The Least Stressful Job for 2013? A Real Look at Being a Professor in the US

The brain trust at CNBC just published this little fluff piece about the least stressful jobs for 2013 and of course the least stressful job was being a university professor. Their rationale? There are no physical demands, no deadlines, no environmental condition hazards, we don’t put our lives on the line, nor are we responsible for other peoples’ lives. I will grant that we’re not crab fishing on the Bering Sea nor making command and control decisions on the front lines of a military conflict; however, this feeds the myth that being a professor in the US is like living in a plush ivory tower disconnected from the world — holding class like we’ve all seen in the movies. It’s also easier to dismiss us in a whole lot of different ways when this myth is perpetuated.

Let’s cut through the BS — being a professor in the US for the first 7 years is like being an indentured servant … and that’s if you’re lucky enough to have a ‘good’ tenure track position. There are different experiences in being a professor, but let me give you a bit of a walk through our world. I sincerely hope that some of my friends will also add their experiences onto this.

Beginning the “Life of Luxury”

Many of us in academia don’t come from backgrounds of extreme privilege — what I mean by this is that loads of us finish our Ph.D.’s (which is what you have to have to be a ‘regular’ professor) with between $75,000 and $160,000 in debt — and the debt mountain is enormous for those coming from lower income families. The median salary in this little fluff piece puts what professors make at over $60,000 per year. Silly story.  The reality is that in most disciplines, a freshly minted Ph.D. is going to be making $45,000-$55,000 per year (depending on geographic location and field). So, we start from a place of financial trauma — if we don’t find a permanent job, we’re still going to owe Uncle Sam our pound of flesh.

Why did we do it? I think this is a question most of us ask ourselves… sometimes often. The two realities are #1  that most of us who are professors are there by choice — this isn’t the ‘fall back’ career and #2 we’re typically really smart people**(editing note at the end) (the PhD and doing original research is kind of a baseline test for that :) ). I know, that’s probably not PC to say but it’s true.

Yet, why would we hamstring our lives this way? Well … lots of reasons, but most of us just frankly like the notion of research, teaching, and being a part of the intellectual endeavor. And we’re saps for it. There is a point that we realize we’re idiots for committing ourselves to a life of functional poverty (because seriously, we’re never going to pay off our student loans), but we still tell ourselves it’s worth it and there are good arguments to be made for the financial sacrifice depending on what we want out of life. It’s just that I don’t know that we all really ‘get’ what it’s like before we start. Why? Look at the silly story — most people just don’t understand what being a professor entails on a daily basis.

But I get ahead of the story — we have to find a job. Well, one of the realities since the economic crash of 2008 is that “real” academic jobs are getting harder and harder to come by both because there are too many new Ph.D.’s and because many universities’ endowments, state funding, and/or giving campaigns have been damaged. Not only that, but many at state universities haven’t seen appropriate cost of living raises for the last 4 years. What does this mean in a practical sense? Lots more applicants than jobs. For example, last year when we were interviewing for a position very late in the year we had amazing candidates because they were new grads who couldn’t find jobs — they were losing out to professors just looking to change jobs who were willing to take “entry” level jobs just so they could make the move. That was great for us, but ridiculous in the job search process.

The “Least Stressful” Job

Now, there are disciplines whose student to professor (for advising) ratio is quite low … Departments of English, Philosophy, Math, and the like who ‘make their money’ because they’re essential parts of a liberal arts curriculum and so each year they fill a lot of classes with students who have to take ‘required’ courses. However, if you happen to be in large majors (e.g., my own in Communication is just one of many that are either growing or already very large at most colleges & universities), the student to professor ratio is actually quite high… so let me walk you through the life of the “Assistant” Professor (i.e., the lowest level of the tenure track faculty, not tenured, and could be released just because they don’t like your socks and you don’t have a lot of legal recourse absent documented discrimination… kind of like working in a ‘right to work’ state) by sharing what my life looked like for the last 3 years. I was at a small ‘teaching’ college, but one that is beginning to place more emphasis on building Master’s programs and research. This ‘suited me’ because while I like teaching, I liked the notion of a balance between teaching and research.

Year One. ‘Breaking You In’

In your first year, you might get a course release … so instead of teaching 3 or 4 classes in an academic semester you might teach 2 or 3. This is a matter of negotiation. Doesn’t sound too bad does it? So what does it mean to teach a class? Well, as a brand new professor in a department, you’re probably having to put together your classes for the first time. So, what does the first year look like?

    •  You have to write your syllabus and all of the course materials (e.g., assignment descriptions, etc.). This will typically take 30-60 hours per class before the semester even begins — for the brand new prof, that’s 90-240 work hours (3-6 weeks) of UNPAID work before you even start your job. 
    • Preparing lesson plans for 16-32 class sessions per class that you teach. If you’ve never taught the class, you have to write the lectures, which takes me about 3 hours (and I’m actually pretty fast, but expect a high level of quality out of the lecture and the visuals) per lecture. Multiply that by 3, so you’re talking about 15-20 hours per week spent on class prep (Yes, this post requires simple mathematics… keep in mind I’m a social scientist, so the math won’t be too complex).
    • You have to attend each of your classes — I know this seems obvious, but hell… it adds to the math. So, that’s 10-12 hours per week (ok… if you’re counting we’re already at 25-32 hours per week).
    • You have to have office hours each week, so that the eager young minds can visit you to ask you the questions they probably could find in the lectures, class announcements, or other class documentation anyhow. At my college, we had 8 hours per week of office hours (33-40 hours per week).
    • At most universities, faculty also have advisees — I had 40-55 advisees assigned to me at any given time (including by the end of my first year). While you don’t have regular contact with them, during ‘advising season’ (i.e., the 6 weeks before registration as well as the first week or two of classes) you end up spending 30mins to an hour ‘helping’ each one. So, that adds 25-50 hours over the course of the semester. The semester is about 16 weeks long, so let’s add 1.5-3 hours per week (oh dear, we’re up to 34.5-43 hours per week).
    • In your first year, committee work tends to be pretty light because they’re ‘helping you to land on your feet’ — so you may only be on 1 or 2 committees the whole year, but those will likely add about an hour of responsibility to your time (especially when combined with routine department meetings, etc.) each week (35.5-44 hours per week).
    • It seems like I’m forgetting something… oh wait … grading — the bane of all of our existence. Now, there are disciplines where the ‘challenge’ of grading consists of the time it takes to write multiple/choice tests and run them through a scantron machine (or post the test online). Unfortunately, the social sciences and liberal arts tend not to be those types of disciplines. None-the-less, if you’re teaching 25 students per class x 3 (or 4), if you’re efficient takes about a half hour to grade each person’s short assignment, add in feedback, and enter the grade into the ‘gradebook’. The norm in the US is to have 4-8 assignments per class plus one or two tests. I tended to assign less… so usually about 4 assignments per class and two tests. That adds on roughly an average of 15-19 hours per week more (realize, there are weeks with no grading and weeks with LOADS of grading). So… we’re now at 50.5-63 hours of work each week.
    • Then comes the research — the stuff we tend to do ‘in our spare time’ — you know, like anytime that school isn’t in session. If we ever hope to be tenured and promoted, we need to produce about 2-3 published journal pieces per year (there is variance there by university and publication type, but that gets too silly to try to explain). Right. So, in the 10-16 weeks that we’re not ‘teaching’ each year, we have to collect data, write, revise, send out, etc. — uh huh…. The reality is that we’re working on projects year round and while we may use our ‘unstructured’ times to do a lot of our writing, each journal article is tough to come by. We’re committing no less than a week’s worth of time just to write the damn thing, let alone collecting data, analyzing it, etc. It’s not unreasonable to assume that the total time commitment to a single piece is about a month’s worth of work (assuming a 40 hour work week). That fills all of that “spare time” y’all seem to think we have AND also addresses the misnomer that university professors have no deadlines.
    • Oh yeah — and for those of us who are trying to build a reputation of expertise within our fields, we travel to conferences (2-4 per year usually) to present papers, we review papers for those conferences as well as journals, etc. All of this is ‘unpaid’ but is really expected not only in terms of service to the profession but enables us to get tenured. That’s added on top of our 50-60 hour work week (before research).

Welcome to year one of your stress-free life as an academic. Oh yeah, and that “good” salary of (on average) about $52,000 per year comes out to $17-20 per hour that we’re getting paid BEFORE taxes. Awesome deal, right? I made more bartending in college than I make with my Ph.D.

Year 2. ‘Piling it On’

Right, so remember that in year one, we were already at 32 weeks a year of 50-60 hours per week of work for the awesome pay of about $20/hour gross. In year 2, your department chair or dean (i.e., your boss) talks to you about the importance of contributing to your college and the whole university through ‘service’ if you want to get tenured and promoted… that they would help you ‘manage’ your commitments (they are lying to you at this point), but that it would be ideal if you involved yourself with at least one student organization and got involved on some university-wide and more departmental committees.

You’ve just added about 3-10 hours worth of work each and every week to your regular work load. Now, hopefully by this time, some of the time you have to spend in course prep goes down a little bit, but you’re probably still being asked to teach different classes (often better classes because you’ve now ‘proven’ yourself) and you discovered that there were things about the ways you were teaching your classes that just didn’t work so you’re redesigning the damn things. Ok, the prep work doesn’t change that much in your second year.

It doesn’t sound like much, but if you happen to prove yourself to be ‘competent’ and affable enough on these committees, you start to get asked to work on side projects, you get encouraged to take on more. And before you know it, you’ve added 15-20 hours more work and honestly, you don’t know how it happened, but you can’t say no. Why? Because they can still fire you for any reason… they don’t even have to tell you why they’ve fired you. As a non-tenured faculty member, you live on a year-to-year contract with no repercussions if they choose not to renew your contract. Don’t make any waves!

Years 3-6. Have you lost your mind?

  By year 3, if things have gone well, you play well with others, and you have adjusted well, then things start to get exciting. You will be approached to take on leadership positions; you will be approached to start doing administrative tasks; you will have the opportunity to really make your case for tenure… oh yeah and you’ll probably be going through mid-tenure review. This is the first point that a group of folks in your department really pay attention to you and ask the question, “would we want to keep this person?”. To get ready, you have to prepare your case… this means putting together a portfolio and building a set of arguments for your contributions to your department, the college, and your profession. You’re now regularly working 80 hours per week, so your effective pay rate comes down to somewhere under $15/hour.

Assuming your mid-tenure review goes well (i.e., they don’t put you on a one-year terminal contract), you still have two more years of this before you begin your tenure review process.

Oh… and if you have to move for any reason… you get to basically start all over again. Usually, you can con them out of a little higher starting salary, and maybe a shortened tenure clock, but you’re still starting over again….

Adding Insult to Injury

So, we come back to the CNBC assertion that being a college professor is the ‘least stressful job’. To that, I say kiss my ass! Not nice? Yeah, being nice, playing by the rules, being erudite, and being smart has gotten us to being in a job we may still love (though by now we’ve gotten rid of our rose colored glasses and often have ‘happy hours’ spent drinking and bitching) but being paid insulting money.

And we have to listen to pundits talk about us like we’re idiot-savants who have no idea what the real world is like.

And for those of us whose research directly translates to the real world (e.g., in my case — persuasion, crisis communication, strategic communication), the so-called professionals look down their overpriced noses at us. That means that even if we did want to move back to the ‘real world’ — we have to basically apologize for our PhD, our time spent training them (Where do they think new professionals come from? Are they hatched?), and kiss their asses for handouts. So, basically until we write our book and ‘become’ a pundit or consultant later in our careers we’re stuck because Americans are scared of smart people.

So, while we may like our students, like our research, and like our colleagues (all of which depends on the day). While we may have unstructured time (because we can be productive without ‘clocking in’). And while most of us either chose this career path when we were young and stupidly idealistic and older and looking for a change — I think I can speak for most of us when I say fuck off with your patronizing understanding of what it means to be a professor in the US.

We know we’re not on the battle lines and most of the time we’re not risking death, but guess what if we do a bad job at our jobs… your workforce is screwed. We have to battle against bad parenting, stupid emerging social norms, a primary/ secondary education system that is broken, and try to reach people at the most annoyingly self-absorbed time in their psychological and social development. All while being paid $12-20/ hour in real wages

Oh yeah and CNBC — learn to do some damn research you wankers!

* Just a small addition at the end*

Thanks for the conversation — even if you are just bitching because you think I suck ;) … In particular, thanks to those folks who have shared their experiences (both positive and negative) in academia. Like a lot of conversations that happen in happy hour there are people calling bullshit, people adding their own experiences, people asking for reality checks, and I think it’s productive.

I’ve added some links to some research and information that folks might find useful about student debt, access to good jobs, job satisfaction, and intent to leave academia. I figured some of you might want quick access to additional information. Have more links to relevant points — feel free to let me know, I’ll add them.

Just a reminder — try to think about what/how you would say stuff to people face-to-face. Yes — this is how I talk and would talk to most of you in a social setting. I think everyone would appreciate the same courtesy.

**And since too many people have gotten so damn hung up on the fact that being exceptionally bright (especially in comparison to average folks) is offensive, I tweaked it because I was just annoyed with the whining about it… ffs…. who was planning on the rant going a bit viral?

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297 thoughts on “The Least Stressful Job for 2013? A Real Look at Being a Professor in the US

  1. Hello all,
    After reading a few of the comments from some brilliant people on this website, I was wondering if I could get some advice. I am currently a sophomore studying at a good private university. It is certainly not top ranked, however the specific department I am studying (political science) has sent several students to top-ranked graduate programs. However after reading some comments on this blog, it does not even seem that even the most prestigious graduate university can help you in this job market.
    I have often found the life of the mind to be an appealing one. However after much internet research this past semester, my ambitions have somewhat lessened. Is there another venue to pursuing the life of the mind that doesn’t involved such a hefty financial and emotional investment?
    The academy seems so full of bureaucracy and stress, I often wonder if sometimes I should just leave it after my undergrad and look for my own ways to pursue the life of the mind, whether that be journalism, working in a think-tank, or teaching at the high school level. At least if those go wrong, I can leave without massive debts hanging over me.
    Could academic job prospects be looking up for when I finish graduate school 8-10 years down the line? Or am I likely to find the find the same dismal hiring rates?
    Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

    • Hi Dan,

      Take my advise for what it’s worth — one person’s opinion who’s been in academia for a while… likes it, but also sees its warts. Obviously, there’s a lot in this conversation that’s negative and showing an underbelly to academia that’s not becoming. That said, even after a decade in the profession and all of the annoyances and struggles that it entails, I don’t regret my decision.

      Honestly, I’m not that bothered by the debt or having to work hard … the hard work should probably be a part of any profession. I do think I probably would have made some different decisions regarding the particular path and trajectory within my career if I were 10 years younger and presented with all of the options that I had. I probably would have gone straight to a research institution, taken the annoyance and pressure involved with grant writing and high publication demands. In my experience, people at R1′s are more honest about the pressures, the folks there are interested in the same type of career path, and there’s not a lot of tolerance for wasting the professors’ time with certain types of work in academia that I don’t really like (administrative work).

      The route I chose was, as I indicated in my post, to focus on smaller institutions because I believed they would better allow for a balance between life and career — after all, the publication and research requirements were less… the trade off you taught a class or two more a semester. I thought I had a realistic assessment and that might be the case at some smaller colleges. However, what I’ve found through both my own experience as well as that of many of my friends and colleagues is a bit different. There are people at our institutions who easily achieve life/ work balances, but honestly in my experience they’re the folks who hide out at work and who allow other of their colleagues to shoulder the responsibilities that the upper administration tosses down the hill.

      What I’ve found is that the smaller colleges seem to pile on service and student engagement expectations at unreasonable rates. The running ‘joke’ at my previous institution communicated to me directly by the President of our university in a sit down chit chat was that they tend to work their Assistant Professors really hard. The result was that the institution has a bit of a reputation in the area for not promoting many to the Associate level. This seems to be a common enough occurrence — though much more open at my previous institution — at smaller public and private universities than at larger more research-oriented ones.

      My advise — have a realistic understanding of what you’re getting yourself in for. The debt and pay issues are manageable and if you really want to teach and want to research then you cope with the downside. I would also suggest a couple of conceptual and career issues.

      First, study something that has “marketable” value in the real world. I was a political science minor and utterly love political theory — it’s not particularly marketable. So, while that and many things are important and intellectually stimulating, try to focus on concepts and areas of study that aren’t just current now but are likely to be interesting in the next 10 years as you’re emerging onto the job market. I picked organizational communication and crisis because I saw the practical application of organizational communication and studying crises because frankly at the time that I was in graduate school there were big open holes in our knowledge. This gave me flexibility and options within my own field. In political science — numbers matter … if you can go down a quantitative research path, you’re going to find work and have options both in academia and the real world.

      Second, be realistic about your own abilities. If you’re smart and able — shoot for proper research institutions as a career path within academia. Jump onto projects with professors. Present at conferences. Get published. Go this path knowing that you will be working your ass off for 7-14 years, but once you’re tenured at a research institution your quality of life improves dramatically. This means that you need to go to a ranked PhD program — and one ranked highly in the particular area that you’re interested in studying. When picking graduate programs be objective about it — DO NOT go to study with a particular person… faculty leave all the time. I’ve seen too many people go to study with “Dr. Jones” only to have them leave for greener or just other pastures and that person’s path is disrupted. Look at the curriculum, the faculty as a whole, and look through the faculty of lots of different universities… you’ll see where the quality institutions are by looking at where other faculty members earned their PhD from.

      One last thought — I know a lot of folks have expressed frustration (including me) at the way that American academics get treated. Consider studying abroad, consider living abroad. If not, look for opportunities to collaborate or do work that applies in the ‘real world’. In political science, there are definitely opportunities for that from foreign policy to domestic politics … get involved. Think about creating as many options for yourself as possible. Consider the Presidential Management Internship program. And, get proficient in a foreign language (preferably one that connects to somewhere you’d like to live OR is relevant to your particular area of study).

      Like I said — after about a decade in higher education, this is what I’ve told my advisees who were interested in an academic career path and so I share it with you.

      Best,
      Audra

      • Audra, you expressed my thoughts perfectly! I, too, would not have given up the path of university professorship, in spite of the many hurdles I (and we all) have to jump!

        BUT… hindsight is that I, too, would have gone to a research-based university as soon as possible, instead of continuing to try to change things at this small, parochial, private institution. I was told to “get my feet wet” here, and then move on, but Eternal Optimist that I was, I was hoping those opportunities would come, since I was publishing research, attending and participating in conferences, moving through the ranks of Assistant, Associate, and finally Full Professor, and Director of the masters/doctoral program…. but it was a struggle.

    • I would urge you to spend time getting other people’s points of view as well as doing summer research experiences to try your hand at what it might be like to be in academia. This blog entry one is just one person’s perspective, and I, along with ~15 other academics that I’ve been able to survey, think it’s terrible and skewed.

      • Dislike for the writing style aside (which is your prerogative), I’m interested to know what you think it’s skewed by? I’m curious to know what assumptions you bring to the table. I laid mine out — that it was based on my experience at small to medium sized universities that try to focus on both teaching and research along with my observations from my friends and colleagues at many universities.

        If you assume I was a struggling academic, you’re quite wrong. If you’re assuming that I didn’t get along in my department or university, you’re quite wrong. If you assume that it’s because I’m bitter about not getting tenure or something else like that you’re also wrong.

        As I’ve said in several other comments, there are a lot of ways to experience academia. But I would urge you to not discount other peoples’ experiences and frustrations so easily. I know what institution you work for because I can see your email address (and would never reveal that because I respect your privacy) and I would suggest that your institutional experience is very different AND that is also why I would tell any undergraduate or graduate student interested in academia to focus on going the route of the big research institutions because the allure of small ‘teaching’ universities is often a bit deceptive for folks interested in a life/ work balance. I have friends who work at those types of universities and who work their asses off, but have a very different work life.

      • The best thing we can do is tell students:
        a. Each person has their own perspective.
        b. As an example of how much they can vary, one could point out some of us might think another person’s attitude about things is kind of grotesque. If students are going to be reading the point of view of someone who thinks PhDs are smarter than most people, I want to encourage them to hear from people who don’t have such an enormous bias against 99% of the planet. Not all academics think that way, and it’s important for a student to know that.

        The student is not required to agree with either party in the end, but it’s a good exercise in critical thinking and analysis to realize that just because people might be more senior in academia doesn’t mean that we should always take what they say seriously. We should seek out varied viewpoints as often as possible and based on the data, come to our own conclusions about what is right for us.

      • I couldn’t agree more that people need to seek different opinions. That’s what’s been nice about most of this conversation is that across a really diverse set of disciplines and types of institutions, many people have had a similar experience.

        So, you were put off because I think folks with PhD’s are smarter (as in books and IQ’s) than most? Really? Fair enough. Though it’s empirically true, I also don’t think that means that non-academics are schmucks — most of them are good at stuff that we’re not. Valuing people for who they are has nothing to do with whether they’re more or less smart — that’s a relatively objective measure of learning capacity. In fact, in a whole separate set of arguments we could talk about the ridiculous ways that work is valued in the US — where those who contribute very little to the social well-being are paid loads and those on whom we rely for our everyday existence (e.g., farmers, laborers, manufacturers, service people, etc.) are not only paid very little but have few opportunities for adequate access to health care, education (for them or their kids), among a lot of other things. So, check assumptions at the door and take a bit of a tongue-in-cheek sarcastic post for what it is. Geez.

        After living through the last decade in the US and watching intellectual after intellectual be put down and denigrated in the mass media, popular culture, and frankly a lot of aspects of our daily lives I’m actually tired of being nice about it. In mainstream American culture, being smart has become something to be mocked or mistrusted. That CNBC fluff piece to which I was initially responding made me cranky because I’m just sick of anti-intellectualism in the US. I’m also sick of people just not thinking — jumping to conclusions without understanding the people or contexts about whom they are talking. So, if an abrasive and obnoxiously long post with some naughty words catches peoples’ attention, makes a few people think, encourages some others to share their experiences, then I call that a very cool damn day!

  2. (Sorry, the “reply to a reply” was in such a narrow column it was unreadable. Here’s the same comment)

    Actually, the underbelly of education is even more troubling. My PhD wife, who knowingly took herself out of tenure track early in her career to balance being an educator and a mom, has found it impossible to make an actual living in the field despite great experience and credentials. After teaching at some very well-regarded universities and colleges while trying to land a permanent position, she now works as an adjunct (contract labor) at a community college making about $15,000 per year while putting in 30+ hours per week. Around 80% of the school’s courses are taught by adjunct faculty, who have no job security, no offices, no set schedules or guaranteed hours, no administrative support, and no budget to attend conferences or conduct research in her field. Her work supports a small number of tenured faculty and administrators making 5 times what she does. She has stayed in the field because she loves teaching, but the “permanent” faculty and staff have no understanding how disillusioned the “contingent” workers are becoming at the lack of opportunity, status and compensation, despite the fact that they are, in large part, the primary face of the institution to the students they teach. The system is broken.

    • Yeah — sorry about that — gotta figure out how to tweak my blog settings to fix the width issues.

      I’m sorry to hear about your wife’s situation … I know too many people who are in that situation. I read an article just this week indicating that about 60% of college/ university classes are taught by adjuncts or short-term contract folks. Honestly, I don’t know how this works and allows universities to be re-accredited. Having spent a couple of years as an adjunct while finishing my PhD (I was on the 7 year plan… boneheaded move on my part… c’est la vie), I completely understand — it’s crap… adjuncts are seriously abused laborers. I was also working as a server/ bartender at the time and in about a week and a half of regular shifts made more than I did in a month of teaching my classes.

      More and more university administrations are coping with budget issues by either reducing the number of full time faculty OR managing growth by just hiring more adjuncts. It’s short-sighted and hurts programs. It’s problematic not only because the adjunct instructor is screwed, but it’s bad for the full-time folks too. It means that there isn’t consistency within the program, they get more service tossed onto them to compensate for the shrinking faculty-to-student ratio in the departments overall (along with fewer bodies to do university-wide service), and frankly why on earth would anyone expect the same kind of commitment from someone who’s paid a few hundred dollars a month (usually around minimum wage) to teach a class, especially with the income disparity. I know most adjuncts do their very best, but frankly they have other life issues (like trying to pay their bills) to try to manage — they have to prioritize accordingly.

      I definitely understand the lack of support from full time faculty … you’d think we’d all be better about empathizing. Frankly, full time faculty often get so absorbed with our/their own annoyances caused by the system that we forget to support the adjuncts. The adjuncts are seldom treated as part of the ‘faculty’, so the lack of empathy and support just continues.

      • And, after “semi-retiring” after 15 years at this small private parochial university, with no retirement benefits except the money I”d contributed to the 403(b) plan, I felt fortunate, a few years later, to be adjuncting, also (in a different division of the university). Not as much pressure to “do”, but as you stated, even more dismal pay… I teach graduate courses, and if there’s a full class, I get $2,500 –

  3. I’m tenured, so let’s get that out of the fucking way. I have a LOT of experience in the public and private sectors so the “profs don’t know anything about the private sector” can just shut the hell up right here.

    There are some responders to the original post who say that they were able to earn tenure with a couple of articles. Well, life must be hunky-dory at Bumfuck U., because at my institution, you would have been eaten at breakfast, shat out by lunch and composted by dinner. You are weak, and it’s a good thing you are teaching 4-4s or 5-5s at Bumfuck. Good luck to you.

    The original CareerCast post, for anyone really paying attention, equates physical labor and active danger to stress. Sure, profs don’t get shot at, or don’t necessarily work out in the hot sun. But many have to apply for grants to sustain themselves over the summer. Applying for a grant to NSF or DOE or DOD is like being part of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” except that everyone has the Glengarry leads. NSF’s proposal success rate is 10%. Sure, you might hoe weeds, but you will get paid for hoeing weeds. I can spend a month writing a really good proposal and not end up with a grant, so I can’t pay my mortgage over the summer and my grad students don’t get paid. When was the last time you did something for free, be it a job or a blowjob? I didn’t think so.

    That you anti-faculty knob-holders and self-strokers didn’t pick up on this points to the need for an IQ test before getting on the Internet, and also points to the need for the US to adopt a UK-style system.

    Maggots.

    • Wow. . .I don’t think “Nathan” or the “knob-holders” (what does that mean) meant to personally insult you I just think they’re somewhat surprised that university profs think their jobs are so stressful because it took several years of education (many jobs do) and because it required an excessive amount of loans (as with most jobs). For a professor, you don’t sound very educated at all!!

      • Yeah, it’s a very odd and angry response. Might need a bit of anger management there in your PD program, love!

        So… I’m not an American and we just don’t have this system (or pay anything for our PhDs, which also only take three years, and yes they count in the US and the rest of the world… I’m in Australia)… the pay in the US and the whole tenure-track process as well as the costs for your education is just terrible, but it’s not the world… and I would love to see an article that actually really talks about these comparisons. It might help to understand how the system has developed or gone wrong (has it, I dunno, maybe people like to pay a lot and not earn much?)?

      • You’re right — the US is very different from the rest of the modern world (in soooo many ways… a rant for another day :) ). I think as I have gotten to know more academics from outside the US, it’s changed my view of what’s “acceptable” in the US.

        That’s also a big part of why my husband (not an academic) and I made the choice to leave the US — it just helps that he’s British, so we can live in Europe/ UK without hassles.

        I think that a cross-national comparison in jobs, processes, environments, etc. would be really useful (do I see conference paper and publication? :) LOL… yeah, I’m a nerd) because I just don’t think that most folks understand the differences in the systems, what we can learn from each other, and maybe cautionary tales.

    • LOL — love this for so many reasons. Dude — your rant makes you a person after my own heart ;) . I think as I go through I’ll just cross apply your response to a lot of the snarky responses and call it good. :)

      You have to love the assumptions people make about academics. Aside from frankly not knowing what we do — and look I don’t think that any of us are saying that we have the worst jobs on the planet, that’s clearly not the case, I think most of us just get fucked off with the piss poor attitudes that the ignorant masses have. I would never assume that I would/could walk a mile in the shoes of a lot of laborers (oh wait, I come from a blue collar background so I do know what that’s like), yet a lot of these folks seem to think that because our work is intellectual, it’s nothing. I think that’s the most annoying part of it all because we all probably have family and friends who think that we don’t work hard, that our lives are all faculty meetings and fluff.

      I also love that a lot of these folks — like the person who responded to you with the ‘For a professor, you don’t sound very educated at all!’ — have these ideas that high levels of education and knowledge = genteel communication. LOL — that’s awesome. We know shit, some of us curse like sailors — welcome to the real world. Personally, I loved seeing my post come with a warning label for harsh language as folks shared it … that was awesome :) .

      To the substance of what you said — yeah… couldn’t agree more… :) Cheers!

    • Have you ever heard of a metaphor? Seriously. I also didn’t mean that the US government would literally take a pound of flesh from us if we didn’t pay back our student loans sunshine.

      • I have in fact heard of a metaphor. Yours is a classic example of what is called “an inappropriate metaphor.” If you’re really a member of a group that’s “smarter than most other people,” then surely you should be able to make your point without resorting to poorly chosen metaphors.

      • Oh good grief — of the things to worry about… the metaphor probably isn’t it. But, the reason I happened to choose that particular metaphor is because indentured servitude was a form of debt bondage — where the ‘young’ (and likely naive worker) was imported from England and forced to work for several years to pay off the debt. Thus the metaphor.

        And no kidding, that’s mostly where the metaphor ends … of course the history of indentured servants in the US was darker and more brutish with many forced into it, ‘sold’ by their parents, and their lives completely shit.

        But this conversation about metaphors is a bit of a red herring. It’s a metaphor made for rhetorical effect not because I think any of us are living under colonial conditions, let alone the exact same kinds of conditions. I do, however, think that many of us (sure, people who work at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the like probably have different experiences) have life choices reduced by the debt. I do think that in today’s economy most junior faculty are afraid to lose their tenure track jobs because we know the job market is shitty — even if we are in growing fields/ subfields. We also know that our degrees are undervalued in the private sector. That means that we have the potential to be exploited laborers with our administrations often taking advantage of the fact that we are on year-to-year contracts until we’re tenured. That also means that we kind of have to shut up and put up with it. Most of us have seen colleagues (and often friends) forced out because they had the audacity to speak up. So, while our exploitation is nothing compared to today’s migrant farm worker (probably a more exact application of the metaphor), for example, it’s still exploitation and worth talking about.

        So, as a literary figure of speech asserting that, on some point, there is a comparison to be made in order to set the tone for my opinion of many of the challenges that young faculty face in academia, I’m going to say that I’m pretty spot on. If you don’t see exploitation in academia then you live in a fortunate world (and I can’t believe I’m having to make Marxist arguments here nor defending a figure of speech… but c’est la vie). I’m not suggesting our exploitation is worse than others, but I feel like it’s worth talking about.

  4. Aw, poor babies. Can’t find a way to be involved in intellectual endeavors without taking on crushing student loan debt? Perhaps not any more intelligent than the typical person after all. Lots of people can’t get shitty, dead-end minimum wage jobs (that they would hate anyway) and have crushing debt as well.

  5. This is all very entertaining. My hats off to all you good people for your honest positions and opinions. At the end of the day, doesn’t it all boils down to every one of us looking at ourselves at the mirror, as honestly as possible, and ask ourselves: “Is this what I really want for myself?” ? If yes, then enjoy the ups and cop the downs. If not, time for a change?

    • bec there are sooo many options nowadays, enough to start all over again after having spent $$$ on your all your education/training

      • yes, there is always the option of starting over. Not getting tenure is singularly the best thing that has ever happened for my quality of life. I found a job I love, get paid a great salary, and actually have my nights and weekends to myself. People start over every day but sometimes it is easier to take the well worn path, even when it is covered in thorns.

    • I agree, at least to a point. I have the opportunity to reassess right now because I’m relocating outside of the US (unrelated to my life as an academic). Yet, the thing that I just think we don’t talk about in academia — especially with our students — but also with each other and our administrations is what’s working and not working within our own profession. There are college/ university environments in the US that are working great for their employees… I just don’t think we sort this stuff out very well. It’s also tough to be a voice of reason when you’re also working towards tenure. I’m not. I feel particularly free :) .

      • Sorry I know this is an extra shot, but I wanted to say – in relation to this issue of how much people get paid and how little we talk about it – that I had a really sad conversation with someone at a small university in the US. I was asking if they were contemplating attending an international conference in the UK next year (one that we might both present at) and she said that her and her husband couldnt really afford to go to a lot of international conferences because of the costs they were both only professors. I immediately laughed For a start a professor in the context of Australia is only a term used for someone who is an Academic Level E and their salary would begin at about 150,000 a year (it doesn’t vary much by institution as it’s an old award rate; varies a bit). So to me it was someone saying we only earn 300,000 a year, and can’t afford to go to a conference. But also I would always expect my institution to pay for me to go to a conference, or at least cover international airfares, accommodation and registration costs. I can assure you, I wouldn’t go otherwise or at least I would go much less regularly. But she explained that they earn enormously less… I guess as an international academic, I had no idea of this system, but it does seem pretty bizarre.

      • LOL — sure… rub it in. In November when I was investigating working… well… almost anywhere :) , I noticed the pay rates in Australia and almost fell out of my chair.

        My university pay was crap, but the support for travel was actually pretty good compared to most. I had a $1000 professional development fund. I could also apply for travel grants from the college, and my graduate chair and dean would usually come up with most of the rest of the cash for me to travel to one or two international conferences a year along with one domestic one. I was particularly fortunate. A lot of my friends/ colleagues at state universities are lucky to get $1000 in total. Most fund their own research as well as their own conference travel.

        Thank goodness for book publishers wanting us to buy books for classes and so providing us review copies of texts because that’s about the only way for us to afford our books. :)

  6. I think you’re misunderstanding the nature of CNBC’s study. Professorship might involve massive levels of work and research as you so thoroughly, tastelessly and arrogantly explicated….However, it is not “stress” in the sense that most of us equally intelligent contributors to the workforce understand that term. The physical labor required for your occupation is nil even when compared to other white-collar professions.
    Your classes are populated by adults and near-adults who, for the most part, require very little disciplinary intervention, a reality that is WORLDS away from the day-to-day lives of high-school teachers like myself who must find ways to cram information into the heads of our students while also confiscating their crack-pipes and cigarettes, pulling them out of hallway fights and trying to convince them that education is important despite the fact that Dad beats Mom, Mom smokes Meth, etc.
    I find it very unbelievable that all or even a large minority of university professors are in as much debt as you claim. Most PhD-pursuing students I know are already working as community college teachers or paid researchers prior to ever earning their PhDs and these incomes contribute to both their tuition and student loans. Your assertion that university professors are burdened with such outrageous debt is a joke. Most of you come from middle-class backgrounds and that’s how you were able to develop the “intellect” required to become professors. Persons originating from poorer backgrounds have FAR too much going on to devote time to the arbitrarily-altered and ever-expanding theories of the soon-to-burst bubble of university culture. This is just a reality of the society we live in. Do you, frankly, know very many university professors who originate in impoverished backgrounds?
    I don’t.
    You may suffer from mountains of student-loan repayments but your own experience should not be used as a litmus test for everyone in your profession. Virtually no one, even those with just a bachelor’s degree, escapes post-secondary education without accumulating some debt. Please keep in mind: this was a job you chose; I’m sorry that your decision to acquire higher education must be funded by…yourself…and not by the taxpayers, the majority of whom cannot afford to take your MORBIDLY overpriced classes, anyhow.
    As for office-hours, that actually made me lough-out-loud in the very cafe in which I type this response: most of my professors offered..at best…maybe 2 office-hours per week and half-the-time they weren’t even present, apologizing later that a “conference” came up and pointing to the asterisked fine-print in their long-winded syllabi which states that office-hours are subject to fluctuation.
    Most of my professors (and I went to a Big State U wherein professors were in no short supply, be they tenured or otherwise) regularly took “sabbaticals” which consisted of taking one or even two semesters off work to….uhh…do research, which for most of them consisted of wondering around Paris or London to get inspired and write lengthy articles about Marx or Sartre while being waited upon by the less-fortunate workers whom they claim to both represent and liberate.
    Your STARTING salary is double my own yet it involves far less work and almost no character alterations. Give me a break, dude.

    • Also. . .how do you figure that you and your colleagues are “frankly smarter” than most of the population?
      This is especially ridiculous if you are teaching at a public university, wherein that “population” over which you are so infinitely more intelligent is SUBSIDIZING the income that (apparently) isn’t enough to support your lofty-ivory-tower-of-a-job even though the rates of tuition have skyrocketed by 1000% in just a few short years :)

    • Nathan you are highly misinformed. I won’t go into every false assumption you make, but I will point out that as an assistant professor in mechanical engineering I am expected to devote 40-60 hours/week on research alone without even adding in the teaching responsibilities mentioned in the article above. I have to bring in $1-1.5 million in research grants to have a chance at tenure. Grant proposals have a 5-10% chance of getting funded, and each proposal takes months of planning, data collection, and writing. My research revenue has to pay for my salary, my grad students’ stipends & tuition waivers, my administrators’ salaries, facilities, and then some! I don’t think a high school teacher would have a clue about these things.

      • For a teacher you don’t seem to read very well. 40 hours/week of research + 20 hours/week of teaching = 60 hours/week, and that’s a conservative estimate. I didn’t realize that constitutes a normal full-time job. They must be working you super hard outside the school day.

      • There is NO effective way to exactly quantify precisely the amount of research the average professor undergoes, you could just as easily pull that from your elitist ass. You have to work, it’s life, it’s capitalism it’s reality. So you have to do some extra work when you get home? Talk to lawyers, man. Talk to doctors. Talk to nurses, schoolteachers, therapists. 60+ hour work weeks are standard in several occupations, you do not deserve a trophy or even the slightest iota of special attention for it.

      • What’s sad in the US is that a 60+ hour work week is viewed as acceptable. More people in more professions should object to that. Oh yeah and the lawyers, doctors, therapists, etc. who work longer hours get paid better too. Nurses — though they’re better paid (and I’m talking about ‘real’ nurses… not the ITT Tech folks) are also overworked and under-recognized.

    • I totally agree. When I read the above “A Real Look at Being a Professor in the US” I heard “Whine, whine, whine.” Nothing but hyperbole.
      Sure, I had to work hard for the first 6 years. But after 4 years of undergrad, 6 years of grad (in which I got tuition and a stipend – i.e. no debt), and 3 years of post-doc, I was used to working hard. Since tenure, life has been SOOOOOOOOOOO easy. I work hard when classes are in session – 30 weeks a year – and indulge my other pursuits when classes are not. I love my life and couldn’t imagine working 50 week a year with 2 weeks vacation.
      When ever I get down and don’t feel like going to work I remind myself that my grandfather worked 6 days a week, 52 weeks a year digging coal underground. Imagine not seeing the sun 6 days a week for 6 months of the year. If he could hear the above whining, he would. laugh his ass off.
      I have so much respect for high school teachers – you really work hard and get little respect.

      • Note the awesome qualifier there — after tenure life became easy. Well… that’s great for you. If you chose to be an academic who was tenured and let off the gas because you could… sweet… you made a life choice that was good for you.

        You want to have a pissing contest about work based on family histories of blue collar work? Seriously, that’s where you’re going with the argument? C’mon… surely you can do better than that. I believe that was part of the opening statement — we realize we’re not crab fishermen nor on the front lines of a military conflict. Perhaps you also ignored the context of the post which was responding to the annoying assumptions people make about life as a professor. If your life is easy, good for you. If your life is stress-free, awesome.

        In the mean time — you would discount the experiences of folks (and certainly not just me) who see some systematic problems, work/pay disparities, etc. in academia just because you’re personally satisfied. This blog post and all of those participating in the conversation may be a collective bitch session, but to deny the legitimacy of peoples’ frustrations and challenges within the context of the academic world is exactly one of the reasons why our university lives are getting collectively worse.

    • Despite your tiresome, rambling post, I don’t think you read the blog and you clearly have a chip on your shoulder about those in higher ed. I doubt anything could part someone so dedicated to an uninformed, fact-free opinion, so I won’t try.

      But, fyi, sabbaticals are “taken” not “took” and they come only every seven or more years. Not at all regularly as you state.

      • They are “taken” in the present tense and “took” in the past tense.
        I am starting graduate studies in the Fall. . .so no, I don’t have a “chip on my shoulder about those in higher ed.”
        I just concur with the study.

    • severely misguided response. I feel sorry for professors who have dedicated their lives to becoming educated only to educate the ungrateful like yourself. There is no reason to criticize professionals who spend years developing ideas and research that DOES impact society. In fact, if you consider all of the contributions of research which have improved social standards and your way of life, you might think differently. However, for now, bite your tongue and understand that being a professor is a difficult position to fill, and we should appreciate them, as they are the keepers of the future!

    • Nathan,

      As a professor, I have never attempted to claim that what I do is harder than other professions and, as a friend and colleague of many in primary and secondary education, I have certainly told them I recognize how much difficulty they face in their jobs, the challenges they contend with that I do not have to face in my classrooms and I also recognize how hard our very under appreciated and underpaid teaching professionals work in this country with little recognition or understanding of what they do or how they accomplish what they do in the classroom. If you are a member of that profession, as you clam to be, then my hat is off to you and I have a lot of gratitude for the work you put into your job.

      Now, I’m going to ask you to do the same for me and my colleagues. Nowhere in the original blog post and, frankly, in most of the supportive comments does anyone disparage your profession or claim that what you do is less challenging than what we do. What people are frustrated with is the stereotypes of lazy overpaid professors who sit around on their asses all day and lazily check off a few papers and answer a few emails and type a few lines on their latest article all while planning their sabbatical to… Paris?? is that what you said?

      Frankly, I am surprised that a person such as yourself, who claims to champion the poor and underprivileged, would utilize the very same kinds of arguments used to marginalize your students to marginalize the experiences and struggles of your fellow educators, because, that is what we are, fellow colleagues and educators. We got into this profession for the same reasons you did, because we want to make a positive difference in the lives of people, to help empower people, society, and ideas…Just because we did not choose to work with youth does not make those reasons any less noble or significant. Education benefits everyone of all ages and at all times in their life. There is no expiration date on the value of education.

      It is true that there are some people in the higher education profession who have managed to master the art of doing nothing and get away with it…I agree. I have seen those people operate and am always amazed at how they get away with it, but this is nothing that any of us don’t see in any profession public, private, non-profit. There are people who “free-load” in your profession and who are overpaid for their work. You know this as well as I do, and, you know they can be difficult to get rid of, BUT YOU ALSO KNOW HOW FRUSTRATING IT IS TO BE LUMPED IN WITH THEM BY PEOPLE WHO KNOW NOTHING ABOUT WHAT IT IS THAT YOU DO AND TO BE STEREOTYPED AS THEM! And you know how frustrating it is when public policy assumes that you are them and then legislation about education and pay is structured to reflect the abuse of the minority and not the achievements and efforts of the majority.

      Its troubling and upsetting to see a colleague such as yourself make these kinds of assumptions because, if I have learned anything in the last few years, it is that the elites who are most influencing our collective professions right now are extremely interested in keeping us antagonistic towards one another while they completely strip our collective bargaining rights, our ability to shape the curriculum at our respective institutions, our teaching autonomy, our intellectual autonomy, and while they commodify, exploit, manipulate, and buy off our greatest and most important asset in education, our students. In that sense, you are giving the very elites who continue to marginalize you and your students more power, not less.

      The narrative you cite in your post reminds me of the kind of “movie” narrative of the 1950s elite professor at Harvard, hanging out in smoking lounges, wearing corduroy jackets with the elbow patches, citing Wittgenstein and Heidegger to one another and pretending to be masters of the Universe. I don’t know what your overall experience is: you claim you were at a large state institution. Well, you have to understand, the large state institution is one kind of educational experience in the post-secondary education environment, one that has been greatly criticized, and for good reasons. There is a lot of distance and a lot of layers between the professor and the student at large public institutions. There are a lot of reasons for that. SOME of those reasons might be for what you described, but, in actuality, a lot of what you describe reminds me of what students ASSUME to be what we are doing rather than what we are actually doing. The truth is, when students have had the courage to voice those assumptions, I have been able to explain what I was doing and why I was doing it and the students usually say, “wow, gee, I had no idea…sorry.” And then I think, man, if this is what they are willing to say to my face, imagine what they are thinking behind my back? And, I cannot control that so I dont.

      Second, in regards to your narrative, a lot has changed in the last 20 years. State funding for higher education is and has been on the decline since the early 1980s. Professors salaries have remained stagnant. Student tuition may fund somewhere between 10-15% of my salary at any given time, and, at the state and public universities, many professors, in order to keep their jobs, now are funding their own salaries through external grants for research. External, by the way, means “outside the institution.” In order to get those grants and to conduct that research successfully, they CANNOT teach and they must travel. That is part of obtaining and implementing the grant successfully. Its not a vacation trip to Paris anymore than a state department diplomat’s trip to Paris is a vacation. Most of the major research that gets done at Universities is no longer paid for by the University, certainly not in its entirety, not even for graduate students anymore. This is becoming true of most sabbaticals as well. Most institutions have cut their sabbatical and research budgets massively and, even when they do fund a sabbatical, its only partially funded, so the professor has to apply for grants to supplement their salaries while they are on sabbatical. When it comes to sabbaticals in general, whether funded by the institution, a private foundation or government grant or both, getting them approved often takes a year or more. University funded sabbaticals are limited to tenured faculty members usually and also, there is a lot of accountability for whatever purpose the sabbatical is taken. You don’t just get to “take” a sabbatical. Additionally, you have to show how your sabbatical is going to benefit the institution directly and many do…often creating an enhanced learning opportunity or research or internship opportunity for students connected to the department and/or professor. There are different types of sabbaticals and, even with research sabbaticals, you don’t just get to propose any old project you feel like. For example, you don’t get to “propose” “gee, I’d like to go to ‘Paris’ so I think I’ll take a sabbatical…”It doesn’t work that way, much as we might wish it. Your research has to go through interdisciplinary committees, meaning other faculty members and often administrators have to recognize the benefit and significance of your project. And, trust me, its not in the interest of administrators or faculty members inside/outside your department to be “granting” you a free vacation to Paris, anymore than it would be at your teaching institution. Sabbaticals can and often do stress the teaching loads at departments so you don’t get to take one unless you truly have earned one and its deemed worthwhile and valuable for your department, your students, and your institution.

      You talk a lot about rising tuition costs and I agree, they are too high…but, just as the rising cost of primary and secondary education should NOT be blamed on the salaries of teachers, the rising cost of higher education SIMPLY CANNOT be blamed on the salaries of professors. The reason why it cannot is because of simple mathematics. Most, if not all, of the studies I have read on rising costs in higher education in the last 10 years have Squarely pointed the finger at decreased federal and state funding, administrators, administrative bloat, and, to a lesser extent, the tendency amongst large universities to spend way too much money on sports palaces and dormmansions and country clubesque student centers and expensive auditoriums, student entertainment (i.e., concerts and comedians)…aka, bricks and mortar….in an effort to compete for students. Teaching salaries simply don’t figure in remotely comparative amounts to the above factors, particularly since faculty salaries, benefits, and wages have not kept pace with increased cost of living costs. Administrative positions and salaries have increased 200%!!! while professor’s salaries, at most institutions have remained stagnant. In fact, at many of the institutions I have worked, professors salaries have not kept up with cost of living increase and remain well below the national average. Additionally, most public colleges and universities have not renewed tenure lines to reduce departmental costs in order to manage the budget cuts and to keep salary costs for professors down…or simply have been denied the tenure line by the deans of their colleges. In losing the tenure line, they still have to meet the teaching demand for their classes which they supplement with the cheap labor of graduate students, yes, but more and more is filled with adjunct, visiting, and part-time faculty.

      This is where I come in: Despite having a Ph.D., publications, all the various required accolades and lines on my vita that my various advisors assured me would be enough to get me a full time tenure-track position, there ARE no longer enough tenure track positions available. What there are are low pay, no benefit, no retirement part time and adjunct jobs, or 1-3 year lecturer positions…and guess what…they are frequently NOT in the same city (not even close) and moving costs are not covered. They frequently do not have health insurance or retirement benefits and I won’t even tell you what the per hour pay comes to because its too upsetting. I have been living this reality for several years now. I keep hoping that things will change, that my endeavor to publish ANYWAYS despite my situation, my endeavor to do more than is required of me, etc. will somehow get me out of this situation and into a more secure position. I’m lucky to be in a one year fulltime position right now and have health insurance, but in past years, my mother, a state employee in health and human services, told me I would have qualified for food stamps despite working a full-time teaching schedule at multiple campuses (last spring I taught 7classes, and 3 in the summer–that’s 10 classes in 25 weeks, plus I did a research project and finished a book and spent substantial amounts of time applying for jobs and I moved across 4 states for a new job on my own dime) nor did I have health insurance or a retirement account I could put $$ into and I am 36 years old!!!. By the way, I did not avail myself of the welfare system out of embarrassment, fear and shame, despite the possibility that I might have qualified. If I was the only one in this position, that would be one thing but I happen to know that I have a lot of colleagues in that position, hard working people with a lot of student loan debt (I have over $100,000). These are people who DO love what they do and want to do this job, but they have to BE ABLE to do this job for it to be meaningful as a job. Thankfully I don’t have children. If I had had children this past year, I honestly do not know what I would have done. I’m sure my story would be very different though. But my situation also means that having children is pretty much not an option for me unless and until things change.

      When it comes to salary averages, it is true that there are professors who get paid six figure salaries. However, the article mentions schools like Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Getting a job in the ivy league is like making it to the NFL. Its simply never going to happen for most of us, even those of us who are quite talented and well known in our fields. As for large public universities, or, “R1s” as they are called, again, getting a tenure track job at a large premier state university is not in the cards for most Ph.Ds, not anymore. Just making it there means several thousand dollars worth of external grants by the time you graduate from your doctorate, a couple of books and about 25-30 competitive, peer reviewed, top tier articles. You have to come out of your doctoral program with 10-12 top tier articles and a slew of grants and awards already if you want to get hired on as junior faculty there and you’re still going to start out at $50,000 unless you are in business and engineering and the hard sciences, which brings me to my next point about salaries:

      Business and many of the hard sciences and engineering have equivalent positions in the private and public sectors…that is, you can be an engineer or a financial consultant in the private sector. You cannot do that if you are a Ph.D. in the humanities and social sciences. In order for those academic equivalent professions to be competitive in the market place, they have to offer equivalent salaries for their faculty members…and they have to keep up with those salaries, so your business and science and engineering faculty get paid sometimes twice what humanities and social science professors get paid for doing the same exact job with the same requirements and that inflates the salary averages of academics. Universities can pay their humanities and social science professors much lower both to ensure that engineering and business salaries stay high and to keep salary costs down because there is not a demand for humanities and social science Ph.Ds full time outside the academy. Ph.Ds in those fields were designed for the academic profession. The profession IS the academy. That is why you get the Ph.D. in those areas. Additionally, we don’t know who was included in the salary research of the CNBC piece. For example, sometimes athletic coach salaries are included in the research because sometimes they are classified as faculty…so imagine what the salaries of football and basketball coaches at state universities would do to the salary average…

      I cannot even begin to tell you how much money I personally have saved the taxpayer over the years, how much I personally subsidize what I do, how much I do for free, not because someone is making me but because I know its the right thing to do for my students, how much I give that my students, my bosses, my administrators, and people like you will never see…and never know about

      I’d like to think that you sometimes feel that way too. You know you say that we don’t have to deal with students with personal problems, and I’m sorry, but that is just not true. I have been, at various times, a shoulder to cry on for many students. I have also gone out of my way to adjust grading and deadlines and rules and teaching principles to meet the varying demands of each of the 90 people I deal with each semester all while still attempting to maintain standards and fairness. Many students have fallen apart in my office or just chatted about their hopes, fears, dreams, financial problems, drug problems, mental health problems, parenting problems, marriage problems, unplanned pregnancy problems, physical health problems. My students are dealing with adult lives and adult responsibilities. They aren’t rich. They aren’t always privileged, and, nor does privilege of any kind preclude life problems. I have had students dealing with domestic and sexual abuse in their lives, being stalked, divorce, homelessness, natural disasters (like their apartment/home burning down or getting destroyed in a tornado), violence in their neighborhood, deaths in the family, getting fired or let go from work and not knowing if they are going to be able to survive the semester financially, eviction, jail, being a refugee or citizen from a war torn or unstable country where their relatives are being shot, killed, jailed, beaten, bombed, I have had autistic/aspergers students and students with schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder etc, etc., etc. I don’t judge them. I listen and I always try to help, however I can, but it takes a toll on me as well, just as your students take a toll on you. This CAN and often DOES affect them both inside and outside the classroom. Many of these students are engaged with group work where I often have to mediate disputes and play relationship counselor to my students so that they can get their projects done well and on time…and i have to do that all while respecting confidentiality and maintaining expectations and fairness in the classroom.

      I’m sorry that your experience of higher education has been what you described and that you seemingly were not able to cultivate personal relationships with your professors that led to one of mutual respect and appreciation for our professions and their various challenges.

      As I said earlier, I don’t claim to work HARDER or to have it WORSE than people in other professions. I just want equal recognition for the professional struggles I deal with just as many other people in other professions struggle with challenges that are unique to their profession. I don’t begrudge doctors, lawyers, police officers, nurses, or others their challenges and contributions, I only ask for the same recognition.

      I only ask that people recognize that OUR profession has its problems and struggles, and that the vast majority of people in my profession work VERY hard and that that hard work often goes unrecognized and unappreciated.

      I don’t begrudge you your salary, your job challenges and the difficulties you face in your profession. Every profession has challenges and difficulties. This blog is an effort to bring those challenges and difficulties to light. Are there advantages to being a professor? Absolutely, why else would we do it?

      Does that mean its a fantasy dream life? Um No. Does that mean I don’t want to do it anymore? Thats a difficult question. I put $100,000 and ten years of my life into this investment. I want to see it through and I hope every day that it turns out to have been the right decision. Because it would really suck if it was the wrong decision. The jury, for me (not for everyone) is still out right now….it may not even be up to me as the job market is what it is…

      There are many things I love about being a professor and that I would NOT want to trade for other professions. I know there are certain jobs I could never do because I am simply not cut out for that kind of work and I respect what the people in those professions do very much, you included…however, the dream has not been fulfilled. I dreamed of intellectual freedom and the ability to explore ideas freely…that is simply not the case. I pretty much have had to do that in what little free time I have. I have dreamed of the ability to revolutionize the learning experience for students and inspire them…and, well, its really difficult to do that under the institutional auspices of higher learning…there are a lot of barriers to change, creativity, and inspiration in the class room…

      I just think this article presents about a straw-sized lens of the higher education profession…Some examples of what they say is true, but only in the most limited sense possible…and it presents a stereotypical view of what I do that simply has not been true and is not true.

      Lindsay

    • Nathan — I think most folks have replied to you fairly effectively. But frankly, you are the type of person who perplexes us. If you posted about your situation being tough and that you were sick of the assumptions people make about your work, my guess is that most of these good folks wouldn’t be so dismissive. Read the posts — these folks aren’t saying that our lives are worse COMPARED to other professions, rather that people misunderstand that we have a lot of shit to manage.

      I also have to giggle — you’re basing your assumptions about being a professor from your observations as a student. Seriously, do you actually think you can make an assessment about most of your professors lives based on what you saw in class? We “perform” in our classrooms. Our job is to educate you – not to be your friend, not to let you in our world… our job is to help you… from your perspective, it’s all about you. I certainly never saw the shit most of my professors coped with (outside of the classroom) because that’s what ‘professionalism’ means. Even if we choose to talk about ourselves (and some do more than others), 99% of what we share is planned and deliberate.

      Oh and it’s not just my experience with student debt — the reality is that about 50% of folks leaving their PhD programs have debt from their graduate programs. Of those about 15% have substantial amounts of debt (http://www.cgsnet.org/data-sources-graduate-student-loans-and-debt-0 ) The debt is substantially higher for people of color … as well as for those of us who came from blue collar backgrounds.

      If all you’re making is $25,000 and you’re a college grad (and don’t live in BFE), perhaps you should revisit your own life choices as well instead of making assumptions about other folks’ life choices.

  7. Pingback: Professor Stress | According to Colwell

  8. PS I doubt most academics in the US have that much debt. If they were academically very strong they should have got plenty of scholarships and funding along the way…

    • Actually… they do. Even with scholarships and assistantships. Full-ride scholarships for undergrads are tough to come by unless you’re an athlete… so at a state school for me with a few small scholarships, some grants, etc. that came to about $28k. Then in graduate school… yeah try living for the better part decade on the $700-$900/month of a graduate stipend for teaching/ TA’ing. We may not pay our tuition, but unless we’re with a partner who supports us or have parents who support us, a lot of us end up having to borrow money to pay for our lives. The graduate stipend precludes us from having ‘better paying’ PT jobs, so over the course of 6-7 years of working on an MA and PhD, borrowing $7-10K a year so that we can live at about the poverty line, that adds up.

    • Thanks for the dig. I am sure the blogger and every other debt-ridden academic appreciates your assumptions. Remember, not everyone’s mommy and daddy paid every dollar for their undergraduate education. Also remember that even with a stipend, tuition waiver or assistantship, adjunct work, and a fellowship, there are living expenses that come with living life. Oh, why do I even bother….

    • another clueless person. money is falling from trees nowadays and they give it to everyone who deserves it, don’t they?

  9. It doesn’t have to be quite as bad as this and I think it gets better as you get more efficient with time. Committees don’t take up much of my time. I used to rarely read any material before getting to the meeting and then make a few trollish comments or keep quiet unless something critical for our department came up. I got tenure, but I was at a research university. Now I’m in Australia where we have to teach less, get paid better in many disciplines, and have higher grant success rates. On the stress side, the tenure track is definitely stressful and many people find public speaking stressful, which is basically our profession on the teaching side, with multiple deadlines a week when teaching new courses. So, they really missed that.

    • Fair enough — like I’ve said… there’s a 1,001 ways to experience an academic environment and lots will depend on the organizational culture.

      Research universities may put pressure on for research (and self-funding for many of them), but I’ve noticed they substantially reduce committee work, advising at the undergraduate level, and a lot of the silly administrative/ paperwork kinds of things that folks at smaller universities get stuck doing. They also tend to reduce the teaching load as well.

      Personally, the research was the most relaxing part of my job, but at the teaching school wanting to become more of a research school, I noticed that our time pulls were more extreme than either at typical teaching or typical research institutions. For example, last year, I was on 6 committees and had significant responsibilities on 3 of them as a 3rd year faculty member. I was also responsible for one or two major campus events a year. This year, had life changes not come up, not only was I going to be expected to serve on at least that many committees but I was likely expected to teach an overload with the overloading being 2 graduate online classes (8 week intensive sessions). I know that’s abnormal and a particular challenge at my last university. But I think to varying degrees most of us at smaller state and private institutions are asked to do more than we should, the tenure process is held as a carrot in not-so-subtle kinds of ways. I have friends who’ve been asked to direct centers for research or service as assistant professors, colleagues running two or three incredibly time-intensive student organizations in addition to their responsibilities, coordinating community service projects as an expected part of their work, and a host of other sometimes cool but all time intensive projects. So, I’ve had to fit in research around all of that and have been fine in that regard as well. But, it certainly all comes at a cost.

      And I definitely agree with the experience changing once you leave the US.

      • Well, things have perhaps changed over the years … And the various academic fields are quite different, too.

        In 1969, I finished graduate school (UC Davis) with money in the bank – no debt – and moved from stressful California to remote Wyoming, where after those supposedly stressful half dozen years I remained until retirement.

        For tenure it took two or three articles in almost any regional of national professional journal .. Not more. Pay? Not much of that, to b sure. But my time was my own … Summers off. Great place to raise kids. Mountains and “open country” just out of town.

        Harvard of the West? Of course not, but I like to think that my teaching for 30+ years helped a fee people to think more clearly. It was definitely a fine (and, frankly, easy) experience for someone who just wanted to live an enriching personal life and managed to get along without significant professional ambition.

        Are such positions entirely gone today?

      • In a word, yes.

        Things have changed radically over the years, and such positions are entirely gone today. Or rather, the only ones still remaining are still occupied by male baby boomers such as yourself. It’s entirely different for the junior profs.

        If you have a young child, and do not have a spouse who can raise that child in your absence as you work 50-80 hours a week toward tenure, you are screwed.

        I lost my job at my 3rd year review. I was voted out by a group of tenured faculty members, 86% of whom were male, and 25% of whom were white males over the age of 70.

        I have $58,000 of student loans from my Ph.D. which I earned at the #2 U.S. institution in my field. They will finally be paid off when I turn 55.

        Every word of the original blog post is absolute truth.

      • Actually, the underbelly of education is even more troubling. My PhD wife, who knowingly took herself out of tenure track early in her career to balance being an educator and a mom, has found it impossible to make an actual living in the field despite great experience and credentials. After teaching at some very well-regarded universities and colleges while trying to land a permanent position, she now works as an adjunct (contract labor) at a community college making about $15,000 per year while putting in 30+ hours per week. Around 80% of the school’s courses are taught by adjunct faculty, who have no job security, no offices, no set schedules or guaranteed hours, no administrative support, and no budget to attend conferences or conduct research in her field. Her work supports a small number of tenured faculty and administrators making 5 times what she does. She has stayed in the field because she loves teaching, but the “permanent” faculty and staff have no understanding how disillusioned the “contingent” workers are becoming at the lack of opportunity, status and compensation, despite the fact that they are, in large part, the primary face of the institution to the students they teach. The system is broken.

      • Hi Alan —

        Like the folks posting after indicated… a lot has changed for a lot of people.

        Some of those positions are still available for some — especially if you want to live in Wyoming (and I’m not poking fun… I did my MA at U Wyo and knew some professors with great credentials who chose to be there because they wanted to live in the wilds of Wyoming) or other remote places. That’s part of the balance folks have to figure out. Yet, when I was at Wyo my professors had to do a whole lot more than publish 2-3 for tenure … it’s not a massive research institution, yet those standards are changing. Even at the ‘teaching’ school I was at most recently, 2-3 used to be acceptable but today they’re expecting 1-2 quality (i.e., national or international) publications a year for promotion.

        Now, for folks at CC’s — honestly, I don’t know. I don’t really know that many full-time faculty members at CC’s — other than drowning in 4/4 or 5/5 teaching loads, I’m not sure what life’s like.

  10. well done!!! and one more thought on this issue, which is the assumption that teaching classes, even just the in-class time by itself, is somehow easy — most of my classes are 2 hours, twice a week, and i usually teach three classes per semester. 2 hours is about the same time as a typical Broadway play or show — so, six performances a week. except I’m the only one on the stage, the script changes every performance, and I actually have to write the scripts. furthermore, the people in audience are not only expected to enjoy the show, but to learn from it in a way that they can use in some way (i.e. passing an exam or writing a decent essay on the topic) — and some of them don’t actually want to be there, yet i’m expected to hold their attention & actually get them to learn from the performance. and that’s JUST the teaching portion of my day!

    • Absolutely. Love the performance frame you put on it… it very much is. I don’t know about you — but the performance is often made incredibly difficult by the deteriorating conditions in many of our classroom buildings … from technology that doesn’t work to environmental conditions that are abysmal, to the horrible fluorescent lighting, to the grade school desks the students are in. Oh yeah — and at more and more universities cramming about 10% more students into each class to make not only the work more but the physical space even worse.

      • absolutely! we have to fight to get “smart” classrooms if needed, and i can’t say enough bad things about the fluorescent lighting. plus my school is overloaded with freshmen (got to keep the dorms full, to pay the debt from building the dorms!), so there’s huge pressure to cancel our upper-division classes & teach more gigantic lecture classes. and no one applauds you at the end of each performance!

  11. The author makes some good points, but ultimately is nothing more than a smug, bitter, hypocrite. Yes, being a professor is very stressful and most importantly, the long hours make family a challenge, to say the least. To both the authors that say our job is not stressful and to the jackass that wrote this article…GO FUCK YOURSELF! You don’t represent me or any of the colleagues I know. Fuck you very much.

    • LOL — kisses to you too sunshine. Thanks to adding substance to the conversation. ;)

      By the way, smug? Sure… though it’s really more sarcasm than anything else. Hypocritical? Interesting … not quite sure how that applies because I’m really not trying to put on a ‘fake’ appearance of virtue here nor am I really contradicting myself… so … ok. Bitter? Nah, not really … I left my university by my choice because I’ve moved abroad not because I got the boot.

      That’s awesome if your experience has been different (and I’m assuming peaches and cream by your dislike for my sarcastic and snarky reaction to the CNBC article) but it doesn’t change the tangible reality that clearly many academics from a host of different types of universities and departments face. I framed it as a rant because I like to — it’s my blog, so why the hell not. But I think each of the thoughtful contributions that folks have made add to the conversation in some meaningful and lovely ways. I’m naturally sarcastic and cuss like a sailor — you don’t like that… I don’t care. But, I love the dialogue and thoughts that the rest of these folks have had. If nothing more than venting a little, it’s nice to know that lots of people feel a lot of the same frustrations in our profession.

  12. WOW! Guess my decision to NOT pursue that PhD and contribute to society in other ways than teaching to young adults was the right choice! Really dodged a bullet there… but then working the 80+ hours a week as a grad student really taught me that it wasn’t going to stop once I got where I was headed!

    • :) Well… I think there are tons of ways to contribute to society. That’s very cool if you’re happy doing what you are doing.

      Academia isn’t for everyone, but at the same time it seems like a goodly portion of academics are frustrated by the same types of things in academia.

  13. Pingback: The Least Stressful Jobs Of 2013 - Forbes

  14. Add on the two academic family, and the reality that one of them may end up working only as adjunct. True, that means few meetings and responsibilities, a la tenure-track, but it also for a mere pittance and in order to make even half the lowly salary of the tenure track you need to work numerous jobs. Not stressful at all.

    • Absolutely — the world of the adjunct (and I’ve been one of those too while finishing my PhD and now that I’ve moved to Europe… I’ll probably do some of that online as well) is a whole other world of angst in academia. I feel ya!

      • It seems like it’s about the same — maybe a bit better. I do see a greater respect for life balance here though than in the US.

        The other big difference in a lot of places here is the lack of student loan debt. In many places here, education is substantially less expensive or free (England is an exception I know). So, even if the pay isn’t amazingly better, cut out the 1/3 to 1/2 your monthly salary going to service your education debt and your quality of life goes up substantially.

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