Professor Moneybags

Yes, it’s true. Affluence, once the preserve of the entrepreneurial class and the corporate sector, has now come to academia. Six-figure salaries, which used to be restricted to college presidents and a few senior faculty members in business and engineering, are no longer uncommon. The stock-market boom of the past two decades, rising home values, two-earner households, and external sources of income from royalties, lecture fees, etc., all have given the academic world a new taste of prosperity.

You might expect all these professors and administrators who have seen their incomes rise—and their net worth soar—to be living it up and, like my old debate partner, worrying only about their tax liability. But in fact, the new affluence has generated profound ambivalence in the academic community. You won’t find such anxiety in the business or engineering schools, where professors typically compare their salaries to the much more generous incomes of those in the corporate sector. Among a large segment of academia, however—especially professors of the baby-boom generation who teach in the humanities and social sciences—there is evident angst about achieving a bourgeois prosperity that many never dreamed possible, and against which they have railed for most of their lives.

About the Author

Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh D’Souza is a writer, scholar, and public intellectual. He is the author of America: Imagine A World Without Her, in which he explores the landscape of a world in which America had lost the Revolutionary War.

Featured Tags

Yes, it’s true. Affluence, once the preserve of the entrepreneurial class and the corporate sector, has now come to academia. Six-figure salaries, which used to be restricted to college presidents and a few senior faculty members in business and engineering, are no longer uncommon. The stock-market boom of the past two decades, rising home values, two-earner households, and external sources of income from royalties, lecture fees, etc., all have given the academic world a new taste of prosperity.

You might expect all these professors and administrators who have seen their incomes rise—and their net worth soar—to be living it up and, like my old debate partner, worrying only about their tax liability. But in fact, the new affluence has generated profound ambivalence in the academic community. You won’t find such anxiety in the business or engineering schools, where professors typically compare their salaries to the much more generous incomes of those in the corporate sector. Among a large segment of academia, however—especially professors of the baby-boom generation who teach in the humanities and social sciences—there is evident angst about achieving a bourgeois prosperity that many never dreamed possible, and against which they have railed for most of their lives.

About the Author

Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh D’Souza is a writer, scholar, and public intellectual. He is the author of America: Imagine A World Without Her, in which he explores the landscape of a world in which America had lost the Revolutionary War.