Brandeis has the 14th highest paid faculty in Massachusetts, according to statistics released by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which were summarized in an Aug. 29 Boston Globe article. On average, full professors at Brandeis make $131,400 per year, while associate professors make $93,400. Assistant professors make an average of $83,400 and instructors make $59,000 per year.

Provost Steve Goldstein '78, in an email to the Justice, gave several reasons why he believes that these statistics should be taken with a grain of salt.

"First, it does not make comparisons by field-you can readily appreciate how this matters by considering the impact on average salary when universities have medical schools and law schools-the composite reflects neither the surgeon nor the poet well," he said.

Second, he said that Brandeis does not compare itself to other Massachusetts colleges, but rather to members of the Association of American Universities. Finally, he wrote that "pay rankings for full professors ... are not a good reflection of the direction that Brandeis is trying to go, that is, to ensure that our faculty salaries are competitive with our AAU peers at all faculty ranks, not just at the full professor level."

The 2013 American Association of University Professors Faculty Salary Survey also found that while there are 105 male full professors at Brandeis to only 48 women, the average salary of female full professors is $133,000 per year while for the men average is only $130,700.

Goldstein said that the disparity in the number of male and female full professors is easy to explain.

"Many of our full professors have been here for many years and were educated and started their careers at a time when there were fewer women entering academia. Because Brandeis is relatively small, the percentages tend to change slowly-we want to stay small and so our ratio of female -to-male professors is not going to be changed through growth, as it as at some other institutions," he said.

"What I can tell you is that over the past five years, the overall percentage of female faculty at Brandeis has steadily risen and that at the assistant and associate levels we are approaching parity," he added.

The study also included data about average salaries over time, which showed that since 2000, the salaries of full professors have risen slightly more than those of associate and assistant professors. In 2000, the average full professor made $80,200 a year, associate professors made an average of $57,900 per year and assistant professors made $50,100 a year.

"The faculty salaries here at Brandeis had been historically very low compared to peer institutions. A few years ago there was an effort to address this in order to retain our excellent faculty and to continue to attract the best junior faculty to Brandeis," wrote Faculty Senate Chair, Prof. Eric Chasalow (MUS), in an email to the Justice. "The goal was to gradually raise the salaries to the middle of the [Association of American Universities], of which we are a member."

Nationally, out of the 1,142 higher education institutions surveyed, Brandeis ranked 100th in terms of faculty salary, flanked by 99th-ranked Indiana University Bloomington and 101st Colorado School of Mines.

All faculty salaries for Brandeis are above the national median, according to the study.

For the lowest tier of professors, "instructors," of which there are only four at Brandeis according to the survey, the average salary was $59,000.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education article, "The figures reflect the earnings of full-time instructional and research staff whose main role (more than 50 [percent]) is instruction, regardless of whether or not they have official faculty status."