There are obvious reasons our union distributes the salaries of faculty and staff. The information is part of "public record," my union representative says. Other items of public record are not released unless asked for, but this list -- conveniently arranged by department for easy comparison -- is sent to all union members since it has become such a common request of faculty and staff. There are also covert reasons: Historically, faculty and academic staff at public universities are not paid as well as their peers in the private sector. Perhaps the plan is to offset this sense of discrepancy with a hierarchy of our own: We'll compare ourselves to our colleagues and feel better or worse. An academic staff university senator says that the salary list is one way to fight inequity. It is, after all, more of a struggle to get off the bottom tier than a struggle for the top. Or perhaps showing untenured professors and fixed-term academic staff the salaries of their peers will make them work harder, the carrot in front of us all.

The student newspaper occasionally publishes the salary list, usually when tuition increases. I am waiting for a student, I imagine an entrepreneur minor, petitioning to pay half as much tuition to take my class as his core business courses. It could happen. This is the university.

"It's like being in a roomful of novelists," my tenured friend says, "and you've self-published a book of love poems." He's telling me to get over it. I'm trying.

Each fall I sharpen my pencils, arrange my clean folders and buy a new pair of school shoes. I can't get past the old routine -- good student. I watch the young men with their fresh haircuts and new cologne, the young women with their new skirts and book bags. The truth is I never wanted to graduate and this career allows me to remain a part of the university. I also never really expected to make this much money, a salary that was enough for my father to raise eight children with. I know, as my father knew, who butters my bread and where to go to get sugar. Unlike my father, I love my job.

The job's not about money and the list reminds me. I stay for the perks: the library, the research, the ambience and, let's face it, the company. I still believe I was hired for my position because I was the only candidate to do a joy dance in her living room after reading the want ad, or perhaps I was the only candidate to admit it in the interview. Either way, I know I was born to work at a university. Where else could eccentrics and intellectuals, ex-hippies and ex-reform school students, Oxford scholars and local graduates find a common haven?

As a student I used to walk across campus and I'd feel overwhelmed by the profusion of scholarship, the promise of enlightenment and the potential for insight. This campus still makes me believe in the possibility of cognition and awareness for anyone, a place where the children of state representatives and sanitation workers, neurosurgeons and domestic staff have an equal chance. Walking across the campus mall to my office each morning, through the spread of wealth and charm, I know that I am an integral part of something I bought into as a student, this community of thinkers who may be smart enough not to compare wages.
salon.com | June 2, 1999

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