This seems like a great idea.

In a move designed to broaden access to faculty research and scholarship, Williams College recently adopted a policy requiring its faculty members to make their scholarly articles available for free to the public.

The school’s faculty unanimously approved the new “open access” policy in June, becoming the first liberal arts college in the nation to enact a mandatory policy.

An estimated 30 universities around the world have adopted similar plans.

President Morton Owen Schapiro said its faculty acted out of a sense of duty to the students, teachers and schools that could benefit from their research.

Great stuff! The more that the world knows about the research done at Williams, the better. I have been beating this drum for a long time. Much of the research being done at Williams would be interesting to current students and alumni. By making it all public, Williams will improve the intellectual life of Ephs everywhere. Give me an RSS feed and a place to write, and I will change the culture of greater Williams. Eight years ago, the Record reported:

He [(former) Dean of the Faculty Tom Kohut] added that the public intellectual life of the college concerns him, and could be improved by encouraging faculty to expose their students and the wider community to their research and scholarship.

My efforts to reach out to Kohut and others were total failures. But progress is possible! You just have to be patient. It is a long game that we are playing at EphBlog. Please play it with us.

Oh, wait. This didn’t happen at Williams. It was Stanford. My mistake. Previous similar “mistakes” here and here.

Is there no one in the Administration with the knowledge of where elite education is going and the power to put Williams in the lead?

From the New York Times:

When she [author Lara Vapnyar] was growing up in Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s, her family — like most other Soviet-era Russian families — had one cookbook: “It was a big book full of canned food, published by the government,” she said. That book, “The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food,” was first published in 1939, a move by Stalin’s regime to replace what had been Russia’s classic cookbook from 1861 until 1917, when it was banned: the aristocratic tome “A Gift to Young Housewives.”

“You couldn’t make a case that that book was anything but bourgeois,” said Darra Goldstein, a professor of Russian at Williams College and editor of the food journal Gastronomica. “It was for the upper classes and their servants.”

By contrast, the recipes in “The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food” were accessible to ordinary Soviet citizens.

“It was the 1952 edition that took off, just as the Soviet food industry was really getting going,” Professor Goldstein said. Alongside photographs of cans of fish and recipes using dried soup were vistas of wheat fields and orchards. “It was a powerful piece of nationalistic propaganda, but also very useful as a cookbook,” she said.

Not that there is anything wrong with that!

Someone asked me whether, when a Williams faculty member who holds a named professorship takes emeritus status, another faculty member is then designated as holding the named professorship. I haven’t been paying attention, and I have no idea. I remember seeing professors referred to as, say “AB, ZY-XW Professor of Subject, Emeritus” (or “Emerita”) but it never occurred to me to look to see whether someone else was soon thereafter appointed “CD, ZY-XW Professor of Subject” while the former incumbent continued to hold the designation but on emeritus status.

I assume that some monetary grant goes with most named professorships. How does that work when the holder takes emeritus status? 

Williams has been profoundly fortunate in the various ways so many of its emerati professors have continued to teach, research, head special committees, and otherwise give to and promote the interests of the College. I think of Hodge Markgraf ‘52 (the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus), as the epitome of that.

This post is coming to you at the suggestion of our esteemed commenter FM.

There is a cover story in the June/July issue of the magazine Art in America called “Talking Politics 2008″ by Eleanor Hartley.  She features “six artists whose work courts controversy” including Williams Professor Laylah Ali.   The artists “exchange ideas about the common ground between politics and art,” a very timely topic given the recent bit of Yale art drama (discussed on EB here and here, and nicely commented upon by our own Prof. Lewis in the WSJ).

Unfortunately the Art in America article is not available online, although FM has a request in and/or might end up scanning it. We’ll see what happens. Regardless, Prof. Ali is a talented artist and notable figure in the arts. This link is from a PBS feature about artists in the 21st century called Art:21. There are some great shots of the art-in-the-making, as well as slideshows of some of her work, interviews, and other video. What a great program! This link is from another exhibition of showing examples of Professor Ali’s work.

The theme of the article seems all the more timely given the controversy surrounding the installation of “The Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama” exhibition in New York City that was quickly shut down by the Secret Service. Granted, some see its attempted creation as more a bit of performance art than an actual attempt to create an exhibition “about character assassination — about how Obama and Hillary have been portrayed by the media,” but it does point again to the intersection of art and politics. The New York Times also did a feature piece in April about how the campaigns generally, and Barack Obama particularly, have inspired quite a bit of political art.

Obviously this is not a new phenomenon. Art is political, politicians and campaigns (and kings and queens and patrons) make use of and support art to fit their various purposes and ideals. Political issues likewise provide an inspiration, frame, and focus for art throughout the ages. Art is revolutionary form of speech, a unique way for artists to express their response to the world. I suppose given the Williams infiltration of the greater art community…wait, that sounds sinister. Saturation perhaps (?) of the arts community it makes sense that one of our professors was featured on this topic. So pick up a copy of the magazine if you see it someplace, or at the very least check out the link to the PBS feature of Laylah Ali above and get a taste of the work and creative process of this talented artist and asset to our faculty.

Do any of our commenters have particularly political pieces of art (visual, musical, etc.) that are your favorites or are particularly notable? Personally, I have always been truly moved and inspired by Picasso’s Guernica. I have seen the tapestry reproduction of the work that is at the United Nations building in New York, and it always evokes a raw sadness and anger in me. Thoughts from others?

Even as far back as 1913, Williams was doing its best to establish a nest egg for the future.  An article in the wonderful New York Times archives describes then-President Garfield’s announcement of a $2 million endowment effort.  True to form, he already had about 25% lined up and more pledged to match.  This effort was announced at the “alumni luncheon” following commencement.  I wonder if Morty will have any exciting announcements this weekend during reunions?

I continue to enjoy the fact that Williams College news made it to the New York Times with great regularity back in the day.  Including such exciting events as the alumni beating the varsity basketball team in a game.  Yes, really.  I can’t find the link again at the moment, but it was great.  In the 1920s, someone wrote in with that bit of news - including the roster and some form of a box score from the game - and it was published in the Times.

You can see the article in its original form (scanned a little crookedly, but readable) here.

WILLIAMS SEEKS $2,000,000.
President Garfield at Commencement Tells Endowment Plans.

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., June 25 — At the alumni luncheon following the commencement exercises at Williams College to-day, President Harry A. Garfield announced that the college would attempt to obtain an endowment fund of $2,000,000.  Half of the first million appeared to be in sight, he said.  The General Education Board of New York, Rockefeller Foundation, had offered $100,000 when the college should raise $500,000.  Mrs. Russell Sage had contributed $50,000, and $200,000 more had been promised conditionally.  To this, President Garfield said, $150,000 might be added from an estate over which litigation recently ended.

The need for $1,000,000, Dr. Garfield said, was immediate, as that sum would hardly do more than make up the annual deficit, and a second million must be had to do justice by the teaching force and the future.  The college, he pointed out, had prospered by buildings presented, but giving for endowment had not been popular and the faculty as a result had been kept on low pay.

President Garfield said that while the salaries of the teachers at Williams had increased more than $50,000 in the last twelve years, the maximum paid to any professor was only $500 in excess of the amount paid in 1900, and the largest amount now received by any professor was $3,200.  The President believed desirable to raise the maximum at once to $4,000, with corresponding increases to all professors and assistant professors.

Williams graduated 115 young men with the degree of bachelor of arts.  Among the honorary degrees conferred were these:  Doctor of Laws, Charles B. Wheeler, ‘73, of Buffalo, a Justice of the New York Supreme Court; Master of Arts, Albert Rathbone, ‘88, lawyer of New York.

Copyright (c) The New York Times, originally published June 26, 1913

Thoughts on professor salaries as an effective fundraising ploy?  Did everyone notice the names of those donors?  I would love to know whose estate was being challenged - possibly over the gift to Williams?  Any Williams history buffs know what famous alum or former prof died sometime around 1913?

I’d also like to say that this shows some shrewd planning by somebody.  Capitalizing on the strength of our alumni to start building those funds way back when undoubtedly built a foundation for the massive pile of cash we’re sitting on today.  Granted, Williams graduated a lot of young men from old money families, so this kind of strategy was likely old hat to them although it seems practically clairvoyant to those of us brought up without trust funds, family homes, and other such personal “endowments.”

Via this interesting discussion on Crooked Timber comes the topic of professors and their textbook profits.

Since N. Gregory Mankiw returned to Harvard to teach the College’s introductory economics class, 2,278 students have filled his weekly lectures, many picking up the former Bush advisor’s best-selling textbook, “Principle of Economics” along the way.

So, what has professor of economics Mankiw done with those profits?

“I don’t talk about personal finances,” Mankiw said, adding that he has never considered giving the proceeds to charity.

But in recent years, other professors have found different solutions to the sometimes awkward problem of profiting by requiring students to buy their own books, including making donations to charity.

The Record should do a similar article. Let’s help them get started!

1) Which textbooks authored by Williams professors are assigned in Williams classes, either by the professor himself or by someone else? Professor De Veaux’s textbook is used in STAT 201, by other professors and by him. In fact, this spring he is even requiring that students have the second edition. No used books for you! Is Professor Kassin’s textbook still used in PSYC 101? Some students are not big fans.

Whatever you do, do not buy the textbook. It was revised three times while I was a student, and every time Kassin would claim “students must have the recent edition.” Bullshit. If you don’t believe, grab copies of your favorite two editions and check the text side by side. I’ll be damned if I didn’t find, my freshman year, that precisely the same text and figures were present in the 3rd and 4th editions, with a two page difference between editions.

These are the sorts of games that textbook authors and their publishers play all the time.

2) What do Williams professors do with the profits that come from Williams students? Professor De Veaux donates his to charity. Good for him! That is clearly the honorable choice. Other professors?

Readers should add comments with more examples to help out our friends at the Record.

Rips in Fabric of Japanese Society

Often the media report that Japan since the 1990s has been going through its deepest economic recession in half a century, but little is said of the nation’s inward distress and violence as outcomes of Japan relinquishing its dominant economic position in the world.

And with the collapse in the belief of Japan as an economic miracle, scholars say young people feel the county has lost its way.

This picture of the “darker” side of Japanese society was the topic of discussion at the Woodrow Wilson Center on Feb. 20 when several Japan scholars described various aspects of a troubled and violent society.

The themes ranged from the link between organized crime and violence in the political order to the social deviancy of youth, low birth rate, high suicide rate, and “permanent” part-time employment. An example of extreme distress peculiar to Japanese society is the “hikikomori” phenomenon, whereby youth withdraw in their rooms, unwilling to venture out and hold a job or go to school or speak to friends and lead a normal life.

Eiko Maruko Siniawer, assistant professor of history at Williams College, described the origins of the Yakuza, the name of Japan’s organized crime, and how it became a violent arm of political parties with nationalistic sentiments.

Ms. Siniawer said that in the late 17th and 18th centuries, men running gambling dens formed mafia-style “families,” and powerful gang bosses emerged. Some dubious merchants, selling shoddy goods, had a similar need for protection in controlling areas. These two “criminal”-type businesses attracted violent men for protection and they evolved into “political ruffians.” In Japan these men became an integral part of the political scene, bringing violence onto their political opponents.

In pre-World War II Japan, the Yakuza would break up strikes and oppose Leftist parties and thought. Siniawer said the Yakuza’s violence contributed to the decline of political parties in the 1930s.

The Yakuza were reborn after the war and, until lately, retained their violent nature. This violent tendency began to recede in the 1960s and especially in the 1970s when the public became more intolerant of the violence of the past.

Despite being engaged in illegal activities, the Yakuza have become institutionalized in the practice of politics. Siniawer argues that for much of Japan’s modern history, political violence is so institutionalized and accepted that Japan can be characterized as a “violent democracy.”

Related post here.

Catching up on our backlog of simple economics question, we have this 1995 letter to the New York Times from Professor Jay Pasachoff.

It seems odd that you choose to put an article on your June 12 front page that some college professors in Nassau County, Long Island, make more than $100,000. In view of the fact that Michael Ovitz, Hollywood’s top deal maker, just turned down a job with a $250 million salary, some 2,500 times more, and that new lawyers fresh out of law schools earn close to $100,000 from major New York firms, the real question may be why other professors don’t earn more than they do.

The question still remains why university professors should make so much less than comparably trained individuals in other professions.

Professor Pasachoff was kind enough to teach me basic astonomy 20 years ago. Allow me to teach him basic economics.

In a free society, your wages are determined, for the most part, by supply and demand. If there are a lot of people willing and able to do what you do, your wages will be low. If there are many firms eager to hire people like you, your wages will be high. Baseball shortstops are paid a lot of money, not because they spend years slaving away in graduate school, but because a) there are very few people who can do what they can do (hit major league pitching) and b) there are many teams (firms) that want to hire them.

There are complexities involved, of course. One reason that baseball players are so well paid is that it is relatively easy to judge their talent and measure their marginal contribution to the success of the team. The output of college professors can not be measured so easily.

But the key point is that there are thousands of people with Ph.D’s who would love to teach at places like Williams. The demand for college professors, at least at elite schools, is mostly fixed, but the supply is large and growing. Why should Williams offer someone $200,000 to teach when it can find dozens of excellent candidates willing to do the same job for $75,000?

Now, the fact that getting a Ph.D. involves years of effort does restrict the supply of professors. If a Ph.D. were quick, there would be tens of thousands of smart people who would want to teach at Williams! Even with the impediment of graduate school, there are still too many people chasing too few jobs.

And why is that? Why do so many people (like me!) get a Ph.D. in hopes of being a college professor when they could make more money (with the same training time) as a lawyer or doctor? Simple: Being a professor is much more fun than these jobs.

Supply and demand.

By the way, how many Williams faculty make more than $100,000 per year? I would guess at least 50 and more likely 100.

Professor of Political Science (and long time friend of EphBlog) Sam Crane has a new blog. See here for why he uses “Useless Tree” as a name. I have added Sam to our always-expanding Eph Blogroll. (Alas, I’ll need help from genius Eric for ensuring that Sam shows up at Eph Planet.)

As noted on previous occasions, the more blogging by Williams faculty, the better. I actually e-mailed Tom Kohut about this several months ago, but never got the courtesy of a reply. Perhaps Sam could help me out with that . . .

Consider this claim by President Schapiro:

Most of the people who work at Williams could earn more money elsewhere.

This just isn’t true or, at least, it isn’t true in any meaningful way. For starters, most of the 2,000 or so employees at Williams are in support jobs that have close comparables elsewhere in the Berkshires. Is Morty claiming that Williams pays its custodians less than they could earn at Mass MOCA, its dining hall workers less than those at MCLA? I doubt it, and I hope not! While I don’t think that Williams should pay more than the market wage for such jobs, I can’t think of a good reason to pay less.

So, presumably, Morty is referring to faculty. But a (vast?) majority of the Williams faculty could not get a better paying job elsewhere. Indeed, most tenured faculty could not get tenure at a place anywhere near as nice (in terms of salary, benefits, teaching load, research resources) as Williams. Of course, this is by no means true for all faculty. Indeed, each year Williams loses professors — recent departures include Gary Jacobsohn, Tim Cook and Kim Bruce — who are certainly getting paid as much if not more by their new employers as they were by Williams.

I don’t intend this to be a mean-spirited post. As the link to Jacobsohn above demonstrates, I still look back fondly on the education that the Williams faculty provided to me. In fact, I think that some more money should be directed toward the faculty.

But, if you want to think clearly about how Williams is run and how it ought to be run, you need to get your facts straight. Morty certainly knows the facts. He would be better off levelling with the rest of us.

Keeping good faculty members at a liberal arts college like Williams is hard to do.

I learned yesterday that Bryan Garsten will be leaving Williams’ political science department for Yale’s (where my political theory brethren are very excited). The news of this defection falls on the heels of Gary Jacobsohn (probably the strongest academic in the Williams political science department and a very good teacher as well) announcing that he has accepted an endowed chair at the University of Texas.

Now, I didn’t have Bryan Garsten as a professor when I was at Williams. He was still a mere graduate school at Harvard with starry eyed dreams of a tenure track job. In fact, very few of the political science professors I knew remain at the school. Sam Fleischacker left for the University of Illinois at Chicago, Tim Cook moved to LSU, and Russ Muirhead is now teaching at Harvard. The reasons each of the professors left were idiosyncratic and personal, but all of them received offers from other schools that they deemed preferable to Williams. While the academy may seem like a warm and fuzzy place, the truth is that schools try to pilfer each other’s most talented professors.

I’m sure that the experience of the political science department is not unique at Williams (e.g., Louise Gluck was just hired away by Yale). Williams is faced with something of a dilemma. It wants to hire professors who are valuable contributors to their field because such professors offer unique insights and have an incentive to stay on top of the field. However, if Williams is successful in hiring academic stars, then the professors are likely to be lured away by research universities offering more salary, prestige, research opportunities, and bigger cities. Continuity in faculty is highly desirable in a college setting because it gives students and alumni a sense of place and increased ties to the institution. Maintaining continuity and hiring valuable contributors to the field are at odds with one another.

There is a further dilemma in the process. If tenure standards are low, then the most talented professors are likely to be hired away and the department will be left with a mediocre senior faculty. However, if tenure standards are high, then a department faces divisive tenure fights, uncertainty and stress among junior faculty members, and a generally uncongenial atmosphere. The poor atmosphere would provide increased incentive for professors to leave and hurt the students.

What is a college to do?

Answer that question and you can land yourself a job as a college president.

David Nickerson ‘97 has several comments on the topic of salaries at Williams. I’ll start with the one most directly related to Mike’s post below.

Suggesting a set pay scale for professors is foolish.

Well, someone has to set a pay scale of some type. We can be sure that the President and the Dean of the Faculty spend a great deal of time on this. As best I can tell from a distance, they do a fine job. I am especially impressed to hear, from a faculty source, that Williams explicitly sets its junior faculty salaries to be, in general, no less than 45% or so of those for senior faculty. Prior to hearing about Morty’s salary, I didn’t think that compensation at Williams was in any way a problem. I now consider the President’s salary to be, potentially, the proverbially canary in the coal mine.

Imagine that the College announced tomorrow that it was doubling the salaries for all members of the faculty. After all, Williams wants to attract and retain the best professors, the faculty is the most important resource for current and future students, the College has a significant endowment, blah, blah, blah.

I am not saying that Williams will do that. I am just pointing out that there is a potential conflict between those who work at Williams currently and those whose primary concern is Williams’s success over the very long term.

If Williams wants to attract the best educators in a field, it will have to bid against other schools for the candidates. Market forces will push salaries well above national average (indeed, my father was impressed that a small college could pay its professors more than he makes at a state research university).

It is not clear to me that the “market” is a meaningful construct with which to consider faculty salaries at Williams. How many tenured members of the Williams faculty, especially in the humanities, could get a similar job (tenure with the same pay) at another institution? I would guess that 20% would be a very generous estimate. There are simply way too many (highly qualified and dedicated) professors out there chasing too few jobs. The true “market clearing” salary would be much lower than it is now.

This is less true for junior faculty, of course. In that case, there is a job market in which Williams does compete. And part of the competition in that market is about how Williams treats its senior faculty. But, big picture, there are dozens and dozens of applicants for virtually every opening at Williams.

Adding a few disadvantages in geography (finding a job for a spouse is not easy) and the premium price for professors only increases.

This is a fair point. Of course, I would turn this around into a virtue and try to recruit faculty couples. (The College already does this, to some extent. I think that there are at least a couple of married faculty members.) Many faculty spouses (does anyone know how many?) also work for the College.

Again, it would be one thing if Williams were really having trouble hiring excellent teachers. But as Morty notes, “The caliber of our newest hires is extraordinary, as we have been able to attract our first-choice candidates in one field after another.”

Again, my point is not so much that Williams’s faculty pay is out of line. From a distance, it seems reasonable. My concern is with the top end and the effect over time that largesse there will have on the institution.

The pay scale would not even work within the college. Chemists have numerous and lucrative exit options, while historians are more or less confined to the academy. In order to pay all assistant professors the same salary, the College would either have to hire mediocre chemists (a la lower tier liberal arts colleges) or pay history and literature professors salaries well above the market rate (ala Caltech). Idiosyncratic academic salaries are a sign of efficient pricing not institutional waste.

Again, this is a fair point. Perhaps Williams does need to pay the chemists more than the historians. This will certainly be a popular opinion in the chemistry department. For the most part, though, I suspect that the differences that Williams actually has are so small that the costs (in terms of rancor) are less then the benefits. If a chemist would rather go to school X than to Williams because school X pays all its chemists 15% more (and more than its historians), then good luck to her. Williams should focus on getting faculty who think that Williams is special.

Indeed, just as an idea, I would suggest that the College consider the pay philosophy of another very successful 200 year old non-profit institution: the US military. In the military, two things are true about pay, with very few exceptions. First, pay is public. Everyone knows what everyone else gets paid. Second, pay depends on rank and time of service. If you are the best colonel in the Marine Corps, you’re reward is not to get paid what a “similar” civilian job would pay or to get paid more than other colonels. Your reward is to get promoted and/or to get the coolest job that a colonel can get.