Where They Have Gone

When the last exam of the spring term is over, most well-esteemed university professors are likely to be already en route to the airport with their luggage. Carrying a wad of traveler's checks courtesy of some big foundation or Government agency, today's academician is off to dispense advice to a foreign government, finish a book in the splendor of the English countryside, burrow in the site of an ancient ruin, or pursue his research to tropical Islands, glacial lakes, laboratory ships, remote capitals or perhaps even the Great Barrier Reef.

Summer has become a time for vast migrations of college faculties. Nearly gone is the day when a professor had no choice but to work on his book at home or teach to earn extra cash. Rising university salaries and abundant foundation generosity have released him for exotic research and farflung adventure. Within the last decade, the number of professors going abroad during the school year nearly tripled, to a peak of 3,954 in 1965-66. During the summer, about 40% of the nation's 325,000 university teachers remain behind to teach.

The professor, says one dean, has become "a member of the most mobile group of migratory workers in the country." A Columbia English professor, noting that nearly all of the other 86 members of his department had vanished, said: "The only reason I'm here is that it's air-conditioned."

Chasing Butterflies. For a few professors, summer travel is nothing new. University of Chicago Philologist John Corominas, 61, has been roaming the Catalonia region of Spain since 1931, asking everyone from mayors to illiterate peasants about the names given to places. Dressed like an ordinary Spaniard, Corominas reads gravestones, checks into town and church records, and figures out Catalonian history from what he learns. To the peasants, he has come to be known as the nosy vagabond who comes around every summer.

Now there are legions of vagabonds like Corominas. In the rain forests of the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Amherst Biologist Lincoln Brower, 34, is leaping after lepidoptera to check out a theory that the color patterns of butterflies edible to birds are evolving toward the color patterns of nonedible butterflies, as a measure of survival. Last week Entomologist Dennis Hynes, 37, of California State Polytech, slipped on snowshoes to walk atop thigh-deep drifts on Washington's Mount Baker and bring back iceboxes filled with larvae specimens of a crop-killing insect called the crane fly.

An M.I.T. professor who wanted to study a kind of high-flying cloud argued that Norway was the only place he could do it and got a subsidy from NASA. Living with his wife and young daughter in a cottage near Oslo, Geophysicist Giorgio Fiocco, 35, spends sporting days paddling a canoe around the fiord and scientific nights examining "noctilucent" clouds by laser radar. Yale Physiologist Jose Delgado, 50, the man who can make bulls stop charging by planting electrodes in their brains, is off to Moscow, a favored academic watering hole, for a psychology conference.

Trigonometry by Moonlight. In the luxurious resort of Nyali Beach in Kenya, 22 American mathematicians are hard at work on a project into which the U.S. AID agency has poured a million dollars. Their quarters are in a white stucco hotel overlooking the deep blue of the Indian Ocean, and their job is to help African countries prepare modern math textbooks. Said William Martin, 55, of M.I.T., the head of the workshop: "Don't go thinking the sponsors aren't getting their pound of flesh." His wife echoed this sentiment by describing a dance at the hotel: "There were the locals twisting and smooching in the moonlight. But where were the professors? They were spread all around here working on trigonometry problems."

While top professors at the University of California make more than $3,000 for staying behind to teach summer classes, the average college-faculty member can earn only about $1,300. This is hardly an inducement in an era when a professor can make $70 a day while on a Government-sponsored junket and as much as $150 when a foundation is backing him. The result is that while faculty members once fought over the summer jobs, now there are usually more openings than candidates.

Flying Kites. Although one Yale administrator says, "You're losing status if you pay your own way," many a professor actually shells out the cost of a trip related to his work, perhaps hoping that at least part of it will come back as a tax deduction. One example is James Purvis, 33, Boston University religions professor, who went to work on the excavation of an ancient Canaanite fortress in Israel, under the supervision of Theologian-Archaeologist Nelson Glueck. Purvis, who says that he left behind "three angry children and an equally angry wife," earns his keep by arising each day at 5 a.m. to begin digging in the broiling sun with the other Biblical scholars. He gets along on a kibbutz diet of cucumbers, tomatoes, eggs and bread, swats his share of flies, and sleeps at night in a tent. For these privileges, he paid his own round-trip fare.

Some educators criticize what Lincoin Moses, 44, the chairman of Stanford's statistics department, describes as "excessive airfreighting of expensive minds." Moses, although he is a member of United Air Lines' 100,000-Mile Club, thinks many meetings could just as well take place with telephone conference calls. Among those who share his complaint is Zoologist Charles J. Flora, 37, of Western Washington State College, who looks on traveling to conferences as at best an unavoidable bore and at worst a deadly ritual. "You get to the point, so enervated with endless waiting and the cramped discomfort of jet flight," says Flora, "that you quit making passes at the stewardesses."

There are, of course, still a few diehard Thoreau types who prefer to catch up on their writing or sample the sweet joys of summer. Closed up in his Newfane, Vt., summer home, Harvard Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, 57, reports that he is dutifully turning out a new book "one dreary page after another." University of Virginia Professor J. D. Forbes, 56, a specialist in business history, is flying kites and writing detective stories while on a visit to his married daughter in California. So long as they are encouraged, even pressured, to fly jets, it seems likely that fewer and fewer faculty members will get to fly kites in the future.

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