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By Peter S. Cahn

Almost a decade ago, when I asked an undergraduate adviser to write me a letter of recommendation for a doctoral program in anthropology, he joked, "Have you taken a vow of poverty?" Now, in my second year on the tenure track, I realize he was not being sarcastic.

I had no illusions of large salaries when I began my graduate studies. With a surfeit of qualified Ph.D.'s in my field, scrambling for every available faculty job or for the few opportunities in industry, I understood that I could not expect to match the incomes of my friends in law or business. In my mind, the satisfaction of pursuing intellectual interests and sharing ideas with motivated students would provide rewards beyond the monetary.

The salary that came with my tenure-track job offer at the University of Oklahoma seemed luxurious compared with my postdoc pay. Moreover, the appointment covered only nine months, so I could supplement my salary with additional teaching, I thought. And I reasoned that the cost of living in the middle of the country would be low.

During my first year as an assistant professor, the monthly paycheck and health-insurance benefits enabled me to afford the down payment on a house, which would have been a fantasy in the real-estate market of California. Yet, as preparing lectures and grading exams occupied much of my time during the semester, I came to understand that my summer would not be truly "off." To produce the scholarly publications that tenure demands, I would have to use those unpaid three months for fieldwork and writing.

With monthly mortgage payments and research expenses mounting, I began to wonder when I could expect a raise. Faculty members at the University of Oklahoma have not received a raise in two years -- neither merit increases nor cost-of-living allowances. And the switch to a health-care plan with higher deductibles has been tantamount to receiving a pay cut. Having secured a boost in tuition rates last spring, the university president has given all employees a one-time, pre-tax bonus of $500 and has pledged to make permanent salary raises his top priority for this year.

During a presentation to the faculty senate reported by the local news media, the president stated that the average salary and benefits for a faculty member on the campus totals about $91,000 a year. That figure astonished me. The high cost of health care notwithstanding, my total compensation was no where near that amount. Perhaps the well-financed science professors were skewing the mean, but when asked for the median salary, the president replied it was the same.

Was I really making so much less money than everyone else? Simple courtesy in this country dictates that you don't ask someone how much he or she makes, and I had just assumed that all assistant professors made about as much as I did.

So I did something I had always been tempted to do. As a public university, the University of Oklahoma is required to make available its annual operating budget. I found this document behind the reserve desk of the main library, hefted from some forgotten shelf by a helpful undergraduate.

It was like unearthing the Rosetta Stone. There, in legible tables and uncluttered font, appeared the names of all university employees and how much money they had been allotted in annual salary. It felt almost illicit, having access to such personal information, but I saw no stamps marking the document as classified.

The first thing I realized upon scanning the amounts in the compensation column was that my salary was very much in line with my fellow junior faculty members in the humanities and social sciences. Colleagues in the sciences and engineering earned significantly more.

Secondly, I saw that none of the anthropologists even approached the average salary figure quoted by the president. In my department, the two highest salaries, by far, belonged to the current chairwoman and the previous chairwoman. This pattern seemed to hold true across disciplines. The best-paid faculty members, even taking into consideration their 12-month administrative appointments, were the department heads. The deans earned nearly four times my salary. Despite the university's emphasis on research and publication, it seemed that the largest financial rewards lay in administration.

Most surprising was a phenomenon known as compression. This refers to the process that shrinks the difference between pay for newly hired faculty members and pay for those who have been at the university for several years and have seen only incremental raises from their starting salaries. Longevity is no guarantee of higher compensation. I had heard senior colleagues grumble about that, but did not appreciate their complaints until I saw the figures.

One tenured member of the department, with 25 years of university employment, earned only $2,000 more a year than I. Another associate professor, who had performed important service roles in the department, earned even less than I did in my second year as a junior faculty member!

Judging by the numbers, the maximum I can expect to earn after decades of research and teaching at the university is a 50 percent raise over my current salary. Most likely it will be much less.

Like most faculty members, I do not determine my self-worth by how much money I earn. Life as a university professor affords me flexibility to pursue the research questions that interest me and set a schedule that suits my needs. My interactions with students are always energizing and never routine. I am also fortunate in that I do not have student loans to repay or children to rear.

However, in important ways, the pay structure of the university represents a crude measure of its priorities. My cursory study of the operating budget revealed glaring disparities in how faculty members are paid, one made all the more pernicious by our reticence to discuss income levels openly. While top administrators receive ample compensation, long-serving employees endure low salaries with little hope of advancement.

No executive-pay scandal exists, and administrators perform complex and necessary tasks for the institution. Yet faculty members carry out the heart of the university's mission, and it is idealistic to think that the pleasures of an academic job will be sufficient to retain innovative thinkers or recruit promising teachers. Choosing an academic career should not require a vow of poverty.