You know how I keep expressing astonishment at the way C H Sommers has gone from being an academic to being a shameless hack. It occurred to me to wonder if it’s just a simple matter of being better paid as a hack. Having wondered that, I decided to see if I could compare her salary as an academic to her salary as a hack for the American Enterprise Institute.
The bulk of her teaching career was at Clark University; she was an Associate Professor when she left to be a scholar at AEI. Clark reports the salary for associate profs to be $107,580.
The 990 tax form for the AEI reports some scholars’ salaries but not all.
That lists Gary Schmitt, John Bolton, Charles Murray, Thomas Donnelly, and Frederic Hess as scholars. Their salaries range from $170,500 to $178,500. It seems safe to conclude that Sommers’s pay is in that range or lower (as a more recent hire).
So…maybe 60 or 70 thousand more. Worth having, certainly, but it hardly seems enough to motivate palling around with the MRA crowd.
On the other hand…there’s no teaching. It’s in DC. It’s among a bunch of like-minded reactionary lobbyists as opposed to a bunch of PC liberal academics. All that and a 2/3 bump in pay. Maybe it’s worth it.