BU focuses on burying grievances, salary gap

Only two months after Boston University's faculty council revealed that the salary gap between male and female full professors on campus was twice the national average for private research universities, BU president Bob Brown said the university has already made major progress toward bringing the school in line with comparable universities. After this fall's round of merit raises, female full professors are making 86 percent as much as their male counterparts, compared with 83 percent last year. Female assistant professors now make 92 percent as much as males, compared with 87 percent last year. Associate professors remain steady at 91 percent. ''I'm committed to compensation that is merit-based, gender- and race-blind, and market-driven," Brown said during a recent lunch with the Globe's editorial board. ''I think it's doable in one year." Brown also said he's talking with members of the BU community about what the university's core missions should be. But even as he tries to focus on the future, he said people often come to him with old grievances that, whatever their merits, he can't redress. Brown calls these gripes ''dead cats." ''They come to me and say, 'I have this cat that died,' " he said. ''It occurred in the previous administration. I say, 'I'll grieve with you, and then we'll go bury it, because otherwise it will smell. But I can't bring it back to life.' " Asked whether this was an oblique way of talking about problems he inherited from former president John Silber, Brown said no, any administration would have its dead cats and that a lot of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors are bringing ''cats I killed" to new provost Rafael Reif, who replaced Brown at MIT. But Brown said the metaphor helps people focus on what is realistic for a new leader to do. Now, when he goes to meetings and people complain about old issues, he said, they often say, ''I know, I know, it's a dead cat."

BREAKING BARRIERS -- A group of presidents of nine leading universities -- including Harvard and MIT -- that have been working together for four years on women's issues issued a statement last week declaring that ''barriers still exist to the full participation of women, not only in science and engineering, but also in academic fields throughout higher education." They committed to taking more steps ''toward making academic careers compatible with family caregiving responsibilities." The declaration was dry and short on specifics, but it still seemed significant to some of the women who have devoted years of their lives to this issue. Nancy Hopkins, the MIT professor instrumental in MIT's efforts to improve the status of women -- which in turn spawned the group of nine universities -- found it moving. She credits the group of female professors and administrators from those schools that has been meeting annually to keep the effort alive. ''I did not think I would live to see this in my lifetime, frankly," she wrote in an e-mail. ''How big the dent will be is still unclear to me but that these women are going to get results seems certain to me. They are adjusting the institutional rules to work for women, as well as men, and for the new reality of family-work life. With the help of a few good men in power."

PRIZED PROFESSORS -- The University of Massachusetts awarded its 2005 Public Service Award this month to seven faculty members, including one posthumously given to James Kaput, a UMass-Dartmouth mathematics professor who designed methods to assist students in learning calculus more easily. Kaput was struck by a Chevrolet pickup truck as jogged on a Dartmouth road in July; the 63-year-old mathematician died of massive head trauma a short time later. In honoring Kaput, the university cited his work as ''a model of how to integrate scholarship and public service." Also receiving the award were Nancy Cohen, a nutrition professor at UMass-Amherst; Robert Chen, a professor of environmental, earth, and ocean sciences at UMass-Boston; Joel Tickner, a professor focused on community health and sustainability at UMass-Lowell; Kenneth L. Applebaum, a professor of clinical psychiatry at UMass Medical School; Thomas Roeper, a linguistics professor at UMass-Amherst; and Joan Arches, a professor focused on public and community service at UMass-Boston.

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