From The Best Schools:
Many college professors change lives, challenge the world around us, and teach us the skills needed to improve our lives. However, their salaries range widely—anywhere from adjunct professors earnings around $30,000 to a full-time professor earning $500,000 and more.
College professors may teach at either private or public universities; their level of expertise and interest will determine where they spend the bulk of their years teaching. If a professor can obtain a position at a prestigious private university, he or she will most likely be paid a lot more than at a second-tier or lesser-known public school.
As you might expect, the highest-paid professors teach mostly at prestigious private universities: Columbia, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, and Duke. Two teach at public universities: UC Berkeley and UT Austin. And three teach at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, an international business school located in Arizona.
You may wonder how these professors can command such amazing salaries. The answer is: These are not your run-of-the-mill, everyday instructors. They are world-renowned, have made major contributions to society, and stand at the pinnacle of their profession. They are the rock stars of academia.
The professors are listed by salary, in descending order. The salary figures have been obtained from a faculty salary survey conducted by the American Association of University Professors, as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as from other sources. The figures are not necessarily current, but in no case are they more than five years old.
Salaries above $1 million are rounded to the nearest $100,000 or $10,000, depending on the information available; those below $1 million are rounded to the nearest $1,000.
* * *1. David N. Silvers: $4.33 million
David N. Silvers is Clinical Professor of Dermatology and Pathology and Director of the Dermatopathology Laboratory at Columbia University. His stellar salary rivals that of many college coaches.
Dr. Silvers received his MD from Duke University in 1968. He is board certified in dermatology and pathology, with a certification of special competence in dermatopathology.
According to Bloomberg, when questioned about Silvers’s high salary, the school remarked, “David Silvers is renowned in the field and has significant responsibilities in directing a highly specialized lab at Columbia University Medical Center.”
2. Zev Rosenwaks: $3.3 million
Zev Rosenwaks is Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Cornell University and Director and Physician-in-Chief of the Ronald O. Perelman and Claudia Cohen Center for Reproductive Medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College.
Dr. Rosenwaks received his MD from the SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn in 1972. He is board certified in Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility, and a Fellow of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
Dr. Rosenwaks is internationally renowned for his pioneering work in assisted reproduction. He was the director of the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Norfolk, Virginia, the unit that achieved the first IVF pregnancy in the United States. He also developed the first egg donation program in the United States.
3. Dean Takahashi: $2.6 million
Dean Takahashi is Adjunct Professor in the Practice of Finance at the Yale School of Management, and Senior Director of Investments at Yale University.
Dr. Takahashi received his Ph.D. in economics from Yale.
In addition to being a professor, Dr. Takahashi is Senior Director of Investments for Yale, where he helps oversee more than $17 billion of the university’s endowment, pension, and charitable trust assets. Prior to joining the Yale Investments Office in 1986, he worked at Affirmative Investments in Boston and as a VISTA volunteer in Vermont.
In 2009, Dr. Takahashi took a two-month leave from Yale to serve as a consultant to the Office of Domestic Finance in the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where he focused on the impact of the financial crisis on municipal finance and policy issues regarding the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.
Dr. Takahashi is married to Wendy Sharp, who teaches violin and oversees chamber music at Yale. They have two children, Kerry and Kai, who are members of the Yale College classes of 2014 and 2016.
4. William E. Fruhan, Jr.: $1.19 million
...MOREWilliam E. Fruhan, Jr., is the Baker Foundation Professor, as well as the George E. Bates Professor Emeritus, at the Harvard Business School, where he has served as Senior Associate Dean, Director of Faculty Development, Chairman of the Executive Education Advanced Management Program, Chairman of the Finance Area, and Course Head for Finance in the first year of the MBA Program.
Dr. Fruhan, who received his Doctor of Business Administration degree from Harvard University, has also directed 15 different private corporations. He is the author of a number of books, including The Fight for Competitive Advantage (1972), Financial Strategy (1979), and Revitalizing Businesses (1984), as well as co-editor of Case Problems in Finance (11th ed., 1997).
Dr. Fruhan’s many scholarly articles include “Corporate Raiders: Head ‘em Off at Value Gap,” “Management, Labor and the Golden Goose,” “How Fast Should Your Company Grow?,” “Is Your Stock Worth Its Market Price?” (with T. R. Piper)—all in the Harvard Business Review—and “Levitz Furniture: A Case History in the Creation and Destruction of Shareholder Value,” in Financial Analysts Journal....
