>A noble ideal, and one utterly defeated by the realities of public
>university budgets and constraints.

Oh, absolutely. On a practical level, doing that sort of thing is completely necessary.

It doesn't mean I have to like it, tho. Also, I have noticed that there's a tendency among university admin types to drink their own Kool-Aid; you can rarely publicly get away with saying "there are a whole bunch of aspects of our college that are sub-optimal," so you end up with spin. And then that spin is quickly internalized, so you wind up with people defending functional necessities as positive goods.

(This phenomenon is far from confined to academia, of course.)

>This is particularly true for the
>economics department (among others); because of the high demand for
>PhD economists outside of academia (IIRC, some 40% of econ PhDs
>positions outside of colleges and universities), they tend to command
>higher salaries than most other disciplines, often by a substantial
>degree.

True, although there can be some soul-selling involved. I have a friend who got his econ PHD and, thanks to his dual citizenship, landed a gig at the Fraser Institute, north of the border. Being relatively convinced of the validity of the Chicago School (positions he has since wildly reconsidered, I should note) and being both politically and policy oriented as opposed to a pure researcher, you'd think he'd have been a good fit for the place.

Let's just say he and his colleagues had different ideas about how a responsible person advances their political and policy preferences, as did... many of the other institutions in the private sector he explored. What he really wanted to do was work for the CBO or OMB, or as a troubleshooter for the UN like his father had. 'Course, everyone with an econ PHD who isn't interested in a giant paycheck wants to do that. He eventually ended up teaching, which he enjoys, but still.

>Because my alma mater is a public institution in North
>Carolina, and the faculty are therefore government employees, their
>salaries are a matter of public record, I know for a fact that there
>are non-tenured (not even tenure track, in fact) faculty making more
>than senior, tenured professors in many other departments at the same
>university.

I'm reminded of the old truism that the highest paid public employee in any given state is almost always a coach of some sort, usually of football. (Although currently in my own state, it's a Professor of Neurosurgery and Dean of Medicine; in our hosts state, it seems to be the Dean of a Law School.)

-Merc
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