States Luring Scientists With Salaries, Facilities

Although such appropriations and bond issues promise to foster excellence throughout the state, the primary beneficiaries of much pump priming are usually state colleges and universities. These efforts, in turn, have triggered recruitment wars between established research institutions and newer programs trying to join the top echelon. The bidding is particularly fierce in such fields as ceramics, computers, chemical engineering and all aspects of biotechnology. And although higher salaries alone are rarely sufficient to trigger such a move, the new buildings and equipment that are made possible with such special appropriations offer a powerful lure to some faculty. Edward Arnold rejected offers from Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania to accept a position of assistant professor at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine (CABM), a unit ofRutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. "It's exciting to be part of a nucleus of a new center and to help in deciding how things will progress," said Arnold, a structural biologist. "I am the third of 18 new faculty to be recruited, and I can help shape further hiring." The absence of formal teaching duties was another inducement, Arnold said. The state-supported CABM also promised to provide Arnold with such perks as additional funds for supplies, sophisti ated instrumentation, travel and support personnel. Robert M. Namovicz, CABM's ex ecutive officer, said that starting salaries for assistant professors range from $34,000 to $90,000, with the top figure paid to clinical M.D.s who bring patients with them. For tenured positions the range is from $50,000 to $124,000, with most Ph.D.s being hired at between $60,000 and $80,000 A salary survey by Cornell of Ivy League schools and a handful of other research universities shows the problem they face competing with top state schools. It also reveals an informal two-tiered pay scale meant to attract and retain top talent. Full professors earn about $60,000, according to the survey, and a handful of 'stars" receive $75,000. Assistant professors earn an average salary of $30,000, with a few at $38,000. In other words, Rutgers routinely offers what Cornell and its sister schools are lucky to provide to a few top scientists. Don Edwards, vice president for public affairs and development at Rutgers, said the school's high-tech initiative grew out of a position paper written during the 1981 gubernatorial race that suggested Rutgers lead an effort to develop the state's high-tech industries. Following his election, Gov. Thomas Kean created a science and technology commission that recommended a $90 million bond issue, which voters approved overwhelmingly in 1984. Rutgers has received a large share of those funds. Together with its own money and private funds, Rutgers has moved ahead with a center for advanced food technology, a ceramics center, and, in October, it broke ground for the $29 million CABM. The bio-tech center already has recruited senior faculty from Hoffman-LaRoche and the University of Minnesota, and junior faculty from Yale and other Ivy League schools. North Carolina has been another early, and active, player in university-based high-technology. Steven Burke, director of education and public affairs at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, said the center "funds packages to provide the environment and structure conducive to top research. We do things universities might not have the money to do." He said such efforts include providing seed money for conferences and workshops, support facilities, money for speculative research and "duding up established labs." Maryland is another state that has actively supported high-tech research, with recent funding of a Systems Research Center for advanced computer technology and the Maryland Biotechnology Institute. The latter has just recruited two molecular biologists from the University of Alberta who, according to an eminent researcher in the field from Harvard, "would be a credit to any top-rank research university in the country." In the face of such attractions,private universities are hard-pressed to find the money to protest their own talent. "Every offer is dealt with on an individual basis," said Cornell's Chester. "The last senior scientist we recruited needed $750,000 to set up his lab," he said, an outlay too large to handle routinely. Another strategy being seriously considered at Cornell is the creation of a "star system" in which highly valued faculty are put on a separate, higher salary scale. Such an approach has been criticized sharply at faculty meetings, however, by those whose fields are not now in demand and by those who worry that it will leave the university with a few high-priced senior scientists and insufficient funds to attract and promote the next generation of researchers. Moffat is a freelance writer in Ithaca, N.Y.

States Luring Scientists With Salaries, Facilities

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