There’s a great line in the movie Dazed and Confused, when Matthew McConnau-ghey’s character, much too old to still be hanging out with high school kids, says, “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, but they stay the same age.” It’s with that same mix of nostalgia and wonderment that my parents speak of my current professors at Cornell: while the elder Fishmans have long since graduated, their favorite teachers are still lecturing up on The Hill.
For a long time, the Who’s Who of Cornell academia was a Rolodex chock-full of distinguished scholars. For decades, these academics earned accolades not just from The New York Times Book Review, but also from their students and peers. When Richard Polenberg, history, was awarded a Weiss Presidential Fellowship, he was cited not just for “international recognition” of his scholarship, but also for being “known among both his students and colleagues as a legendary teacher who imparts tremendous knowledge with an engaging style,” according to the Cornell News Service.
And why were Cornellians in such collective grief over Walter LaFeber’s retirement? Glenn Altschuler, the Litwin Professor of History, called LaFeber “the best thing that’s happened to Cornell in the last half century,” recalling how he was “unfailingly attentive to students, staff and colleagues.” It was LaFeber’s “extraordinary devotion to students,” in the words of Professor Emeritus Joel Silbey, that so endeared him to his many admirers.
The heavy hitters (think Maas & Lowi, not Alexander & Catalano) built their reputations on campus-wide esteem, and not just nationwide acclaim. And as evidenced by their popularity among alumni, the top professors are not just beneficiaries of longevity; their fame is grounded in sustained praise from decades of students.
Are these esteemed septuagenarians the last of their kind? Surely there are rising stars in the faculty, so why hasn’t their twinkle caught our eye?
For one thing, professors these days distance themselves from the day-to-day movements of the University. The new breed of Research Institutions tend to emphasize publication over instruction, a fear articulated as early as 1964 in The Journal of Higher Education: “Must the quality of teaching and institutional service inevitably suffer as more prestige is accorded to research and professional writing?”
When Peter S. Cahn, a U.C. Berkeley grad with a Ph.D. in anthropology, sought a professorship at a large public research institution, the department chairwoman told him, “To get tenure, you need a book or a series of articles. If you have great publications but lousy teaching, you’ll still get tenure. If you have great teaching, but not-so-great publications, you won’t get tenure.” As Cahn noted in The Chronicle for Higher Education magazine, “Teaching … was a chore to be suffered until you could return to your writing.”
Yet despite the demands of research, the other Ivies have managed to hire renowned (and middle-aged) teachers who are respected as much for their rapport with students as they are for their scholarship. One of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history — “Justice,” attended by over 10,000 students in two decades — is taught by Michael Sandel, a professor in his early 50s. Louis Menand, another celebrated Harvard professor and regular contributor to The New Yorker, graduated from Pomona in 1973, when many of our star academics were well into their careers.
Even at Brown (even at Brown!), the famous faculty won’t be collecting Social Security checks any time soon. Admired political theorist John Tomasi and I were both in school in 1993 (though I’m told Oxford is a step up from Greenacres Elementary School), and popular architecture professor Dietrich Neumann doesn’t have a grey hair on his head (I noticed while inspecting for lice).
“We are in a period of unusually heavy retirements now,” acknowledged Peter Lepage, Dean of Cornell’s Arts and Sciences school. “It means that we are bringing in a lot of young faculty and that these people will be our future.” In the humanities — where great professors give great lectures — we are on the brink of an age of uncertainty.
Was this changing of the guard inevitable? While Harvard and Brown were recruiting the Sandels and the Tomasis, where was Cornell?
Some telling statistics come from the University’s Financial Plan. For the 1985-86 school year, 16 institutions paid higher average salaries to professors than those meted out by Cornell. On average, Stanford paid $52,577, while Cornell offered $45,631 to endowed professors.
By 1995, we had fallen three spots in the rankings, and schools such as Rutgers, Northwestern and NYU were offering packages of up to $10,000 more per year than Cornell’s wages. CalTech paid average salaries of $88,827 — close to $20,000 more than the average Cornell professor was earning.
Currently, we’re the 12th ranked school in pay, offering an average salary of $115,414. Still, some of our finest professors, such as Timothy J. Vogelsang, who left our economics department last year for Michigan State University, have chosen to relocate because of financial concerns.
“There was a salary difference, and it was a factor I could not ignore because of my family,” Vogelsang wrote in an e-mail message, noting that Michigan State “also provided more research funds.” Aside from pay, he said that he was very content with Cornell, and “had salaries been close, it would have been a difficult choice.” In Volgensang’s case, Cornell could not compete with a public state school to retain one of its most popular professors, and that’s a shame.
Vogelsang’s departure, as well as other recent faculty losses in the social sciences departments, should solidify support behind President Skorton’s initiative to add a humanities leg to the University’s capital campaign — an appeal already weakened by the loss of Vice President for Development Inge Reichenbach last year to Yale.
Cornell also needs to increase research opportunities for the soft sciences. In recent years, we’ve successfully emphasized the hard sciences: Steven Squyres, astronomy, has made headlines for exploring Mars, and Professor Steven Strogatz, mathematics, recently published the acclaimed book, Sync. The University’s research website succinctly sums up our priorities: “computing and information sciences, genomics, advanced materials and nanoscience.” Funding for the social sciences should be reemphasized to echo the achievements of our engineers and astronomers.
It’s a pity that we didn’t better anticipate this period of “unusually heavy retirements” by cushioning the fall with more able(bodied) academics on the right side of forty or fifty. Young humanities professors are already put off by Cornell’s location and its powerful senior staff, the former cramping travel plans, and the latter dimming intellectual stardom. To compensate, we need to offer competitive salary packages and research opportunities.
Now, back to those high school girls …
Rob Fishman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at rbf25@cornell.edu [1] Agree to Disagree appears Wednesdays.
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[1] mailto:rbf25@cornell.edu