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

  1. I found this comment incredibly offensive: “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 frankly smarter than most people in society (the PhD and doing original research is kind of a baseline test for that ). I know, that’s probably not ‘nice’ to say but it’s true.”

    Who are you to say that you’re smarter than most people in society? Maybe someone didn’t want to go the PhD route because they had the foresight to know it wasn’t going to be a lucrative position and chose something pragmatic? Or maybe they were a smart person who didn’t want to contribute to an institution they didn’t believe in that is limited to the upper echelon of society (Hey, education IS a privilege. Even if your parents weren’t rolling in it and didn’t leave you a trust fund, you had access to early education or resources that fostered your interest in learning and regularity in testing that made you a viable candidate to become an undergraduate).

    And guess what? Lots of people have to work insane hours for virtually no money when they’re getting started in a position to gain experience. Ever hear of a triple unpaid internship? Everyone had to give indentured servitude. It’s a competitive market that’s a byproduct of a shitty economy that affected everyone, regardless of their qualifications. No one goes into an 8+ year educational career track without figuring out what the compensation will be after the fact and weighing if that’s worth it. And if you didn’t and blindly applied, then maybe you aren’t as smart as you think you are.

    • I toyed with getting rid of that paragraph a few times because it’s really unnecessary to the bigger point, but figured ‘screw it’ people who get hung up on whether or not highly educated people have above average learning capacities were going to miss the point anyhow.

      I’ll make it really plain — I am not saying that other people don’t give their pound of flesh. I am saying that getting treated like our lives are ridiculously easy because we’re academics, the CONSTANT disdain for us evident across media and frankly day-to-day conversations, and crap like that is annoying.

      The lack of empathy that Americans demonstrate for other people never fails to amaze me. The lack of empathy for education — from K-12, training programs for folks who don’t want to go to college, graduate school, and the like in the US is a major reason why we are failing.

      And the ease with which we’re offended by naughty language, impolite messaging, metaphors, or someone saying a particular group happens to be smarter than average folks just shows how we never seem to see the forest for the trees. Try reading through some of these peoples’ responses and you’ll see that while I’m kinda cranky and obnoxious, that there are people whose lives have genuine pain because they wanted to do something that mattered to them, understood there would be sacrifices, but because no one in our industry ever really talks about the genuine sacrifices made (beyond just a crappy paycheck) they have faced a lot of challenges. If people still can’t empathize and worry that someone thinks they’re smarter than the average bear then there’s something wrong with that way of thinking.

      Admitting someone faces challenges doesn’t take away from the hair stylist who works 10-15 hours on their feet, the social worker dealing with peoples’ pain on a daily basis, or any other occupation. So, get over it.

      • Thank you for saying that. I am actually in genuine pain over my tenure-track academic job. The pay is equal to what I made before I went to graduate school and racked up $100K in debt, and I am a 15 hour / $800 flight away from my beloved family in a small town where I am realizing it is increasingly unlikely that I will meet someone to marry and start my own family. I am absolutely miserable– but not because of my job. I love my job. Even through the 100 hour weeks. No. I’m in pain because I think I’m going to have to leave my job because I am not sure if the sacrifices are worth it. And it feels horrible to have worked this hard to get to where I am and even contemplate giving it up. I’m sick of people telling me how lucky I am and how great it is that I’m not digging out ditches. My pain is real, and it’s mine, and it’s a lot of other people’s just like me.

  2. What a crock saying “we’re frankly smarter than most people in society (the PhD and doing original research is kind of a baseline test for that….”

    1. Being smarter does not make one wiser. For example, doctors think they are smart yet they are one of the largest demographics that fall for scams.

    2. In a PHP program, original thought rarely exists. You are taught to think within the confines and rails of certain accepted bounds. Go outside those bounds and you are vilified and ridiculed. Yes PhDs spend a lot of time on their work, but that proves they have dedication, not smarts

    • LOL — never claimed smart = wisdom nor common sense :) . Roughly, it’s a measure of learning capacity, something that we’re being consistently conditioned not to show in modern society.

  3. I have a PhD in Engineering, and went to the private sector. So I know academia well, and I intentionally chose to move away. First, you think you are a “smart” – let me assure you, the stuff you do “Communication” is trivial stuff. I run a company, and I handle sales/marketing/people management, and I do a lot of communication, and I never missed anything that your kind does. So what you do truly, seriously does not add social value. You have the freedome to do it, but please do not ask me to pay more taxes to fund you. Seriously.

    Second, you conveniently omitted the part that comes *after* tenure. Most professors take it easy at that point. Life is *easy*, because you have a job from which it is almost impossible to get fired (and people who make the firing decisions want to protect the sanctity of tenure because their own jobs depend on it – talk about conflict of interest) and there is no need to even retire. I know professors well into their seventies drawing a fat paycheck.

    So please spare us the “We work hard” stuff. I have been there, I know the reality.

    • Awesome — wondered when the “but you’re a social scientist and I’m a hard scientist” silliness would break out. It’s kind of funny because I’ve been paid… really well actually… to coach engineers on how to interact successfully with other human beings in a professional context. We can shit all over each others work anytime that we want, but the reality is that both of our fields make contributions in a lot of areas (including ones that save lives). If you don’t like the commercial application of a limited part of the field of communication that’s your prerogative. But that’s really a bit off the point because territorial pissings are a bit boring and have been addressed inside and outside of academia for a long time. Blah blah blah.

      So, instead of making it about whether I suck because I’m a social scientist type, perhaps you should reserve your ire for all of the ‘hard’ scientists who have added their input supporting the challenges of being in academia in general. Those would be folks likely to be doing work that you find valuable and they also support the argument that academia has some challenges to address.

      Here’s just a wild guess, but I’m going to say that you had to rely on some of these very hard working folks who made the choice to not go into business in order that you might earn your PhD in the field you wanted. These folks facilitated your success — whatever it may be — so as an educated person your snarkiness seems misplaced.

      While there are certainly people who hide out in all of academia (like all professions), most folks work pretty hard. I don’t begrudge full professors for letting off the gas a little … after the 14 years (minimum) of slogging it out as both assistant and associate professors, I can forgive them that. In my experience with full professors, while most of them remain active in publishing, they also take on a lot more responsibilities with graduate student supervision, take the opportunities to do a lot of consulting that serves a lot of necessary functions, and generally speaking shift the type of work they do. So, if they slow down to a 40 hour work week, c’est la vie. It’s kind of like management in many corporations — they worked their ass off til they were mid-career, ascended to positions of power, and often take the foot off the gas a bit.

    • As an Associate Professor, I can affirm that life does not magically get easier once you do get tenure. Sure, you don’t have the clock ticking, but if you want to one day become full professor, you must continue publishing, publishing and publishing some more to convince your peers that you deserve to move up the ranks. Of course, once tenured, you will have to sit on more committees, apply for more grants, and your work is still reviewed. Though the process is somewhat longer, if your Chair or Dean does not believe you are pulling your weight, there are ways of eventually getting rid of you.

  4. I got a BA in Religion from a small respected liberal arts college in 2001, and then an MA in the subject from the Ivy League in 2008 (after some “real” work and some Peace Corps), graduating with a 3.9 GPA. After holding a respectable position in the library of this Ivy League university (making $17.5/hr) I then got into a pretty good state school Ph.D. program. I did not, however, get any grants or funding of any kind, and after moving to the new city for 6 months, could not find any work. I stopped and looked ahead (and inside). By this point most of what this article describes had become apparent to me. So I did one of the hardest things I’ve ever done: I said “fuck it” and walked away. 14 years, hundreds of hours of research and many hundreds of pages written, about $80,000 in debt, and six months ago I started my new job as a dishwasher at a restaurant. I’m now a bartender and server and am about to become a manager. Right now I regularly take home $20+ an hour with my tips. Many member of my family and my academic compatriots look at me with pity, like a failure, a climber who almost got to the top of the mountain and then turned around. But they couldn’t see the fucking cliff I was about to walk off!

    • Thank you for sharing — lots of pathways through life and just because we start down one doesn’t mean that’s the one we stick to. If you’re happier now, then that’s what matters right?

  5. Pingback: Business as Usual: A Response to Forbes and Mary Beard | Allan Johnson

  6. They list something similar to their own jobs as one of the most stressful (newspaper reporter), citing the “high level of layoffs and cutbacks in the industry right now.” I think this “article” has about as much merit as a Facebook status update.

    Also, as a Ph.D. student, your post has reminded me why I will likely not go the academic route :)

    • LOL — I like the comparison … you’re right. And clearly the poorly executed measures (and likely poorly opertionalized) used to create these lists play into annoying social stereotypes. So, for me the problem is that as much as it’s basically ‘creative writing’ it’s disseminated by a ‘credible’ news source (i.e., the list and accompanying stories have been posted on CNBC, Huffington Post, and Forbes at this point).

  7. Why all the CNBC hate? This isn’t their report. This is them talking about a report put out by Career Cast. They fully attribute it, and fully disclose what their criteria for “stress” is. For all the harping on about fact-checking, Audra should do some of her own.

    • They’ve ‘broadcast’ it as part of their own content (much like Forbes did and Huffington Post has as well). All of whom have been irresponsible. Just because Career Cast created it doesn’t mean that media outlets have to pick it up. The media outlets have editorial review and responsibility.

  8. I was an assistant professor at a large state school in the US, and your description is pretty accurate to what I was doing. After my first trip to the emergency room, the cardiologist said it was anxiety…probably job related. I got some great meds (not uncommon for academics), and decided to re-evaluate. In the end, I decided that. Should change career paths to something less stress-inducing. So, I started my own business in a crappy economy!!! You know what? I work about the same number of hours, replaced my university salary in about 8 months, and I have MUCH less stress now. I…me…not some bunch of diva-like tenured professors and “random” journal reviewers… I control my fate. I hope everyone who thinks that job is “easy” will give this some consideration…IT’S EASIER TO BE A ENTREPRENEUR IN A RECESSION THAN A COLLEGE PROFESSOR!

  9. I felt like you were reading my life. I just completed my first semester (of the first year) as an assistant professor and while I enjoy the work, I found little energy and motivation for writing — which, of course, I must do to keep my job in the long run. My teaching load is 3-2. I got a course release for this first year (2-2), but one of the courses I taught and will regularly teach meets for 6 hours per week — the students get 4 hrs of course credit and I only get credit for one course prep. No TAs. Just me. I also advise 40-50 students. I commit about an hour of time for each student each semester.

    Of course, there are also weekly program meetings, less frequent department meetings and periodic departmental service meetings — basically lots of meetings :)

    None of this accounts for the time I need to spend writing, preparing for conferences, reviewing manuscripts, and reading scholarship.

    Overall, I enjoy the work even as I question if it’s worth it. The professor who teaches once per year and pulls in 100+K are a very small minority of the professoriate — and even these select few work very hard in other areas of academic life. As for the rest of us, we work very hard too and for half the pay.

    • I’m glad it rang true for you … that was my life, except that I never got the course releases I earned because of my research since we were badly understaffed…. :)

  10. I got a Ph.D in Sociolgy from the University of Chicago. I took one look at this life (my wife is currently an assistant prof) and said forget it. I now work in soft money research (if I don’t get grants or contracts I don’t get paid). I find this tenuous life far less stressful, make 60% more, and only work 60 hours a week.

    • Grant writing is one thing that I wish I’d taken some time to learn to do properly. Because I was a bit single-minded in my interest to avoid R1′s (like I said, I’d probably do some things differently if I were a decade younger), while I’ve worked on a good few grants, I’ve never really put one together on my own. It’s an addition I might be making soon :) .

  11. Funny, none of this seems familiar at my university.

    * Lesson plans are mostly a write-once item, and recycled every semester.

    * Not a single one of my professors teaches more than one class at a time. And many only teach once per year or even less.

    * Office hours are a one-hour-per-week item, and usually students get directed to the TA’s office hours.

    * Advising is performed by department staff, not faculty.

    * Assignment grading is done entirely by TAs, with professors and TAs splitting exam grading.

    So as it stands the teaching-related portion of a professor’s semester comes out long stretches of 4 hour weeks, with a couple of exam grading spurts. Not bad for around $100k per year (based on the publicly accessible salaries).

    • A few thoughts because things are seldom what they seem when you’re a student. Also, keep in mind that different types of universities have different experiences — as I said in my post, what I shared was based on a smaller institution (i.e., we don’t have TA’s).

      Sure — after the first 3 times that you teach a class you have it down pretty well and from there it’s minor tweaks until it’s time for a major course revision. My point was that new professors typically have to make all of that from scratch and it often takes a good few years before you’re settled into the classes you’ll ‘typically’ teach for a host of reasons.

      Moreover, the folks at large research institutions typically have one undergrad and one graduate class at a time and if they’re really only teaching one class, it means that their research load is MUCH larger. Odds are they have substantial grants that literally ‘buy’ them out of teaching. So, effectively they are there (for better or worse) to be researchers (think about the show ‘Big Bang Theory’ — it’s not like those guys really “teach”… though an exaggeration, they represent a parody of life at a big research institution).

      Oh yeah, and the office hours — again, different universities have different requirements. My university mandated (in our faculty handbook) a minimum of 8 hours of availability per week to our undergraduates. Another institution I was at expected us to be there from 8 to 430/5pm Monday through Friday (seriously, that’s not the norm besides that particular institution and maybe a small handful of others).

      At those large research/ state schools, advising for undergraduates is typically done by a professional student adviser. I can’t tell you how great that would be — I love talking to students about things like professional development, etc.; however, the minutia of how their class schedule is going to come together isn’t the best use of my time AND the professional adviser usually offers better advise for degree completion because that is 100% their job. In your first year at a new institution, you don’t know any more about the overall curriculum at that institution than a new freshman there, so there’s a tremendous learning curve and while I personally didn’t cause anyone’s degree plan to get screwed up, it took a lot of calls and follow up emails (and a few mistakes to be corrected with a few forms signed by my department chair ;) ) to make sure I served my students well. In exchange the faculty spend a lot more time with graduate students and I can assure you — graduate students are a whole lot more demanding on their time. Sometimes it’s an hour a week per advisee (or more depending on where they are in their program).

      There are some drawbacks for undergraduates attending big state schools (I was one of them too) — mostly in terms of direct contact time with your faculty. It’s not because the faculty don’t care, it’s because the definition of their job and how they’re evaluated centers on research and graduate advising. That’s why there tend to be more problems with student retention at the big state schools, but they’re also a lot less expensive. But depending on the particular university you attend and the degree program you’re in, a lot of times once you get beyond your first two years, you start to have a lot more contact with your professors. That’s often at Research 2 institutions rather than Research 1 institutions.

      Frankly, as a Ph.D. student teaching a couple of lower division classes I understood the undergrads’ pain because I thought it was weird that I was writing 8-10 letters of recommendation a semester until I asked a student why they asked me — their response… I was one of about 5 instructors they had in classes of 30 or under so they felt like I would be able to write them a better letter than the ‘real’ professor they took in a class of 150 or more. I think that’s a major drawback to going to large state institutions; however, for me I knew I was going onto post-graduate education and couldn’t see spending $20k/year (and I’m old, so these days that’s effectively doubled) to go to an institution focused on undergraduate education knowing there was a lot more money to spend later.

      • LOL — don’t worry about it… given the wrong person I didn’t post the comment (comments with a bunch of links come up as ones to moderate because they’re more likely to be spam)… and just an FYI I also edited the post… proof reading responses sometimes falls by the wayside.

        Also, not that this will make sense to anyone else but you but regarding the rally — my partner didn’t go and my students spent their day interviewing people and presented the findings of their research… for them, it was an educational opportunity that I supervised and helped them produce. For me, the day was just pretty cool. I’ve never said our lives are total shit just that we also have stress (just like everyone else who works in the real world) and that it’s frustrating when we get treated like dirt.

    • Alex, basically you’re saying this article is not true for the handful of large, well-funded research universities. It’s it not the norm by any means among the 1450 or so colleges in America. What you describe happens, at best, at 15% of schools. What you’re describing is the outlier “dream job” that we all want. BTW, what is your university?

  12. Thanks again for the wise words… it’s been great to track and read the responses (a full inbox on a Sunday!). I know that in Australia (and yes, I promise not rubbing it in, just for the sake of comparison), that some of the changes that you and others have talked about has happened – students seeing institutions as service providers instead of the good old hallowed halls that they used to be, the added admin and management work that we all have now. But I do think that it would be a great thing to look at how the industry became what it is in the US and didn’t in the same way overseas… and by the issues in the industry, I suppose I mean that it clearly has become a bit insular. We advertised a full professor level position about six months ago, and before that about 12 months ago. We’re in the northern part of Australia (Darwin), advertised for someone who really wouldn’t have needed to have enormous publishing or even that much of a teaching track record, just be across one of three very broad discipline areas (the creative arts, education or language/linguistics) as long as they had *some* understanding of Indigenous Knowledges/Studies etc (across any area). We got almost no interest locally and not one person internationally. Now, you can search online and find these jobs (seek.com.au), it’s clearly at least twice the salary of the US, it IS a job, it would have provided a lot of opportunities etc… and we even advertised fairly extensively out of country. They could have done their own research, didn’t need to teach, and were mostly just supervising research students and doing their own research. It wasn’t a permanent possie, but it would have been three years, with very likely ongoing funding… and, again, I just think that in the US people obviously want to stay in the US, but there must be some people desperate enough to want to be a researcher in the broad humanities and earn 150,000 a year when maybe they have not that much experience and a PhD… but, yeah, no takers. We have since kind of absorbed the role, but will be advertising another position again and I will be fascinated to see if any of this changes, frankly.

    • I am interested in indigenous studies (American indigenous peoples…. but you know ;) )… you want a remote faculty member living in Germany? :) :) Honestly, though — I have a friend who would be perfect for the position if you ever advertise it again — she studies conflict and indigenous peoples … and something tells me that she would go in a heartbeat! :)

      In the US, at least in communication, there are about 3 or 4 places at the most that we know to look for jobs and unless an international university advertises in those 3 or 4 places, Americans just don’t know where to look or how to apply for a lot of international positions. I don’t know if other disciplines are as insular, but I would guess that is the case. I do think a lot of that is changing and while certainly not everyone wants to flee that crazy country, I think more academics are waking to the fact that their lives could be different. I do believe that there are a lot of folks in some of the more challenging positions that do feel trapped by their student loans, by worries about giving up a tenured position if they have it, worried that they couldn’t pay for the move, and a whole list of things related to the unknown — you know Americans, in general, aren’t very experienced in exploring the world these days.

      Sure, sure… keep rubbing it in. :) Not that I have to worry about it personally anymore.

  13. Pingback: » Being a Professor

  14. Pingback: The Least Stressful Profession of Them All?

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