HENRY HILLIARD-PICTURE GROUP
A balancing act: Sheldon Glashow in his Harvard office
harsh on creationists, whom he regularly describes as "fools"
and "jerks."
He is also irate with gawkers who interrupt his lectures
and campus strolls. "People don't realize how intolerable it
is for somebody who thought he had privacy to learn people
are watching him," he says. Prominence does have its ad-
vantages. Gould pays grad assistants out of his speaking fees
and royalties and reportedly gave much of a $200,000 Mac-
Arthur Foundation "genius grant" to the Department of
Invertebrate Paleontology. But success has also brought
detractors. What Gould most resents are suggestions that he
is merely a popularizer. "Why is there the notion that
writing science for the public cheapens the profession? ... I
have some colleagues who might be very negative toward
me, but the real motivation is jealousy and overt ill will."
Prize in Physics, Steven Weinberg is still much in
The Physicists: Eight years after winning the Nobel
demand. In 1982 the University of Texas lured the
54-year-old scientist from Harvard for one of the
highest salaries ever paid a state employee. (His
wife, attorney Louise Weinberg, had been hired in 1980 as a
professor at the UT law school.) In addition to his salary (now
more than $126,000), Weinberg was, allowed to fill three
tenure-track positions-in effect to build a faculty cluster
around himself. "He contributes to the image of the universi-
ty as a bustling, high-quality research university," says
William Livingston, vice president and dean of graduate
studies. "When you're raising money, Weinberg is a plus."
A regular part of Weinberg's duties involves fund raising
with both private donors and the Texas Legislature. He
chairs a committee that recruits faculty for the university's
32 $1 million chairs in science and engineering and serves
on the national panel charged with choosing a site for the
proposed superconducting supercollider. Such visibility has
obviously paid some healthy dividends for the university.
Although UT's physics department enjoyed a reasonably
good reputation before Weinberg's arrival, says associate
professor Joseph Polchinski, a Weinberg hire, "he made it a
world-class institution." Weinberg himself is comfortable
with his high-profile role. "What I really enjoy more than
anything else is still doing physics and writing papers," he
concedes. "But that's very bloodless work ... We are in the
real world where you have to convince the voters to support
the universities if you expect to do the things you want to do.
I feel more alive here."
Weinberg's former Harvard colleague, Sheldon Glashow,
was also courted assiduously by other colleges after winning
his physics Nobel in 1979. Texas A&M reportedly offered a
deal that was even better than the $1.5 million package it
gave to football coach Jackie Sherill, who, after all, was not
promised a new scientific staff. Glashow managed to work
out a complex balancing act. While remaining on the faculty
at Harvard (which limits outside commitments to 20 per-
cent of a professor's schedule), Glashow parceled himself out
among three other institutions. Now a board member at
Texas A&M's College of Science Research, he is also listed as
an "affiliated senior scientist" at the University of Houston,
lecturing there during Harvard's spring break (annual fee:
$10,000), and as a "distinguished visiting scientist" for one
day a week of research and advising students at Boston
University.
At Harvard, Glashow teaches a spring graduate seminar
and a fall course called From Alchemy to Elementary Parti-
JOHN W. H. SIMPSON
Repaying a lifelong debt through a firm commitment to teaching: Novelist Joyce Carol Qates with writing class at Princeton
SEPTEMBER 1987
NEWSWEEK ON CAMPUS 11