Professor Moneybags: When academics get rich . . . the agony!

The image of the impecunious professor dies hard, but many of today's college teachers and administrators are in fact living rather well. Academic conferences, once dominated by disheveled, sorry-looking folk, are now frequently a high-class affair, featuring speakers and even ordinary attendees in designer suits. College towns that once rattled with beat-up old Volkswagens and Chevys now hum and purr with shiny new Volvos, BMWs, Lexuses, and even Porsches. Some academics used to attend events just for the free wine and hors d'oeuvres; today this practice is rare-except among graduate students. Indeed, many academic couples these days think nothing of paying $4 apiece for a Venti nonfat latte, or $100 for dinner and wine at the local Italian bistro. A die-hard liberal professor whom I have debated in the past recently surprised me when he confided that he voted Republican last November: "I really like Bush's position on getting rid of the estate tax."

Yes, it's true. Affluence, once the preserve of the entrepreneurial class and the corporate sector, has now come to academia. Six-figure salaries, which used to be restricted to college presidents and a few senior faculty members in business and engineering, are no longer uncommon. The stock-market boom of the past two decades, rising home values, two-earner households, and external sources of income from royalties, lecture fees, etc., all have given the academic world a new taste of prosperity.

You might expect all these professors and administrators who have seen their incomes rise-and their net worth soar-to be living it up and, like my old debate partner, worrying only about their tax liability. But in fact, the new affluence has generated profound ambivalence in the academic community. You won't find such anxiety in the business or engineering schools, where professors typically compare their salaries to the much more generous incomes of those in the corporate sector. Among a large segment of academia, however-especially professors of the baby-boom generation who teach in the humanities and social sciences- there is evident angst about achieving a bourgeois prosperity that many never dreamed possible, and against which they have railed for most of their lives.

Robert Frank, who teaches economics and public policy at Cornell, describes his predicament when a relative offered a few years ago to sell him a Porsche 911 at a bargain price. "I was sorely tempted," he confesses. But he knew that Ithaca has a strong social norm against conspicuous consumption. A chemistry professor who drove a Porsche convertible told him that he occasionally had to endure vandalism and obscene gestures. Frank passed up the deal because "I realized that unless I could put a sign on the car that explained how I happened to acquire it, I would never really feel comfortable driving it." Now, however, Frank has changed his mind and purchased a BMW. Still, he seems apologetic about it, and in his most recent book, Luxury Fever, he deplores the rising tide of materialism and consumerism in America.

A couple of years ago the Wall Street Journal ran an article-entitled "Even Leftists Have Servants Now"-profiling several professors who have hired gardeners, pool men, cooks, maids, and nannies. Most of these servants are, ahem, blacks and Mexicans. The contortions these academics go through to justify their behavior make for captivating reading. Political scientist Mark Petracca, of the University of California at Irvine, says he finally agreed to get a nanny, but he absolutely refuses to hire a gardener, even though everyone else in his neighborhood has one. Putting all his learning on display, Petracca explains: "It reeks of a kind of imperial colonialism one can imagine present in Shanghai."

Recently an editor at a California publishing house told me about one of her authors who has published several books denouncing the rich for selfishness and greed. Even though the latest one has been out for a while now, the author regularly calls her to find out how it's selling. Hearing the dismal sales figures, he responds, "Next time I'm really going to slam those greedy bastards."

It is easy to laugh at this hypocrisy, and I do. And I'm sure the businessmen who read that Wall Street Journal article also had a hearty chuckle. Why not? These are the same professors who for years have directed their resentment and moral indignation at "the rich." Now, irony of ironies, the enemies of the rich have joined the rich. The virtue of impoverishment has given way to the vice of plenty. The good guys have become bad guys, and they stand condemned in their own books and Ph.D. dissertations-indeed, in their own hearts. So it's only fair that, hoist on their own petard, these self-righteous moralizers be permitted to suffer a little for sinning against their own moral code.