It's worse than the computer software commercial where a hacker e-mails the salaries of upper management to the entire company. On prime time TV, shared wages are the core of bad feelings, snide jokes, office wars, mutiny. Wages are something to be kept hidden, a private matter like marital problems or a case of hemorrhoids -- real and pertinent to our everyday lives, but not something we talk about in the coffee lounge.

By all accounts I'm a short timer, someone with a fixed-term contract that promises a full-time job with one stipulation: "This appointment is contingent upon grant funding." In many ways that one line is my motivator. I research, I publish, I present, I write grants. I want another year. I've accepted that I'm at the bottom of the university food chain, an academic staff member with no Ph.D. in hand, not even close to my fingertips. I know the pecking order that exists among university personnel on this campus and certainly others: administrators, faculty, teaching academic staff, academic staff. But when the list comes out, for all to see, the pecking order emerges in startling black and white.

Our culture has conditioned us to accept that our identity is tied to our jobs, of course, but there's more. We are what we earn, our body and spiritual worth equivalent to our gross net. I don't like to believe it. After all, I am a sometimes poet, unused to getting paid for my life's work. But what of the others? I imagine my tenured colleagues sitting with their office doors closed, checking the raises of friends and foes, tennis partners and neighbors, new chairs and former deans. They hover over their calculators figuring out who received extra merit pay or that excellence in teaching award or both. One teacher admitted that as a junior faculty member he computed the dollar amount of his students per head, comparing the number of students in his survey courses to the number of students in his tenured colleagues' graduate courses. This same faculty member commented that though the salary list portrays "public" worth, it does not reflect "private" reputations: The professor who wears bad plaid or the one who hasn't changed his syllabus in 15 years; the professor whose students routinely leave her office weeping or the one who hasn't read a book in a decade.

I'm reminded of what I learned as a student, that for college educators, more than other professionals, their career is their life. You can see it in their cluttered offices, a definition of self lost among their obsessions with books or baseball, "Star Trek" or frogs, passions in place for the duration, a haven where personal and professional are inseparable. I recognize now that tenure is as much "occupation" as "occupancy," as much "term of office" as "possession." They are lifers.

Though I am outside of that loop, the salary list still bothers me. For days after reading it I felt a need to renew my inner dialogue, a little self-talk to make me feel better. You learn all of your students' names the first week, I tell myself. You bring colleaguing to a new level: You even found a date for a physics professor. You read the course catalog. You teach in a circle. You write student references from memory. You display your Phi Kappa Phi sticker in your office window. You know what GLOBE stands for. You support women's athletics. You never park in handicap spots. You recognize the chancellor off-campus. You know the personnel organizational charts. You can name five deans without looking. You stopped blowing bubbles at staff meetings and wearing miniskirts on the days you teach. You cut your hair. You wear make-up sparingly. You have an eye for details. You nixed your "Gilligan's Island" screen saver. You never run with scissors. You served on committees to create committees. You wrote grants that have brought in more money over the past four years than your salary. You haven't lost your spunk. These are intangibles that can't be reflected in salary recommendations, I remind myself.

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