Academic Inequality and the Star System

By Christopher Shea

The Chronicle - April 14, 2014

Which professors become highly visible may have changed since the 1990s, but the business side of the academic star system is still going strong: Universities that hope to move up in the graduate-program rankings target top professors and offer them high salaries and other perks. Against the backdrop of a rampant reliance on adjuncts, that strikes some people as even more ethically questionable than the famously high pay of Duke University English professors that scholars griped about in the 1980s and 90s.
The New York Times reported last June that New York University, which has faced protests from graduate students and adjuncts over pay and benefits, was helping to buy second homes in desirable places like the Hamptons for some of its most-valued faculty members and administrators. When word leaked last summer that David H. Petraeus, the former CIA director who has a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton, was going to earn between $150,000 and $200,000 for teaching a single course at the City University of New York’s honors college, students protested, and Mr. Petraeus agreed to teach for $1. Columbia University bought the economist Jeffrey Sachs an $8-million townhouse when he moved from Harvard in 2002 (although, in fairness, the first floor was reserved for the Earth Institute he heads, and he pays rent).

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