The Faculty Raiders

The second-drawer engineering school at the University of Texas swelled with pride when it acquired a top-drawer man: the University of Illinois' Chemist William Bradley, a leading authority on the molecular structure of materials. Masking its joy, as is proper in academic circles, Texas sent out a routine press release announcing Bradley's appointment--and thereby left untold a typical tale of the great game of faculty raiding.

The plot to kidnap Bradley began three years ago, when Texas heard on the academic grapevine that middle-aged Chemist Bradley wanted the help of a bright young scientist to complement his own work. Texas began to look. It soon learned that Bradley admired a young specialist in crystallography. Dr. Hugo Steinfink, then working for an oil company in Houston.Steinfink was lured to the Texas campus in 1960 with the promise of unlimited freedom and such research tools as a $30,000 refracterometer. The presence of Steinfink hooked Bradley, and the deal was clinched with a new, $4,000,000, eight-story laboratory.

Last week, at the peak of the hiring season for the next academic year, 1962-63, most faculty deals were being carried out on the beginner level, as graduate students flocked to the holiday meetings of learned societies to be interviewed by cool-eyed professors in "the slave market." But once on a faculty, teachers are free to wheel and deal in a world where Chips have fallen and sharp young men in Brown Tweed Suits thrive on perpetual opportunity. Compared with the C.O.D. wooing of baseball players, or even with the corporate kidnaping of business executives, the art of hiring professors is so subtle, so roundabout, that it requires the delicacy of a Chinese marriage broker.

Sleet in Chicago? In Academe, the cardinal sin is open talk about jobs. One never seeks; one is sought. Mostly, this means a labyrinthine feeling-out between men in the same field at different campuses. The nuances are endless. When a dean in sunny Texas asks on the phone, "Is it still sleeting in Chicago?", he may be implying a full-scale job offer. Or he may not; a major gaucherie, of course, is for a professor to react to a feeler that wasn't there.

Faculty salaries average $7,330, can hit $25,000. But money counts less than prestige, the good opinion of peers. Hence every job switch must somehow constitute a rise in status. Even when a university has-been is shunted off to a teachers' college, he is credited with gaining "more security and more leisure." In contrast, a star scholar lives on solid achievement, and fears "peaking out" after his big work is done; recruiters therefore try to "catch him as soon as he gets itchy"--that is, with an offer that can lead to new triumphs of research or scholarship.

Unhappily, an old star's new glow may also burn out as soon as he gets tenure. A common product of hasty hiring, the "deadwood" scholar is a total loss and a horselaugh on the great game of faculty raiding. This is why Harvard, still relatively unscathed in the hiring battle, takes one full year for an Olympian look at a professor before employing him.

Three-Way Trade. Sometimes the fish baits the hook himself. While working in Washington on the U.S. budget, for example, Harvard Economist X runs into Minnesota Economist Y, who reports that Stanford Economist Z is sick of "dull" Palo Alto. Presto, X is on the phone to a close Yale friend, who jumps at the chance to sabotage those "upstart Californians." Yale grabs Stanford's Z--precisely what Z himself hoped for when he told Minnesota's Y his troubles. In return, thin-blooded Y may well quit frosty Minnesota to take over Z's job at sunny Stanford. Both Y and Z knew, of course, that Stanford would not tempt X, who is quite happy working for Harvard because it allows him to spend most of his time in Washington.

More often, the job seeks the man. Says U.C.L.A.'s Vice Chancellor Foster Sherwood: "The man you want is never in the market." Sherwood, whose burgeoning campus needs 100 new facultymen next fall, is spending thousands building the labs and libraries that scholars find irresistible.

U.C.L.A.'s northern rival, Berkeley, got famous that way, starting the vast go-West movement that now has thoroughbreds galloping out of famed stables all over the East. But not all the traffic goes West. Last week Brown triumphantly made off with Berkeley's Historian Carl Bridenbaugh. president of the American Historical Association. Yale exults in such recent California catches as Berkeley's Microbiologist Edward Adelberg and Stanford's husband-and-wife Historians (China) Arthur and Mary Wright (he got a new Yale chair; she became the first woman tenure-holder on Yale's liberal-arts faculty). On the other hand, Stanford got Yale's Historian David Potter. To replace Potter, Yale snagged Johns Hopkins' topflight Historian C. Vann Woodward, whose terms were a blue-ribbon chair and a year's leave of absence with pay before he ever reaches New Haven.

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