10. California Institute of Technology $162,200
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/14/aaup
Other institutions are indeed giving raises. If anything, now is the time to offer more to recruit the best faculty and go for the jugular. Institutions that have financial health… institutions like Williams, could clean up in this climate.
Henry Bass says:
I just got the Alum magazine from Berea College in Kentucky. Since I am from Kentucky I have sent them some $ over the years. Berea gets no $ from tuition. All of its students are too poor to afford any tuition. Its entire budget comes from endowment and contributions. Its endowment income is down 25%. The latest issue of the alum review is printed on much cheaper paper and there are 3 rather than 4 issues a year, since every budget at Berea has been cut 25%. And the alum review is spending 25% less this year, like everyone else. There are no faculty complaints about faculty salary cuts.
I doubled my yearly contributiion to Berea. Within a week a got call from a student volunteer thanking me. A real genuine call. Obviously the folks who teach at Berea are not in it for the $.
People far richer than me from richer states than Kentucky can decide whether or not they want to write out biger checks in these hard times to keep the raises coming to the Eph faculty. I will continue to send my limited $ to Berea.
Its up to the rich Eph alum to decide if they want to give the $ in these hard times to keep the raises coming to the Eph faculty.
Derek says:
Ah, David. Reductio ad absurdum is such a desperate measure.
All tenured Williams faculty members would get jobs in academia. Asserting what would be a better job, and presuming that better can be measured in equal pay, is a fool’s errand. Nonetheless, many of our best people would get great jobs. And Williams would be a decidedly lesser school. And that would have a definite impact on Williams’ reputation.
In any case, you still have not addressed the AAUP question. And beyond that, this is a stupid discussion, because Williams is assuredly not considering inane solutions like ending tenure.
Otherwise, what Rory said. And what PTC said in 18: I argued last January that Williams ought to be recruiting while everyone else was cutting back. It was a smart countercyclical solution then and is a smart solution now.
dcat
jeff s' says:
so somewhat less than 10% of williams profs would/could seek employmnt elsewhere under some version of David’s modified tenure proposal.
as previously noted, its not the quantity its the quality.
I believe derek is correct to state that the best would be most likely to seek greener pastures.
This is why voluntary retirement inducements are often not in an organization’s long term interests. And why across the board pay cuts/freezes usually drain an organization of talent.
If 7% of willias profs were to leave and 70% of those leaving were in the top quintile of profs – we would lose 5% of faculty but 25% of our top quintile of profs. I don’t think this is far fetched.
And their replacements might be quite good – but if we were to keep repeating the process – hire new good talent and then lose many of the best to Amherst, Swarthmore and GW – wouldn’t Williams become the equivalent of an AA ball team for the major leagues of academia – or perhaps something akin to the Pittsburgh Pirates?
or does the market mechanism somehow fail in this instance? Perhaps academics a too egg-headed to act in their own rational self-interest.
jeff s' says:
sorry – a bit of new math there.
7% leaving x 70% from top quintile = 5% of 7% total are from top quintile. Departures would constitute 25% of top quintile.
Considering that many williams departments are quite small -top dogs could leave quite a void and really impact students.
now back to Palin…
jeffz says:
Guys, I wouldn’t sweat HWC’s usual bitter, vitriolic trolling. Based on his past track record of criticism (Ex. A: Mukharji, Aroop), targets of his disdain seem to do pretty well for themselves. Indeed, I’d bet that Williams will hire a banner crop of top-credentialed profs despite HWC’s “concerns” — ohhh, woops, never mind, they ALREADY DID:
http://dean-faculty.williams.edu/?page_id=209
The thing to remember about HWC is that he will do his darndest to turn any single good thing that happens at Swarthmore into an indictment of Williams by comparison, and any single bad thing that happens at Williams into a sky-is-falling confirmation of his belief that Williams is hell on earth, especially when compared with God’s earthly kingdom, Swarthmore. For example, had Swarthmore, and not Williams, had a Marshall winner this year, he’d find some snarky way to turn that into an attack on Williams and a tie-in to Bernard Moore’s presence on campus.
David says:
Derek writes:
Again, if you don’t want to educate our readers on this topic, no worries. Just say so. But it really is bad form to mislead them like this. Just what do you mean by “academia” in this sentence? Part time librarian at Mount Greylock High School? $5,000 per year adjunct (with no benefits) at Berkshire Community College?
Morever, I am not just measuring job quality by “pay.” Include every dimension of job quality you like: pay, benefits, teaching load, students quality, colleague quality, support services, and so on. The vast majority of tenured members of the history department could not get a job equal to or better than their Williams position, based on any (reasonable) combination of these attributes.
The fact that you can’t simply admit this makes me take your accusations of cowardice against anonymous faculty members much less seriously.
jeff s writes:
No. I don’t think any/many Williams profs would seek employment elsewhere if Williams went from lifetime tenure to a 25 year tenure contract. My claim is that, regardless of any change, no more than 10% of Williams professors could get a similar quality (pay, benefits, teaching load) job at another school.
Well, this is something that Williams faces now. Somewhat relevant departures include folks like Russ Muirhead, Marc Lynch, Craig Wilder, Jason Wilder, Gary Jacobson, Tim Cook and Bryan Garsten. You could make this problem go away by paying every professor a million dollars per year. Does that make sense?
Of course not. There will always be professors leaving Williams. The issue is balancing the costs and benefits of various policies with regard to faculty retention. If no one ever leaves, you are probably paying way too much. If everyone leaves, you are paying too little.
My goal is to have an informed conversation about just what the job market for Williams professors really looks like. Derek (and others) seems uncomfortable having that discussion.
PTC says:
The job market for extremely well educated bright people in the USA? The job market is always good for those kinds of people Dave. They work at Williams because they like it.
Williams has always been, as an institution, cheap in my mind. Cheap in giving, cheap in pay for services… it gets away with it for several reasons- one of which is the location and it can afford to be cheap- the other is the absolute monopoly it holds in Williamstown- but those that can travel will if you start slashing and burning their earnings. You cannot underpay your top demographic/ most enabled and important population and get away with it for long. I doubt Williams is stupid enough to underpay one of the most powerful populations at the school… no matter how cheap the institution has been in other areas in the past.
JeffZ says:
DK thinks Williams is too generous, PTC too cheap. For the love of God can we please just split the difference and “iterate to agreement”????
rory says:
@David: no one is uncomfortable with a discussion of the job market, david, just with a discussion on your terms about the hypothetical job market you want to imagine.
the fact that you and i can list off a number of faculty who have moved elsewhere should be proof that a good chunk of faculty could get highly attractive jobs if they were to look. Which likely means williams shouldn’t be alienating its faculty because of a hypothetical about 10-20 years from now by an anonymous email to you with no actual details in it. Nor should it alienate potential future faculty.
Nishant says:
Not sure if this is additive, but it shocks me that the average Williams faculty member makes somewhat less many than senior analysts (2 years from undergrad) at investment banks (in a bad year).
What a screwed up world we live in…
frank uible says:
Even my crude inner city roots tell me that it is bad social form to discuss an emotion laden subject of this private type in this manner and in a forum such as this one.
JeffZ says:
I concur with Frank. I realize that Williams’ salaries are, by necessity, public information, but that doesn’t mean we, or in this case the royal (pain in the ass) we David Kane, need to repeatedly publish and scrutinize the salaries of individual Williams employees. Just in really poor taste, and reason 1,892 why those employees generally look upon Ephblog with disfavor, and are usually disinclined to participate.
jeff s' says:
“there will always be professors leaving williams…”
indeed. and the fact that some “stars” leave now suggests just how poorly williams might fare in the future with a modified / reduced tenure offer.
no one has suggested that we titrate compensation to ensure that none of our stars leave. that is spurious and nonsensical – and a waste of my and Ephblog reader’s time.
the question is whether changing a fundamental “benefit” of an academic post – when Williams does have to compete to recruit and retain (by your own admission) top tier faculty – would result in greater net outmigration of current top faculty and lower yield and retention of younger top tier candidates.
I think to argue otherwise – while defensible – ignores the application of rational self-interest on the part of academics. If your argument is that Williams does not need top quintile professors and we should be content with really focusing on those profs that fall into the 40th to 80th percentile range – so be it.
But why subject all of us to years of arguments regarding the evils of affirmative action and how damaging any actions taken by the college might be (in theory or practice) to the quality of students or faculty (narrowly defined), if your advocacy against tenure would almost cetainly achieve the very outcome you have railed against all these years?
Is this a case of myopia in the servics of hypocrisy? Or am I missing something?
David says:
jeff s writes:
Agreed! (And, by the way, you seem like a knowledgeable Eph. You ought to join us as an author.)
My sense, and I could be wrong, is that it would have a trivialdo not have to take the deal. It is optional. They can keep life-time employment. Second, for most new faculty, the difference between lifetime employment and a 30 tenure contract is very small amongst the other criteria that they are considering in deciding on Williams.
a) A new faculty member does not even know if she will ever get tenure, much less that she wants to spend the next 50 years in Williamstown. So, the notion that something that won’t even matter for 8 years (if then) is going to matter that much is suspect. Much more important will be pay, teaching load, resources, spousal employment and so on.
b) Keep in mind, the vast majority of hires do not have options anywhere near as nice as Williams. (That’s why Williams almost always, according (somewhat misleadingly) to Morty, gets its first choice in recruiting.
c) It would make sense for the NESCAC schools to get together on this and make the change simultaneously. They all face this problem.
David says:
Nishant writes:
If by “screwed up” you mean, “does not agree with my moral intuition about fair compensation,” then you’re right. Also, “free” would be another correct replacement.
Compensation in a free society is set by supply and demand. Draw out the supply and demand curves for investment analyst. Compare them to the curves for college professor. Do the same for home health aid. And garbage collector. And Marine sniper.
Does it make sense now?
hwc says:
I take it that you disagree with my assessement of weak to mediocre credentials for Moore and Falk? I don’t think we even need to debate Moore’s lack of credentials. I am still scratching my head wondering how Falk could have been the top candidate with his only relevant experience being a couple of years as Dean of Arts and Sciences at a research university noted for its poor undergrad program? It must have been a weak field, which surprises me. I argued throughout the process that Williams would attract an extraordiarily strong pool of candidates for that position.
Be that as it may, I disagree with DKane’s suggestion to continue the pay freeze; I would rather see Williams make other cuts. I agree with his contention that the Williams faculty would be hard pressed to equal their current gigs. The places they would need to look are not in a hiring mode.
Ronit says:
@David: @Nishant: Money isn’t everything. You should take into account the quality of life enjoyed by tenured Williams professors vs. investment analysts. There are plenty of people who see both jobs as extremely desirable, so there is no shortage of supply of qualified candidates. However, the investment analyst’s high pay is probably more than balanced out by the lack of job security, long hours, lack of a life outside work, and high stress levels.
(also: 2 years out of undergrad makes one a senior associate, I think, not a senior analyst. Senior analysts usually have CFAs, at least 5-10 years of experience, and make a good deal more than Williams profs. That being said, I know more than a few who would give up their high-paying-jobs in a heartbeat if they were offered a tenured professorship at a place like Williams.)
jeff s' says:
“…the vast majority of hires do not have options anywhere near as nice as Williams..”
This may likely be true – but even so it does not necessarily support your argument. Again, its not about quantity its about quality. If only 10% or 20% of (presumably) the best candidates have other competitive offers – wouldn’t this have an adverse effect over time? Seems hard to argue otherwise unless you are saying somthing aklin to all porfessor candidates above say the 60th percentile are “good enough” for Williams students.
“…a new faculty member does not even know if she will get tenure… so the notion that something that won’t matter for eight years (if then) is going to matter that much is suspect”
That is quite plausible.
Although I think the converse could also be true. If getting tenure is the equivalent of legalized professional (and personal) torture on profs and their families, why subject oneself to that kind of treatment if all you will get if you succeed is “tenure light.” I wouldn’t even bother with such a process, myself.
Unless we have some objective data on the mindset and priorities of top caliber candidates, we are debating hypotheticals. At this point we all should know how well managing and leading by theory and ideology alone works.
hwc says:
Let’s play the zero-sum game. I think they cost about the same:
Loan free OR 2% faculty raises?
JeffZ says:
(1) Everything I’ve learned about Falk to date suggests that he was an excellent choice. His credentials as a scholar are impecable, and as an administrator are excellent, and I like what I’ve heard about his tenure at JHU. I’d rather have someone young and energetic with fresh ideas than someone who is potentially calcified by years and years at a place just like Williams. In all events, what we DON’T know are all the things the committee learned about Falk, in personal interviews, in terms of his personality fit, in terms of his vision for Williams, in terms of what colleagues and so forth had to say about him.
(2) HWC, your comments on Bernard Moore extend well beyond one particular visiting professorship, and you damn well know it. You have barely been unable to contain your glee that a Williams professor (and I guarantee you, if it was a white female prof, you’d be a lot less gleeful, but that is another issue entirely) was involved in this sort of embarassing mess. You’ve attempted to generalize from one con artist, with some questionable credentials, but who also without any doubt brought some serious value to campus, was able to work for a little over one year in a visiting professorship at Williams, to a sky-is-falling generalization that Williams is not a desirable place to work and it holds no attraction for scholars of the highest distinction. This is false, as demonstrated by the list of new professors hired by Williams this year, who I guarantee are every bit as well-credentialed, or moreso, than Swarthmore’s most recent set of tenure track hires. Things have gone wrong at Swarthmore, too, That doesn’t mean that Swarthmore as an institution is falling apart. Your main goal on this block is to wait for any negative thing to happen at Williams, and then use this as proof positive that Williams is institutionally bankrupt, or at the very best, a pale immitation of Swarthmore. Well, I’m not buying, and neither are the other regulars familiar with your delight in anything negative associated with Williams.
Lest we forget, as a casual reader of this blog might, notwithstanding the occasional frivolous expenditure (endemic to any organization with a budget in the multi-millions) or the flukey and non-generalizable Bernard Moore fiasco, Williams is in pretty damn good shape, as measured by applicant quality, graduates’ success, respect among peers, grad school admissions, extracurricular accolades, every college ranking out there, and on and on and on. Judging from your nasty, embittered comments (the only kind you ever seem capable of making when it comes to your alma mater), you’d think Bernard Moore had replaced Mark Hopkins as the dude on the other end of the log. Whereas I see an institution that is as strong or stronger than it has ever been, that happened to f–k up in one situation, partly through its own fault, party by falling victim to a world-class con man who fooled plenty of other august instiutions and individuals. Which is not to say Williams can’t learn lessons from that — but the the mountains are still purple, we’re still number one in US News, we are still gonna win the Sears Cup, we are still the most prestigious liberal arts college in the country, hell, even the weather gods continue to bless mountain day. The educational apocalypse is not upon Williams, as much as you seemingly wish it were.
David says:
Although I agree that some of hwc’s comments on Falk and Moore have been too negative — or, at least, more negative in a manner that is different from my own special flavor of nastiness — I think that “only kind” goes to far. Recall hwc’s excellent posts on linguistics and the College’s financial statements. We need more from hwc, not less.
Nishant says:
@Ronit:@David: I was speaking of Investment Banking Analysts. Not investment analysts. In most banks, again in IBD, you start as an analyst and after two years are promoted to Senior Analyst. You then go to bschool and if you choose to come back you are an Associate (not senior associate, the next step would be VP). Good investment analysts on the other hand are hard to find
@David: Easy and pretty predictable response on supply and demand but I would posit that a) demand for both occupations is cyclical and b) supply is not constrained. Moreover, since a retarded monkey can do the job of most investment banking analysts,its not native talent either that is constraining supply. So now you tell me David, why such a compensation differential – esp. when you consider the investment most professors make in their education.
Nishant says:
@Ronit: Agreed, quality of life is much better. But at the same time its not easy to be a tenure track professor. On the other hand, once you have tenure, it does seem nice.
JeffZ says:
Fine, DK, I’ll grant that his posts on finances and the like are great, but any time he diverges off that path in comments’ on other topics, it is solely to revel (with palpable glee) about bad news at Williams, compare it unfavorably to Swarthmore, generalize one negative event to institutional catastrophe, or make some other nasty comment. It’s like the dorky kid who gets picked on by the jocks waiting for them to get a DUI arrest, lose their job, and go bald, then starting a blog about it. I guess at some level it might feel gratifying (and believe me I WAS that dorky kid once upon a time), but on another, what’s the point?
David says:
1) “demand for both occupations is cyclical”. True (on a long enough time scale, demand for all occupations is cyclical) but so what?
2) “since a retarded monkey can do the job of most investment banking analysts” So, why doesn’t Goldman Sachs hire retarded monkeys or community college graduate or high school drop outs?
3) “not native talent either that is constraining supply.” It would be helpful if you could spell out your position more clearly. Consider the job of professional soccer player. Is “native talent” “constraining supply” for that job? On the one hand, No. I (and millions of others) would love to be a professional soccer player. There is huge supply. On the other hand, Yes because the people doing the hiring in soccer want the best players that they can find.
Similarly, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, et al want the best analysts they can find. And they are willing to pay enough to get it. If they paid less, many of the Williams graduates they want to hire would go elsewhere.
[Now, you can make a sophisticated argument that the decision makers at soccer teams and investment banks are stupid, that they use sub-optimal standards and so on. Is that what you mean?]
4) “why such a compensation differential” Supply and demand. You claim that this response is “predictable,” but the truth often is. Whatever mechanism you cite for explaining salaries in professional soccer (or insert some other high paying field) is likely similar to the mechanism which explains the pay in investment banking.
Again, it is possible to view the pay in soccer, banking, military service, ditch digging and many other fields as “screwed up” in the sense that you wish the world were otherwise. I wish that Peppermint Patties grew from the bushes in my yard. Nothing wrong with wishes! But, unless you are going to propose some policy/law/culture change that might affect those pay scales, your personal moral intuition is not that interesting.
Dick Swart says:
@JeffZ:
hwc on jazz is very good!
JeffZ says:
Also, there is a zero percent chance HWC would have approved of ANY Presidential hire who was not a woman, as he himself made clear prior to the announcement, so of COURSE he would denigrate the Falk selection. Duhhh.
Ronit says:
@Nishant: Retarded monkeys have a terrible work ethic.
hwc says:
True. The College could, however, at least taken the starch out of my displeasure by hiring an obviously outstanding white male instead of a guy who has no record of accomplishment as a college administrator and who told a joke about putting electric dog collars on his children.
If I had told you a year ago that Williams would hire a president who had never set foot on a liberal arts college campus as a student, professor, or administrator, who had no ties to Williams, and who had three years of experience as a school Dean at a research university with a dreadful undergrad reputation, you would have said I was nuts. That’s exactly what they just did. I knew they would hire a white male, but I expected them to hire one with an impeccable resume.
As for Moore. I have made clear that I am not even concerned about his record as a convicted felon. I have stated emphatically that I can’t find anything in his academic or professional record that makes him even a plausible candidate for a teaching position at Williams College. If the College ever chooses to shed some light on his appointment and reappointment, then I would be willing to reconsider. Until then, I think it is quite reasonable to portray that hiring as incompetent on its face.
hwc says:
And, yes. I believe that Williams College desperately needs its first woman President.
Ken Thomas '93 says:
I do not believe that this is an accurate statement WRT: David’s “intentions,” but it is worthwhile to think through why it may seem so.
JeffZ says:
I am not going to re-argue all of the Falk and Moore stuff here; it’s all been discussed in exhaustive detail before. I am sure we are going to be subject to your nasty comments insulting Williams by referring to Moore for the next several years, and I guess that is your right. I will just say one thing: Falk had more academic and administrative experience than Tony Marx did when he was hired by Amherst, and that seems to have worked out fine — I doubt the trustees are complaining after Marx recently secured 125 million in two donations. I’ll trust the collective wisdom, objectivity, and insight of the Amherst and Williams trustees as to what constitutes a well-qualified Presidential appointment over the views of one embittered, admittedly gender-biased alum pre-disposed towards negativity any day of the week.
hwc says:
I think Tony Marx should be fired.
Derek says:
Dave –
I have no idea why my unwillingness to play a game about the academic job market on your terms has anything to do with my criticisms of anonymous professors. And I’m not really dying to hear the parallels. YOU were the one who equated a comparable job with comparable pay and benefits. YOU. Not me. Which is why I pointed out that using those standards is dumb.
I have no idea why not being willing to engage in hypotheticals is a problem, nor do I have the patience for your idiocy (a job in academia could be Mount Greylock, you aver. No, actually, “academia” is generally understood to be higher education, especially in the context of this discussion — first Wal-Mart, now Mt, Greylock? Please, stop being a douchenozzle.).) So I will reiterate yet again: Tenured Williams professors would get good jobs as professors at respectable universities or colleges if Williams revoked tenure as we know it and Williams would be harmed in the process, not least by AAUP and in various rankings, which may mean nothing but sure as hell matter to a whole lot of people associated with the college.
dcat