Brother, Can you spare a dime?

Brainstorm: Fair Play for Humanities Faculty? - Chronicle.com: "In the just-received November issue there is a piece entitled “Left Behind? Historians Lag in the 2006-07 Salary Report.” It is based on numbers provided by the College and University Personnel Association-Human Resources, and it shows history salaries lagging significantly behind the average for all disciplines (except the health sciences, which are not included in these statistics). The discrepancy is greatest in the lowest academic ranks (that is, entry-level salaries), where history salaries were 14.2 percent below the average — whereas full professors were 7.5 percent below the average. What this means, of course, is that historians are now being paid at levels comparable to those of the other humanities disciplines — and for compensation purposes, history is clearly considered a humanties, not a social-science, field. History still does better at the lower ranks than literature, but it is now low enough to be included in the CUPA-HR list of “Disciplines with the Lowest Average Salaries.” And the humanities-social science distinction matters: Salaries in the social sciences are on average 7.5 percent higher than in history."