The following letter provides interesting testimony to Franco Modigliani‘s market value in 1956 as well as how A. G. Hart hoped to offer Modigliani’s other offers together with an offer extended to James William Ford (Harvard economics Ph.D., 1954) by Ohio State University as evidential ammunition in the economics department plea for a significant increase in Columbia University salaries to remain competitive.
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COPY
[Stamp: Office of the Vice President, July 13, 1956, Columbia University]
July 8, 1956
Prof. Carl S. Shoup
Executive Officer
Department of Economics
503 Fayerweather
Dear Professor Shoup:
This is to give further background on the scrap of evidence about the adequacy of Columbia University salary scales that is offered by Franco Modigliani’s comment on our offer of a visiting professorship for next year. As your note points out, the interpretation hinges largely on his professional status.
Against our offer of $10,000 for a one-year visit, as I read Modigliani’s letter with its gentlemanly absence of specific figures, he was offered $12,000 for a year as visiting professor at Harvard and at least $12,500 as permanent professor at Berkeley, and settled for (I take it) $12,000 to stay at Carnegie Tech. His age is 37 or 38, I believe, and he has been professor for two or three years at Carnegie Tech.
Modigliani’s reputation is established, but not very wide. He has published several distinguished articles, and has important work in progress; but his only book publication to date has been a collaboration with Neisser. Furthermore, he has lacked the backing of the major graduate schools (being an immigrant with a doctorate from the New School), and has thus tended to be undervalued by the market. Besides, he suffered a setback because he had the misfortune to be in the thick of the fracas at the University of Illinois. When working conditions there became intolerable, he felt such an unconditional urge to leave that he sacrificed the bargaining power of his tenure there as associate professor. At the time he went to Carnegie Tech, he could not command a tenure appointment but went on a term arrangement which however it took them only a few months to convert to an appointment with tenure.
In short, here is the kind of man we will want when next we have an appointment to make—and undervalued rather than overvalued on the national economics market—and our salary scale is at least $2500 below what he can command at good centers with about our teaching load, and with a lower cost of living. Another interesting comparison has come in meanwhile. James Ford, whom we let go from a Columbia instructorship to be assistant professor at Vanderbilt, writes that he has refused a post at Ohio State as associate professor at $8100. This is for a man of about the caliber and stage of development we think suitable for an assistant professorship at Columbia. We must be a good $1500 below the market at that level, if this is evidence.
Very truly yours,
/s/ Albert Gailord Hart
Professor of Economics
Source: Columbia University Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Central Files, 1890-, Box 400. Folder “Shoup, Carl Sumner (2/2); 1/1956—6/1948”.
Image Source: Franco Modigliani, from MIT Museum website.