Where Are the Professors?

At Harvard's Graduate School of Public Administration last week, students in Economics 169 and 287 ran into a growing problem: the absent professor. David Elliott Bell had left abruptly to grapple with the U.S. budget; the same school's Economist Edward S. Mason was off surveying the economy of Uganda. Other Harvard absentees: Government Professor Arthur A. Maass (studying the water laws of Spain), Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (lecturing on the West Coast), Government Professor Carl Friedrich (at a Texas seminar on Hegel) and Economist John T. Dunlop (mediating for the construction industry). Students who came to sit at the feet of such scholars could well ask: Where are they?

More and more, professors are called away to advise on everything from the design of skyscrapers to the polishing of presidential candidates. The trend is filling professorial pockets, if not student heads. The average full professor at top U.S. campuses earns less than $12,000 a year, but highly extracurricular profs now make $30,000 and more.

$1,000 a Day. Few campuses match Harvard for part-time teaching. Theologian Paul J. Tillich, 74, gets 25 to 30 speaking requests a week, is regularly gone from Thursday to Tuesday. Economist-Author John (The Affluent Society) Galbraith gets so many requests that he files them by continent. Schlesinger's schedule is so crowded that he leaves itineraries by the telephone so his children can inform callers, and incidentally themselves. Chemist George B. Kistiakowsky has not even been at Harvard for the past year but in Washington as President Eisenhower's science adviser. Budget Director Bell is now off to Washington--after living part time in Pakistan since 1954 as the country's economic consultant.

Harvard's famed facultymen make as much as $1,000 a lecture, and some chemistry professors earn the same fee per day advising drug companies. At the Harvard Business School, two-thirds of the 108-man faculty do sideline consulting, and 28 are officers and directors of corporations. Professor Paul W. Cherington is chairman of his own science-management firm, United Research Inc. Professor Malcolm McNair reportedly earns more than $40,000 a year advising retailers. Just for advising Incorporated Investors Inc. one day a week, the late economist Sumner H. Slichter used to get $10,000 a year, and Incorporated Investors was only one of his clients.

Bad for Harvard? All of this outside hustle strikes some critics as bad for Harvard. Boston Attorney Francis H. Burr, member of the Harvard Corporation, admits that "a lot of people are concerned and so are we." But he also says that "many professors are worth more to the university by spending time away." McGeorge Bundy, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, adds that not more than 10% of the faculty are ever absent for long. Bundy asks: "How are we going to strengthen our knowledge of far-off areas unless we have men wandering through darkest Africa? This outside activity enriches and invigorates the place. Without it Harvard would be a much duller place." At week's end Boston papers reported that Bundy himself, a Republican-for-Kennedy, was in line for a Washington job as Under Secretary of State.

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