From his Cedar Building office, Dennis Roberts can only sit and wonder why the University rewards professors across the street in the Business Administration I Building with salaries thousands of dollars higher than his own.

"There are people at the assistant professor level who haven't been at Penn State for two years who make 10- to 15-thousand dollars more than I do," said Roberts, professor of educational psychology with more than 20 years of service at the University. "I'm pissed off about that. We all do very similar work."

Average faculty salaries vary by tens of thousands of dollars between teachers of equal rank at University Park's 10 colleges. Standing faculty members who have reached the rank of Professor in the Smeal College of Business Administration earn an average annual salary of $94,262 while professors of equal rank in the College of Arts and Architecture receive salaries averaging $59,941.

A report detailing the diversity of salaries within Penn State's teaching ranks will be presented today to the University Faculty Senate by the Committee on Faculty Benefits. The report also shows similar differences between colleges in the Commonwealth Educational System.

But explanations for the salary gaps among the University's colleges are not agreed upon by professors and administrators.

"It's the same reason that affects salaries anywhere in the world -- the law of supply and demand," said Peter Bennett, associate dean of the Smeal College. "The amount of effort you put into something doesn't determine your salary."

Job fields such as business have small pools of highly skilled applicants capable of performing top-notch research and teaching, Bennett explained. Other majors, such as arts and education, have more highly qualified people they can hire. The more people to choose from, the lower the salary the University needs to offer.

Executive Vice President and Provost John Brighton pointed out that paying different salaries to employees with different skills and qualifications is nothing unique to the University.

"That's part of the realities of the way the world is," he said.

To complicate the market factor the University must compete with nonacademic job opportunities available to professors.

"The competition is tough, and you've got to pay them more," said Jean Landa Pytel, assistant dean for student services in the College of Engineering. "A person with a Ph.D. in engineering or the College of Business can do other things besides teach at a university; they can go into business and make a lot more money.

"A person with a Ph.D. in history, they don't have as many choices as to what they can do."

But Roberts does not buy the market explanation.

"That's the standard line," he said. "That's not what's happening. There is an abundance of supply in most disciplines. Market forces don't determine how much Penn State has to pay people to work at Penn State."

The University has created a self-imposed demand that values some disciplines more than others, Roberts contends.

"Penn State is notorious for rewarding some people at certain ranks more than others. The administration allows some college deans to pay people more if the dean feels you might lose that person, but in other colleges the administration could care less," he said.

Many people at Penn State are quick to draw attention to other Big Ten and research universities, where comparable salary differentials between disciplines also exist.

"We do have discrepancies in different colleges," Pytel said. "Now, that doesn't mean that it's good."

The issue then becomes not one of competition, but one of fairness.

"The work of faculty at the University is basically the same no matter what college you're in -- your expectations are the same, your students pay the same fees," said Jamie Myers, assistant professor of curriculum and instruction in the College of Education, where the average standing assistant professor salary is $38,932.

The mean salary for standing assistant professors at Penn State is $44,260. The average assistant professor paycheck in the Smeal College totals $66,762.

"One of my impressions about Penn State faculty is that they are all smart and very interested in their work," Myers said. "It would be nice if it were rewarded equitably."

But that is just the way things go, explained Romolo Martemucci, interim head of the architecture department. Fields such as arts will probably always find themselves on the lower end of the totem pole.

"It's not fair that once they get here, the amount of work they put and the education they put in is about equal," Martemucci said. "It's just that the type of education is more valuable."

But Roberts, who said he wishes he received a salary as high as University Park's average standing professor salary of $72,604, refuses to accept the status quo.

To convince him the salary differentials are justified, it would take a strong argument that professors in colleges such as Engineering and Business Administration are highly more productive or significantly better teachers.

Roberts doesn't expect to be convinced. "How can one justify that sort of differential?" he asked. "The people in business are being highly overcompensated."

However, the process of determining why professors make the money they do is no easy task. Pytel, who chairs the Faculty Senate's faculty benefits committee, said defining a reliable correlation between past achievements and present salaries is not possible at this time.

"In order to do a good analysis of the relationships, we need reliable data that the University doesn't keep; maybe it should," Pytel said, citing a dearth of information about faculty members' years of teaching outside of Penn State as one example.

"I don't think we'll ever get to a point where all the salary differences will ever be able to be explained," she said.

Myers would like the Faculty Senate to investigate possible ways to redistribute funds within the University in order to close salary gaps between colleges.

"It is possible to shift funds . . . to make salaries more equitable," he said. Myers noted that the University already reallocates funds in its budget for colleges in response to fluctuating enrollment numbers and student-credit hours. Money could also be redistributed to reduce salary discrepancies between colleges, he said.

Salaries need not be lowered to reduce disparities if the University makes a conscientious three- to five-year effort to eliminate the gaps, Myers said.

Roberts named the state's system of higher education as an example where salaries do not differ based on discipline, but faculty members are unionized and use collective bargaining to set salaries. That helps eliminate what he called Penn State's differentials of "mammoth size."

But Brighton said homogenization of salaries across all colleges cannot occur without taking money away from professors at the higher end of the pay scale.

"You would certainly lose people in areas if you made salaries the same," Brighton said.

Martemucci agrees with Brighton's conclusion that equal pay would jeopardize the quality of teaching and researching, saying that the result would be fantastic artists but mediocre business people.

However, this is not so, Roberts concluded.

"I'd like to see somebody offered $70,000 and turn it down," he said. "If this happened over time, I don't think there would be much impact."

The allure of working in a university environment such as Penn State should be enough to entice professors, Roberts said.

"The University environment is like no other in that you have total freedom of your time," he said. "I don't know of many occupations where you have such control over how you work."

Myers and Roberts both said they would strongly support a system in which salaries were more equitable between colleges, but faculty members earned higher salaries based on merit, not market.

"People who are really creative, people who really accomplish a lot, should be rewarded," Roberts said. "I don't think many people would object to performance-based differences."

Whether that time will ever come, however, is a greater source of doubt for Roberts. "The Faculty Senate is chicken," he said. "They will not argue this."

Perhaps it is the effects of those salary differences that are most unknown and most unpredictable.

For Myers the answer is simple: "Personally, my interest in scholars, my collegiality is not based on salaries.

For Roberts, the answer is just as simple: "It makes me not want to work with anyone in the College of Business. I resent it. But I'm not