Is It Better to Know?

A friend contacted me the other day to see if I had any insight into a salary range for a position he was considering. Because it was an executive-level position at a private institution, I sent him to GuideStar, where he could scout existing salaries from a couple of years ago (which are public record, thanks to IRS Form 990). If it had been a state institution, I would have sent him to one of the Web sites that make those salaries public (my local newspaper, for example, has a link to the salaries of our state university and community-college faculty).

When I worked on the state side, I remember that each year the budget was printed, salaries and all, and deposited in the library for review. According to campus legend, the two rival alphas in one department used to compare themselves each year; apparently their dean had rigged it so that they alternated making $1 more than the other one each year in order to keep some form of peace. Where there is full public disclosure of salaries, there often is a great deal of jockeying over position, which sometimes spills over into departmental politics. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

The flip side, of course, is that ignorance can be a tool used to perpetuate inequities related to gender, age, or political influence. Full disclosure can be a powerful antiseptic against these practices, though its effectiveness must always be considered against the realities of such knowledge. When everyone finds out what “Pete Publishes-A-Ton” and “Suzie Superstar” really make, it may be hard to take them seriously as full-fledged members of “the team.”

Is the full disclosure of salaries worth the tensions that such knowledge can produce?