Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/290

286 now published by the Carnegie Foundation give details for 103 institutions paying $45,000 a year or more in salaries, to the instructing staff, and of 54 smaller institutions which were selected as showing that good results can be obtained with comparatively small resources. The average salary of the full professor in the hundred leading institutions is about $2,500, varying from about $4,800 to about $1,400. Higher salaries are paid in a few cases, but salaries of $5,500 at Harvard or $5,000 at Columbia are practically the maximum money prizes open to teachers. These prizes are not open to free competition; for in' this country a professor can as a rule only reach the highest position in his own institution. In this regard, the German method of calling a man freely to what is regarded as a better position has certain advantages. A professor may be called to Berlin at the age of sixty, receiving a higher salary and a more honorable position than any that we have, and this possibility may be a stimulus to good work. Here a man who receives the average salary of $2,500, at the average age of appointment of 35 years, is not usually able to look forward to further promotion. His expenses increase, especially if he has a family, and he finds himself less well off than the successful physician and lawyer in the same town, who are continuously increasing their incomes and the material advantages they can give to their children.

The Harvard plan seems on the whole to be the best hitherto put in practise in this country. After a graded series of promotions and increments of salary, a full professorship is reached at the average age of forty with a salary of $4,000, and the salary is increased by $500, at intervals of five years, until it reaches $5,500. If a man shows unusual ability—ordinarily it must be acknowledged by being called elsewhere—he may be promoted more rapidly than in accordance with the usual routine; in general, however, the salaries are not in proportion to ability or to needs, but are equal with slowly increasing increment. This method and the system of pensions gives security and dignity to the office. It is an open question whether the lessening of competition and ambition which it favors is a good or an evil.

The comparison of the salaries given by different institutions should result in the improvement of conditions where these are unsatisfactory. Thus Syracuse University pays its assistant professors an average salary of $978 and its full professors an average salary of $1,808, and in its non-professorial departments has one instructor for twenty students. Haverford College pays its assistant professors $2,240 and its full professors $3,440 and has one instructor for six or seven students. These are extreme cases, but there are many anomalies in the tables. It is of course true that the effective salary is dependent on the cost and standard of living. A salary of $2,000 in a small town may have as much purchasing power as twice that amount in >Jew York City.

record with regret the deaths of James Duncan Hague, the American geologist and engineer; of AncetoGarcio Menocal, an eminent Cuban engineer in the service of the United States government; of Mr. Arthur Lister, F.R.S., known for his work on the mycetozoa; of Mylius Erichson, the Danish explorer; of Dr. F. Noll, professor of botany at Halle, and of Dr. Oskar Liebreich, professor of pharmacology at Berlin.

director of the Solar Observatory of the Carnegie Institution, has been elected a foreign correspondent of the Paris Academy of Sciences in the place of the late Asaph Hall.—Count Zeppelin, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, has been awarded an honorary