Most colleges provide employee benefits in addition to pay to compensate the administration, faculty, and staff on the full-time payroll. Every campus has a slightly different set of offerings — mostly the differences reflect how much of the benefit is provided by the institution, how much with an employee matching contribution and how much control over options the individual employee has.

Faculty receive the special benefit of time — usually paid for a nine-month commitment, with June, July, and August free for research, writing, other work or play. Both faculty and staff also often receive tuition remission for themselves and for family members (with wide campus variations). When I was a lawyer, a client who had no children asked me to help get his university to assist him with the cost of his elderly parents in a residential facility, for a sum equal to tuition benefits (the school declined). In some schools, the option of day-care or tuition remission is now offered, with the choice to be made by the employee.

On a scattering of campuses, housing opportunities — again, with variations such as mortgage assistance or housing allowances, are also offered. Several campuses have a housing stock available for faculty and senior staff, residences that often come with a complex system of entitlements for use after retirement and for second-to-die spouses to remain after the passing of the other. All of this helps to create community.

But in a few cases, special arrangements have been made that go well beyond the usual.

Last November, it was reported that Stanford University acquired housing for athletic coaches. They planned to provide residences for their use or offer cash allowances to assist them in purchasing their own home. Located in one of the most expensive NCAA Division I real estate markets in America, Palo Alto’s housing costs gave sticker shock to new recruited coaches. It takes more than the promise of good weather to lure someone to California from Indiana.

When Jeffrey Sachs moved to Columbia University from Harvard a few years ago, he was provided a mansion dubbed “A Town House Fit for a King.” Columbia purchased the $8.2-million facility for use by Sachs and the Columbia Earth Institute, which he directs, saying it needed a facility for entertaining and meeting space. The sauna and gym in the basement were to be converted into a conference center and library.

Catherine Sharkey is departing Columbia University’s Law School for a new assignment at New York University’s Law School and she’s concurrently leaving her Columbia-owned flat. Well, not exactly. NYU has purchased an 80-percent share in a $5.2-million apartment in a Columbia-owned building on Central Park West. Ms. Sharkey, who previously lived on the 2nd floor of this building, will now move up to a duplex built into one of the upper story turrets. She purchased her 20-percent interest with the help of an NYU loan.

Full disclosure obliges me to observe that for 36 years, I lived in university-provided housing, most recently at The George Washington University. When I served as president, I resided in a college home — a requirement of the job (as it is for presidents on most campuses), becoming a caretaker with diminished privacy.

What we are beginning to see develop is a change from the normative “benefit package” into specific “recruitment” devices.

If a three-bedroom house near Campus X somewhere in Middle America costs $310,000 and a three-bedroom condo in a large urban metropolis is selling for $2.3-million, it is daunting to persuade a professor at Campus X to move her family for a new job without some type of consideration. Although this is often done through higher salaries, even that does not always provide sufficient relocation incentive. The gap between a reasonable raise and the increased cost-of-living can be difficult to bridge. As faculty and staff who are being wooed request more assistance with the potential relocation, schools search hard for innovative ways to get the job done.

These days universities recruit with enhanced laboratories, subsidized mortgages, more research assistants, reduced teaching loads, better travel budgets, and more. The answer is almost always, more. Or, when it comes to teaching, less. All of this creates an interesting tension on campus: benefits for everyone and special benefits for some. Governor Spitzer of New York has recently called for recruiting 2,000 new faculty to the State University — about 10-percent of whom would be “world class.” How to attract them? It is chopped liver here and schmaltz there.