Raiders in The Groves of Academe

By Ezra Bowen

The salary and perks at Rutgers sounded fat: nearly $100,000 a year, plus $1 million for equipment to use in a spanking new physics building. So why stay at the University of Pennsylvania for half the money? Physicist Torgny Gustafsson, 41, didn't. He jumped, murmuring, "I couldn't wish for anything better."

Neither could University of Kansas Sociologist Jill Quadagno, who doubled her salary and got a lush travel allowance when she switched this fall to Florida State University. It was also -- in the trade's patois -- a "two- cushioned" slot, with a job for her physiologist husband David. "We just had to do it," he says with a smile. So did Professor of Italian Aldo Scaglione, who left the University of North Carolina for a chair at New York University, the chance to shape an Italian studies center and -- a dollop of icing he requested -- an elegant apartment on Washington Square.

A free-market scramble is going on all over academe, with star scholars' heads being handsomely hunted in the finite universe of top teaching and research talent. In the past year raiders have bagged ten professors from Cornell, impelling that university to bare its own teeth. "We're coming after their people, they're coming after our people," says Larry Palmer, Cornell's vice president for academic programs. "Everyone is jockeying."

Since 1983, the University of California at Irvine has given salaries of $76,000-plus to get ten luminaries. The University of Tennessee at Knoxville's $85,000 to $90,000 Chairs of Excellence have lured two engineering whizzes, with a third to be announced next month. George Mason University has attracted 35 scholars in the past five years with pay of $60,000 to $123,000 (vs. a national average of around $45,000 for a tenured professor). Poised to nab 20 more academic stars, Mason President George Johnson demurs: "Raiding isn't the right phrasing; it's selective development."

By whatever name, even small and out-of-the-way schools are trying it. This year the University of Southern Maine brought on 45 fresh staffers, some from Harvard and Stanford. And last month Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky., announced a $5 million war chest. Says M.I.T. Dean of Science Gene Brown: "A lot of universities are out to buy a professor."

They have to. By 1995 about 40% of the U.S.'s 108,000 tenured faculty will reach retirement age. But replacement talent is not coming along. Despite the sweeteners for key players, a survey in 1986 indicated that only .3% of freshmen plan academic careers -- in which starting salaries still languish around $21,000.

The most fought-for stars are women and minorities because they are in short supply. In the University of California system, for example, only 1.7% of tenured faculty are black, 2.5% Hispanic and 10.1% female. Says Duncan Rice, N.Y.U.'s dean of the faculty of arts and sciences: "My department chairmen are aware that they had better never miss an opportunity to bring on a highly qualified minority or woman." Black Historian David L. Lewis, recruited to Rutgers, was courted by schools in the South, Midwest and East before he quit the University of California at San Diego for a heavy salary, a light teaching load and a budget to travel in Europe and Africa.

Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, once dean of the faculty at Amherst College, where she fought what she saw as entrenched male chauvinism, jumped to freewheeling George Mason, where she would have more time to write. "I thought it would be fun to try a school with chutzpah," she says. Last week Princeton announced that Toni Morrison, the much honored black female novelist (Song of Solomon, Beloved), was leaving the State University of New York at Albany for Princeton, where all hands insist that she will be no ornament but fully active in writing classes, Afro-American studies and the rest of university life.

The long-range result of the pirating might not be healthy for academe. As universities, like professional-sports owners, become caught up in bidding for a few known stars, they may stint on finding creative ways to build a team. Cornell's Palmer worries about developing a two-tier system of gold-plated prima donnas and underpaid working stiffs. Furthermore, says Mario T. Garcia, chairman of Chicano studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "one campus gains at the expense of another." This is what disturbs N.Y.U.'s Rice, as he ponders the consequences of too much raiding. "It terrifies me out of my wits," he concedes. "I worry either about having a faculty of kids or having to replace a faculty in a market that will be much more fiercely competitive than it is now."

With reporting by Pamela Lister/New York, with other bureaus