The campus buzz is that History Professor Jeremi Suri is off to UT-Austin, set to double his salary from $113,000 to $220,000.
In the Cap Times piece, Suri cites the state climate as a motivator for his departure.
“I love this place and am very sad about leaving, but it’s been a really hard year here,” says Suri. “I think with the political attacks on the university and the budget cutting, it’s hard. And that’s not the fault of the university, but it’s the environment that we’re operating in.”
The question a lot of people are thinking: If it’s tough times for the university, why not stick it out with the institution that fostered his scholarship rather than abandoning it in its time of need?
But of course the real point here is that defenders of the New Badger Partnership/Public Authority (ostensibly dead for the time being) will state that this is really about the money and offers only further proof that UW-Madison needs more flexibilities so as to incentivize academic commitment to the university. It’s the only way to stay competitive!
The only problem with this argument is that the empirical evidence doesn’t support it. As Professor Sara Goldrick-Rab convincingly shows, the data just isn’t there:
Another really important question is: do we have a faculty turnover problem? The data I can find on change over time seems to imply “no” — the proportion of faculty leaving hasn’t changed much over 30 years, and if anything seems to have declined.
To be clear, her argument isn’t that UW faculty don’t deserve better pay, just that increasing their salaries isn’t the most “cost effective” way of keeping people here in Madison. The post is worth reading in its entirety.
It’s also worth noting a thing or two about Suri’s record at the university. Though popular with a lot of students, the fact remains that much of his work provided ideological support for the less savory aspects of US foreign policy. Though I haven’t read his book on Henry Kissinger, people whose judgement I respect have stated that its largely an apology for one of the worst war criminals in American history. He also serves as Director of the Grand Strategy Program, which is essentially an initiative of military indoctrination on campus and in its classrooms.
The militarization of the university is one of the more dangerous trends in modern academia, and Jeremi Suri was perhaps the leading academic advocate for this development at UW-Madison.
I agree with Rashid: I don’t think this is a fair characterization of Dr. Suri’s academic career nor of the Grand Strategy Program. He is far more interested in describing difficult choices than in decreeing to his students how those decisions should have been treated.
The Grand Strategy Program has an interest in national security, true enough, but that is neither militarization nor indoctrination. Rather, it includes the military (and the people in it) in the conversation about what kind of world we want to live in and how we can achieve it.
In the future, I would warmly encourage Mr. Szarynski to either read or listen to a scholar before publicly criticizing him.