MARKETS MAKE SOME PEOPLE RICH AND OTHERS POOR.

Yes, markets are environments in which there are incentives to reduce costs and seek productivity gains.  They are also environments in which scarce resources get reallocated to more rewarding uses.

Professor Craig Maher, a Wauwatosa resident with a post at Wisconsin-Oshkosh (hey, Wisconsin, do you regret not restoring the Valley 400?) recognizes one of the incentives speed-ups and pay freezes gives to ambitious people.

Since joining the UW-Oshkosh faculty, I have done all that is expected of a good academic. I consistently receive strong student evaluations, I publish consistently and on topics particularly germane to my course responsibilities in the MPA Program - public budgeting and finance. I was promoted to associate professor and will be promoted to the highest academic rank, full [c.q.] professor, at the end of this semester. My research was recognized in 2011, when I was awarded a highly coveted Endowed Professorship.

In addition to professional pursuits, I have been active in the Wauwatosa community, where I successfully ran for elective office in 2004 and 2008 (receiving more than 80% of the vote in 2008). My children are in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts; my oldest daughter is in an after-school program called Kids Who Care, where the students interact with residents in a local retirement home.

The point of this is to highlight how much this city and area mean to my family and me, and any decision to leave would need to be significant.

As a faculty member, I have not had a salary increase in at least four years. In fact, my take-home pay today is lower than it was in 2009. The current political climate is such that I am reluctant to tell people what I do for a living because my profession is perceived as a drain on the state, that faculty are lazy and that they are paid exorbitant salaries.

As any smart professional would do, I finally decided that personal attachment can only go so far, so I tested the market and was recently hired at Northern Illinois University. The program I am joining is much stronger (nationally ranked), the salary is much better and the benefits are comparable.

My question is: If I was put in a position where I felt I needed to leave Milwaukee and Wisconsin, what does that say about the future of the UW System faculty?

It is widely known that UW System faculty are compensated well below faculty at comparable universities elsewhere. The response historically has been that a portion (never all) of the difference is made up on the benefits side (health insurance and pension). The changes this year now make the gap even greater. I worry about what that means for retention of top faculty in the UW System.

We're glad to welcome new colleagues, although I hope Professor Maher negotiated a good starting package, as Northern Illinois has sometimes frozen pay, apart from making counter-offers to outside offers.  Headquarters is receptive to the observation that "if you can get a better offer, we'll match it" forces the people most likely to receive such offers to cast about for offers, and there have been occasional raises, and, thus far, no layoffs or furloughs.  On the other hand, we've had a lot of retirements, as uncertainty about the future of the state pension funds, and a change in the benefit formula going forward, has induced people to cash in now.

Commenters to Professor Maher's column note that Northern Illinois is a larger university, and the program he is joining, public administration, is one of the country's best.  All true, and both of those things were true long before the football program got noticed.  That's no reason for complacency in Wisconsin.  Start treating attrition as "those people would have left anyway" and do nothing about the working conditions, watch a change in the criteria by which you define "would have left anyway."  In markets, resources are reallocated from less rewarding and less productive to more rewarding and more productive uses.