COVERING THOSE OPPORTUNITY COSTS. Two seemingly unrelated posts from academic webloggers provide opportunities to revisit some basic economic principles. Apartment 11d responds to a Stanley Fish article continuing his defense of the academy (and in the process making a spot-on observation about bullet points.) The criticism from the fourth floor includes this: "Perhaps there has to be a different mission in public and private universities. Private universities can set tuition rates as they please, have a serious research agenda, and provide jacuzzis for the students. But public universities have to be responsible to others. If the public doesn't want the faculty to take year long sabbaticals or teach classes of five students, then so be it." The Superintendent's minor nitpick is with the second sentence: it is or, not and, as we have not yet disposed of the hypothesis that creature comforts are cheaper than a prestige faculty as means to encouraging enrollments; whether those are the kinds of enrollments to encourage is another matter. That leads to the major nitpick: the public has not told its representatives it does not want its university faculty to stop doing the kinds of work the private research universities do, and it probably hasn't hurt Northern Illinois University to have graduated the Speaker of the House (don't get me going on what I discovered at West Virginia.) Faculty are mobile. During the early 1980s, an era of tight state budgets and falling enrollments, a number of good economists at the University of Wisconsin were able to obtain more attractive offers elsewhere. Although the public does have a right to know where its money is going, it has to understand the rest of the story. Dean Fish is unlikely to be able to keep his best scholars at Circle (I know, it's Illinois-Chicago) if he's unable to match the terms of employment, which means research opportunities, participation in doctoral programs, and tech support as well as salaries and surroundings. That brings me to the apparently unrelated second post. Invisible Adjunct suspects this professor is crying with his mouth full. (He also doesn't know the territory: "OK, we're not in Boston, or the San Francisco Bay area, or Puget Sound, or Raleigh-Durham. The nearest beach is about 300 miles away. The local culture is conservative, with more churches than bookstores. We are south of the Mason-Dixon line, but we have indoor plumbing and a National Public Radio station on the campus.

"There is a major metropolitan area only an hour away. The weather is good, housing is affordable, the crime rate is low, and so are taxes. Schools are good, even if there is no Advanced Placement French or Urdu offered in the second grade." Sounds like some pretty good selling points to me: are there sailable lakes or dealers in O Scale near to hand? The article, however, neglects to mention salaries. Killer job description. Not your basic coastal College Town. Classic compensating differential problem. If the pay packet is also stingy, nobody will come.