Vanity Fair on Finance and Politics

It Came from Wasilla

The August 2009 issue of Vanity Fair magazine had several interesting articles: It Came From Wasilla a hatchet job about Sarah Palin; The Man Who Crashed the World on the collapse of financial giant AIG by Michael Lewis; RICH HARVARD, POOR HARVARD "If Harvard is so smart, how come its record $36.9 billion endowment has collapsed" about the financial problems of my neighbor here in Cambridge; and a strangely sweet story about paparazzi Michael Jackson’s Last Close-Up. You'll have to buy the magazine to read the article about Harvard, the rest are on the web site.
The Harvard article (p.145) claims that the average full professor at Harvard makes $192,600 not including benefits. I'm surprised that's so high. I had been under the impression that the most prestiguous universities could actually get away with paying their faculty comparatively lower wages because professors were willing to give up salary to work at a big name institution.