To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Books June 2, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/books/it/1999/06/02/salary Money pit When a university faculty union distributes the salary list, public record becomes private hell. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Patti See It comes in a white business envelope, no mark but my name and department on a computer-generated mailing label. Sometimes the address is written in with a blue ink pen. It's that time of year when our association of university professionals distributes "the list": salaries of all faculty and academic staff. It's worse than the computer software commercial where a hacker e-mails the salaries of upper management to the entire company. On prime time TV, shared wages are the core of bad feelings, snide jokes, office wars, mutiny. Wages are something to be kept hidden, a private matter like marital problems or a case of hemorrhoids -- real and pertinent to our everyday lives, but not something we talk about in the coffee lounge. By all accounts I'm a short timer, someone with a fixed-term contract that promises a full-time job with one stipulation: "This appointment is contingent upon grant funding." In many ways that one line is my motivator. I research, I publish, I present, I write grants. I want another year. I've accepted that I'm at the bottom of the university food chain, an academic staff member with no Ph.D. in hand, not even close to my fingertips. I know the pecking order that exists among university personnel on this campus and certainly others: administrators, faculty, teaching academic staff, academic staff. But when the list comes out, for all to see, the pecking order emerges in startling black and white. Our culture has conditioned us to accept that our identity is tied to our jobs, of course, but there's more. We are what we earn, our body and spiritual worth equivalent to our gross net. I don't like to believe it. After all, I am a sometimes poet, unused to getting paid for my life's work. But what of the others? I imagine my tenured colleagues sitting with their office doors closed, checking the raises of friends and foes, tennis partners and neighbors, new chairs and former deans. They hover over their calculators figuring out who received extra merit pay or that excellence in teaching award or both. One teacher admitted that as a junior faculty member he computed the dollar amount of his students per head, comparing the number of students in his survey courses to the number of students in his tenured colleagues' graduate courses. This same faculty member commented that though the salary list portrays "public" worth, it does not reflect "private" reputations: The professor who wears bad plaid or the one who hasn't changed his syllabus in 15 years; the professor whose students routinely leave her office weeping or the one who hasn't read a book in a decade. I'm reminded of what I learned as a student, that for college educators, more than other professionals, their career is their life. You can see it in their cluttered offices, a definition of self lost among their obsessions with books or baseball, "Star Trek" or frogs, passions in place for the duration, a haven where personal and professional are inseparable. I recognize now that tenure is as much "occupation" as "occupancy," as much "term of office" as "possession." They are lifers. Though I am outside of that loop, the salary list still bothers me. For days after reading it I felt a need to renew my inner dialogue, a little self-talk to make me feel better. You learn all of your students' names the first week, I tell myself. You bring colleaguing to a new level: You even found a date for a physics professor. You read the course catalog. You teach in a circle. You write student references from memory. You display your Phi Kappa Phi sticker in your office window. You know what GLOBE stands for. You support women's athletics. You never park in handicap spots. You recognize the chancellor off-campus. You know the personnel organizational charts. You can name five deans without looking. You stopped blowing bubbles at staff meetings and wearing miniskirts on the days you teach. You cut your hair. You wear make-up sparingly. You have an eye for details. You nixed your "Gilligan's Island" screen saver. You never run with scissors. You served on committees to create committees. You wrote grants that have brought in more money over the past four years than your salary. You haven't lost your spunk. These are intangibles that can't be reflected in salary recommendations, I remind myself. But I obsess. I walk through the food court and pass a man I recognize is two of me, a woman who is three of me, an administrator who is nearly five of me. No one buys me lunch. I know that a power structure exists in any career, any job, any office, any factory, yet it is an impalpable system until we see salaries. New hires start at $5,000 more than me per academic year for three months less work. I know, I know, they have terminal degrees. All the same, I'd rather not have this information. 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