Professors: Where They Have Gone

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When the last exam of the spring term is over, most well-esteemed university professors are likely to be already en route to the airport with their luggage. Carrying a wad of traveler's checks courtesy of some big foundation or Government agency, today's academician is off to dispense advice to a foreign government, finish a book in the splendor of the English countryside, burrow in the site of an ancient ruin, or pursue his research to tropical Islands, glacial lakes, laboratory ships, remote capitals or perhaps even the Great Barrier Reef.

Summer has become a time for vast migrations of college faculties. Nearly gone is the day when a professor had no choice but to work on his book at home or teach to earn extra cash. Rising university salaries and abundant foundation generosity have released him for exotic research and farflung adventure. Within the last decade, the number of professors going abroad during the school year nearly tripled, to a peak of 3,954 in 1965-66. During the summer, about 40% of the nation's 325,000 university teachers remain behind to teach.

The professor, says one dean, has become "a member of the most mobile group of migratory workers in the country." A Columbia English professor, noting that nearly all of the other 86 members of his department had vanished, said: "The only reason I'm here is that it's air-conditioned."

Chasing Butterflies. For a few professors, summer travel is nothing new. University of Chicago Philologist John Corominas, 61, has been roaming the Catalonia region of Spain since 1931, asking everyone from mayors to illiterate peasants about the names given to places. Dressed like an ordinary Spaniard, Corominas reads gravestones, checks into town and church records, and figures out Catalonian history from what he learns. To the peasants, he has come to be known as the nosy vagabond who comes around every summer.

Now there are legions of vagabonds like Corominas. In the rain forests of the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Amherst Biologist Lincoln Brower, 34, is leaping after lepidoptera to check out a theory that the color patterns of butterflies edible to birds are evolving toward the color patterns of nonedible butterflies, as a measure of survival. Last week Entomologist Dennis Hynes, 37, of California State Polytech, slipped on snowshoes to walk atop thigh-deep drifts on Washington's Mount Baker and bring back iceboxes filled with larvae specimens of a crop-killing insect called the crane fly.

An M.I.T. professor who wanted to study a kind of high-flying cloud argued that Norway was the only place he could do it and got a subsidy from NASA. Living with his wife and young daughter in a cottage near Oslo, Geophysicist Giorgio Fiocco, 35, spends sporting days paddling a canoe around the fiord and scientific nights examining "noctilucent" clouds by laser radar. Yale Physiologist Jose Delgado, 50, the man who can make bulls stop charging by planting electrodes in their brains, is off to Moscow, a favored academic watering hole, for a psychology conference.