Among the findings were that the mean salary paid to the 615 full professorsrepresented by the departments that responded increased by 3.6 percent, to $87,589. The 96 chairmen of those departments were paid a mean salary of $124,973, a 2.4 percent gain. Mean pay for the 382 associate professors was $63,848, up 4.4 percent. Inflation, by comparison, is generally recognized to be about 3 percent.
The results are greeted with guarded optimism by several department chairmen and professors. They cite a number of reasons for the salary increases, including the need of some schools to compensate for lean years when pay raises were meager or nonexistent.
"At public schools, there has been a game of catch-up," says John Solaro, who chairs the physiology and biology department at the University of Illinois in Chicago. "So salaries, in general, have been steadily going up."
The survey, which included pre- and postdoctoral trainees, ...
