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?
Yes, I have called our financial lives as “genteel poverty” because we look and sound like we are middle class citizens but compared to other professionals, our bank accounts look like blue collar workers who do not belong to unions.
As for stress, I have gotten to know our local EMTs and firemen because I have been hauled out on a gurney more than once due to hearts attacks. Least stressful job my a**!
Wow — sorry to hear about the health impacts, but collect a group of professors together and we can probably see many ticking health bombs coupled with the occasional health freak (they stick out
).
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As someone in the sciences I’d have to add a few things. Chief amongst them being: “Writing major grant applications”. There are people whose entire jobs consist of this, they are lauded as serious fund-raisers. In the sciences at american universities we are paid a 9-month salary. I am expected to fundraise the rest of my salary through grant applications. If I don’t get grants – I don’t get paid BUT I am still expected to produce original research. Something that can only be done in my field outside the academic year (ecology = field work = outside = summer). If I don’t work in the summer, I have no data, I can write no papers. In my field – the success rate for NSF funding (the major source of support for basic science) is between 6-8% and there is only one grant cycle per year. These grants are massive undertakings (we’re not talking about a puny 4 page prospectus here). Since those odds are so pathetic, I spend vast amounts of time chasing small grants from as many sources as I can find. Last year I wrote 13 grant applications. Grant applications are nothing but deadlines and tangled bureaucratic nightmares.
I do off the corner of my desk what some people get paid full-time for. I get paid a lot less than those people too.
I supervise, mentor and am directly responsible for the success of a lab group of 8-12 people. I manage and am directly accountable for a 6 figure budget (which I have personally fundraised) which covers anywhere from 3-6 distinct research projects each of which I have designed from scratch and all of which involve complicated field logistics coordinating multiple people to do involved and complex tasks in remote locations.
There is no time off. Ever. Any time I spend with my children, or reading a book, or doing the dishes is automatically filled with guilt and stress because I know, I KNOW, I should be writing a grant, or writing a paper, or reading research papers, or prepping a class, or a lab section or something. I work on my birthday. I work on Christmas Day after the kids are in bed. I work on statutory holidays. I work on weekends. The idea of a weeks paid vacation is so laughable to me I can scarcely believe there are people in the world who get such a thing.
Anyone who thinks the job of Assistant Professor is stress-free is frankly utterly ignorant.
I do this job because I love research. I love teaching. I am not motivated by money. The lack of respect for what I do and what I am capable of and how it compares to what someone in private enterprise is doing? that I could live without.
Absolutely — grant issues, particularly for folks in sciences and social sciences particularly at R1 and R2 schools creates its own unique stress. There’s nothing like being expected to pay your own way. I knew that wasn’t one of the aspects of academia I wanted, which is why I chose to avoid that route.
However, I definitely identify with the guilt over not working. I’m thankful for my husband who reminds me in his own ways (y’all have read my communication style… imagine what I’m married to
… subtlety is not really a part of our household communication) that I need to take time to enjoy myself.
I’m actually remaking my life right now because frankly there was no balance and it was only going to get worse. I know that a lot of it was self-imposed because I’m a bit competitive and a high achiever, but American universities seem to feed off of that.
Like you (and I think anyone who signs up for an academic’s life), it’s not the money that bothers me so much as the lack of respect for the value that my time has both from folks in private enterprise but also increasingly from our administrations. They profit in many ways (from cash to reputation) from our work yet they are the ones who dangle carrots, place pressure, and are often not supportive of a work life balance.
Reblogged this on Playing, With Research and commented:
Coming from a smaller university, one that encourages a more democratic relationship between faculty and administration, not all of this applies to my experiences. I had no committee obligations during my first year, but I gladly took on some workshop work to earn some extra money. I will be getting advisees this spring, and that I do worry about. I am on two committees this year, but for one I was asked to be a co-chair. And luckily I had a post-doc research fellowship that has helped me create a publishing record. But for anyone who thinks professors have an easy job, this detailed breakdown of our lives really tells the truth.
Thanks for the reblog and addition. I told a friend who doesn’t find his life particularly stressful in the same ways that he was fortunate, but that there are 1,001 ways to experience academia. To be honest, I have always liked the work. I really liked my former university — warts and all because I got along really well with our administration.
Yeah, I get frustrated by all of this, but in spending more time talking with my colleagues outside of the US, I’ve found that while they can identify with a lot of the common themes life as an academic outside of the US is a whole lot different. Like with most things, Americans seem to take ‘fun’ jobs and make them relatively painful experiences.
I did my post-doc at Roskilde University in Denmark. Their university set up was immensely different from both the state public universities and private universities I have experienced. I did not get a sense of the pressure or stress that we have here, although they have similar requirements on them. I wonder if part of it is because of how much more supported they are by their government and society than we are.
Denmark is, in particular, great about creating a supportive climate for education in the country. I think you’re right — it’s all about the organizational culture differences. For the last 3 years, as I’ve gotten to know my European counterparts at conferences, I’ve been amazed at how differently their lives feel even with the same publication and similar enough teaching requirements. It’s how it’s executed and supported that seems to make all of the difference.
Plus it probably doesn’t hurt that in Europe there does not appear to be a similar societal and cultural backlash to intellectualism.
Yeah, there’s that… I’ve found I actually get treated with silly amounts of respect just because I’m a nerd
… it’s kind of weird.
Don’t forget the grant deadlines – Get your single spaced, 12 page summary of everything you need to do to answer the world’s most important research question done on time or else! And then, expect it not to get funded, because there’s no money available for science anymore. People routinely look at the amount of work I do writing grants and say “so you’re basically doing all this for nothing???”. To which I reply “sort of, but it helps me figure out what research I really want to do next”.
Amen!
I just wanted to add that although we professors don’t make life or death decisions on a daily basis, the influence we have on students’ lives can make or break their chances “in the real world.” For each student who thanks me for having a positive influence on them, I wonder about the other 20 I don’t hear from. Have I helped them learn? grow? thrive? Knowing the influence I have on students’ hearts and minds adds stress to my job. It is a stress I choose as this is one way I hope I give back to society, but it does not make my job less stressful.
Yeah — that drives a lot of the changes that I used to make in my syllabi … a lot of the conversations I have in class … a lot of what I did with my students. I love the warm fuzzy emails/FB/Twitter with former students. But taking the job seriously should be a part of it.
One more thing a lot of people don’t understand about tenure – it’s not like tenure for K-12 teachers, which is practically automatic after a few years. And it’s not really optional, once you’ve got a tenure track job. If you don’t have enough publications, talks, etc etc and are denied – you’re fired.
It’s not like any other job where being passed over for a promotion means you just do what you’ve been doing. You don’t get to try again next year. You’re fired, and you’d better hope that another school (usually a lower-ranking one, which means less pay and higher teaching loads) will take you on. And, of course, the odds of that one being in the same city you’re currently in are close to zero, so it probably means a cross-country move – hope your spouse can get a new job, too! (Then there’s the problem of getting two academic jobs in the same city, but let’s not go there.)
For sure! The tenure process is a whole different beast full of politics, pain, and ridiculous amounts of time trying to justify your contributions.
I do have to clarify a little bit — the least stressful job in the US IS a college professor’s. Assuming that college professor is my dad, who is in his 43rd year of teaching, teaches 2 classes, has 1 office hour, and spends 10 hours a week preparing AND grading everything.
He insists he’s going to retire at the end of next year, and I keep saying “why? You have the job I want to retire into.” Now that I read what life is like for new college professors — glad I didn’t become one when I had the chance 20 years ago — I think I’ll keep slogging it out as a 60-80 hour/week business owner. Life is much easier.
A lot better. Textbooks are apparently less heavy than the stone tablets he carried to class each day.
Actually, truthfully, he said he was able to get tenure because he bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1984 for $3000. It saved him so much writing time.
Add to that the stress of family and social obligations, weekly worship gatherings, perhaps a special needs child, coaching soccer and football, sick days (and making up for sick days!), and the possiblity of some enraged loser student shooting up your classroom — my college professor son is the most stressed human being I know. But you would never know it. He always projects, calmness and graciousness, and visits his Mama every week. I don’t know how he does it all.
Thanks for your contribution as well — the personal side is definitely a whole other can of worms. I think it appeals to a lot of folks wanting to balance work and family (little did we know).
This should be required reading for all graduate students who are thinking about an academic career. Had I read something like this in graduate school, I might have made a different choice for my career path. Now, as I sit here having graduated with my Ph.D. in Geology in 2010, looking for academic jobs and fighting with ever decreasing funding rates, I am concerned that my postdoctoral experience will be looked upon negatively by industry and that I will be forced to be on the adjunct professor path permanently. My last research proposal was not funded (not surprisingly) and my current research funding ran out at the end of last month. The university that I teach at was only able to find me 3 classes this semester to teach, which makes me less than full time and thus, I have to pay half of my health insurance (in my state, they pay for your health insurance at a university if you are full time). So not only is my pay decreasing, but I will have to pay more. And talk about not being paid well: I will be getting $4000/class/semester. Ah, academia…
Yikes — good luck to you. I know there are tons of new grads in this position right now across the disciplines. Thanks for sharing!
Audra, YOU ARE AMAZING. This is amazing. Thank you so much for saying everything I wanted to say in response to that Forbes article (right down to “learn to do some damn research you wankers!”) and saying it so well. I do this job because I love working with students, and am constantly fighting the impression that I have some sort of “cushy” job with “all that time off in the summer.” Thank you for so clearly and eloquently laying out the case for why all of those comments – including but not limited to the Forbes article – are so clearly full of sh*t.
Thanks. I saw that article and couldn’t contain myself… but that’s also why I have this blog… it saves me from ranting at the husband and dogs
As a UK academic I would have to say that your work chimes well with our work here. So often I hear about the ‘you only work 32 weeks’ what about all that holiday?’ Well the reality is, my contract says I have 6 weeks holiday a year if I am full-time academic and never once have I managed to actually book 6 weeks as something always intervened, whether it was a conference, Induction for new students, teaching in the ‘holiday’ time as I have part-time students who can only come in then, supervising students for the PhDs and Masters’ dissertations over this 6 weeks and so on. And even now I am marking!
Not forgetting of course, that when you are not teaching is the time you would like to allocate to that research and writing. I was once given a full semester off but only managed to have 4 full weeks of that as I was required to keep coming back for committees and the associated work I was required to undertake for them… and we do have plenty of deadlines! all the time in fact..
So why am I still an academic after nearly 20 years? – a late convert – well I like the freedom to work from home and to choose to write about topics that interest me, and to teach and research in my chosen field. I like the students and enjoy the discussions we have and the opportunity to travel – I have just come back from China where my uni sent me to do some teaching. There is freedom that I wouldn’t have in other jobs and the intellectual stimulation that I need. So overall, I’m not giving up on my career yet…
Thanks for the perspective!
I think the reason that you’ve identified in why you stay are probably major reasons why most who remain stay in academia.
Aside from exorcising some frustrations about the misconceptions others have about being a professor, my hope isn’t that people leave academia — I think most of the people who want this as a career path are doing it for good reasons. My hope is honestly that we can more meaningfully address both the good and the bad in the job. I think too many of us start our careers and end up having our time abused. We put up with the abuse of our time and all of the trade-off’s because we like the pluses. But then again, the travel and the intellectual stimulation is often held out as a cake that if we’re good, do all of our work, we’ll get to indulge later.
And it doesn’t get better once you’re promoted: http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/132071/
Incidentally — it’s not just the social sciences and liberal arts who feel this way … here’s a nice post in Huff Post’s soon to be defunct Quora talking about many of the same issues: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/quora/what-are-the-downsides-of_b_1534350.html
Audra,
Here are my comments to the David Levy piece from last year. While it is not my current situation, it is certainly not unique and answers some of the concerns of this article…though it is not a direct refutation. Additionally, though my circumstances have changed for the better, my career and financial situation are still very precarious and could resort to similar conditions from this letter in the near future.
Dear David Levy,
I appreciated your well-written thoughtful piece on higher education in America. However, I think your analysis leaves out many important considerations. There is a lot of disparity and inequality in higher education for faculty members, both in terms of pay and in terms of workloads. I feel justified in making this claim. I have been a full time visiting professor, a tenure track professor, a part time adjunct and a full time adjunct. I have taught at state institutions, large and mid-sized, small four year colleges and community colleges. I have a Ph.D., a book in press, publications forthcoming, and several past individual authored and co-authored publications. I also have garnered top paper awards for my research. I have taught and advised graduate students and taken part in advising undergraduates. I have participated in budget committee service, curriculum development,IRB, and have taken part in faculty development and training in internationalism in the curriculum and writing across the curriculum.
For a variety of reasons I left my tenure track job, primarily because of poor fit, but also because I felt I could not properly develop myself as a research scholar in that particular institution. It was a teaching institution. My pay was $39,900 with a 4-4 load 3 preps, two upper division, service requirements (at the time I left I was on five committees with the expectation I would be doing more service work, not less before my tenure review), advising loads, graduate teaching and advising, and publication requirements (the standards for publication were increasing when I left, not decreasing). In the three years I was there, I did not receive a raise and was told not to expect any kind of raise until I received tenure…by the time I left, I was an exhausted and demoralized mess. I was extremely depleted, disillusioned, and ready to leave the profession entirely.
Unfortunately, in the social sciences and humanities, the job market has been tight. Despite all my efforts to better myself professionally and academically, I have had no interviews for a full time position, lecturer, tenure track, or otherwise in the last four years. I came to the DC area trying to look for other opportunities outside of academia as well as academic positions hoping to possibly move in a different direction professionally. I have found that marketing yourself with a Ph.D. is more of a challenge than one would think. In the meantime, I am paying the bills as a fulltime “beltway adjunct.” Yes, there is a name for us. I share limited office space and resources at a number of institutions with both graduate students and other adjunct faculty members, all of whom are working their tail ends off.
I have no health insurance, cannot afford it, and have stopped making contributions to my retirement account so that I can pay for my long commutes and living expenses. I teach six to seven classes a semester, cannot afford to teach less, but also, am greatly concerned that I simply cannot find enough hours in the week to teach more and still be able to effectively prep and grade. Right now I have over 120 students spread out across two campuses. I’m also attempting to still publish at least one book chapter or article a year…so that I can still market myself as a viable research candidate…I get up at 4 or 5 a.m. and teach four days a week straight through, getting home around 6-7 p.m. on average. Fridays, I grade and prep and don’t know what I would do if I did not have that day to do that work.
In the meantime, I hustle, hustle for students, more classes to teach, always looking for a way to make an extra buck or put in an extra hour for some extra recognition, so that some senior faculty member might take notice of me, that I’m not just some adjunct who will be here and gone, but that I might actually make a damned good colleague. Sadly, the inequality produces a relationship between adjunct faculty and full time faculty that is one of servant and master…With a few exceptions, they hardly know we exist. None of them are even remotely curious about what kind of scholarship I’m doing or what my life is like in their department. They certainly have no clue about the kinds of financial struggles and very real crises many adjuncts are facing. I know I’m not the only one making a living this way.
There are a lot of problems in academia, but I have to say, every time I read another critic in the press whining about the “laziness and indifference” of teachers, I have to say, I just sigh and think, “who the hell are they talking about?” At all of the institutions I have worked at and been a part of full time or part time, tenure track or contract, all I see are a lot of people who are extremely overwhelmed and underpaid. When I get to my adjunct office at 7:00 in the morning, I’m not often the first one there, and I see the same people when I leave at 4:30 or 5:30 p.m. when I’m not the last one to leave always either. I know I’m exhausted with my workload and, yet, I also know there are people working harder or just as hard as I am and they are certainly not wealthy or lazy or indifferent to their students.
There are always freeloaders. I’ve been in retail and temporary administrative work enough to see that every industry, every job has people who manage to find a way to do nothing and still be successful. I see a lot of administrators in higher education with salaries that are twice or thrice what I make who have managed the art of “doing nothing” while looking extremely busy. By the way, administrators’ salaries and positions have increased 200% according to the latest studies while our salaries have remained virtually stagnant in the last thirty years, our share of governance and power in the institution has decreased and our full time positions have fallen to the point where adjuncts and grad students, like me, teach between 40-75% of the courseload. And lets not forget where a lot of money has gone in the last 20 to 30 years. As people from the business world came in and took over the governance of institutions, imposing a private sector business model on institutions private and public, the consequence has been to view the student as customer, meaning that budgets have put more emphasis on entertainment, advertising and PR, luxury dorms, super sports stadiums, and athletics. You may argue that a lot of that money comes from donors, but my question is, why aren’t administrators pushing for better quality classrooms and support for faculty in the classroom from donor?. Its a simple matter to say to donors here is where our real financial needs are. I understand you are competing for students, but, truly, the purpose of a university is to educate, first and foremost, and yet, campus after campus I see classrooms sorely in need of basic technological upgrades to meet the demands of 21st century organizations, businesses and skills, while the athletic facility down the block is a palace. Also, Instructors and professors need to be able to branch out from beyond the classroom with opportunities and programs and experiences with/for their students to prepare them for a global marketplace and they need assistance, funding, time and opportunities to do that. If all we are doing is clocking in and out with our syllabi and our basic courses and focusing solely on getting more butts in seats and logging in more credits per semester, and, quite frankly, quantifying and justifying every minute aspect of our jobs, then we will never be able to think creatively and significantly revolutionize the classroom experience for our students so that they can be inspired and can develop themselves for a 21st century global marketplace.
Additionally, an executive has an administrative staff to support their work, including secretaries. Faculty, especially adjunct faculty, manage all of their administrative work alone, scheduling, emails, phone calls, filing, sorting, copying, pasting, printing, typing, etc on their own, a cost savings to the institution. My computer, printer, files, file cabinets and storage space at the home office are not and never have been subsidized by any college or university and, yet, it is absolutely necessary for me to have a functioning home office in order to be able to do my job. I know when I talk to my brother, the investment banker, or even my parents, government workers, they cannot imagine not being compensated in some way for how much I pay out of pocket in terms of expenses, just to be able to do my job effectively.
Finally, you mention how the lower salaries in the past were justified because of the work hours and how pay has improved. Perhaps on average pay has improved, but we have to remember that getting a Ph.D. in the past used to be something a person could do based on merit more than cost. Now, people like me have to take out loans. I have $100,000 in student loan debt. It was originally closer to $80,000 but because of forbearance and unsubsidized loans tracing back to my undergraduate years and with the low salaries I have had over the years, I have not been able to make consistent payments. In December, my forbearance permanently runs out, and I will be forced to figure out how I’m going to pay the loans when I don’t even have the budget for health insurance, a decent savings account, or retirement. I’m in serious danger of default and moving back in with my parents at age 36 to try to figure out what to do.
Additionally, payment for who? Which side of academia are we talking about? I know that business and engineering professors make the higher salaries, driving the salary average up. Business schools justify the higher salaries because in order to recruit people in the business world into academia, they have to compete with private sector salaries. Social science, Philosophy and Humanities people don’t have equivalent professions in the private sector as health, engineering, and law and business do. The popular line is to then say that what we know and do doesn’t matter in the real world, but that simply isn’t true. Business colleges and engineering colleges and health science colleges all demand that their students take classes from our departments. Communication classes are required in almost every discipline across the university because people see the value of our field, and yet, we are paid half the salary to do the same job with the same hours and same service and research requirements of our colleagues…Simply because our skills don’t immediately translate into some pigeonholed job description doesn’t mean that our area of expertise isn’t acknowledged or valued as necessary, and, yet, our pay doesn’t reflect that attitude taken by the very colleagues in other fields who scoff at our efforts to improve both our pay and working conditions…
I think your editorial poses an extremely limited world view and fails to take into consideration the hundreds of underpaid professionals who subsidize and support higher education to keep teaching labor costs low and the price we are paying professionally to ensure that. Because of the direction my career has taken, I face being pigeon-holed as an underperforming academic who will never amount to anything as a real scholar even though I’ve done everything I can to promote my own intellectual and professional development despite the challenges I face in terms of workload. I also cannot seem to find anyone in the private, public, or non-profit sector who can see me as anything but an academic with limited career options.
This is not the future I had imagined for myself when I got my doctorate and I don’t think I’m the only one who is having these struggles because I see people like myself at work everyday. The fact that there is a name for people like me, “beltway adjuncts,” ought to be an indication as to just how much we are holding the higher education system up on our shoulders.
I have seriously begun to question whether pursuing higher education as a career was the right choice, and yet, I put ten years and more than $100,000 into that choice so what options do I have but to try and make it work?
I know that I am just one person responding to your letter, but I would really like you to consider that looking at the laws of averages rarely tells the whole or even part of the story of what is happening in higher education. As a scholar yourself you should know that.
Sincerely,
Lindsay R. Calhoun, M.A., Ph.D.
Good letter — I definitely think it applies in this case as well. These were always things that we (collectively friends, colleagues, etc.) have complained about, but it seems like being both away from the US and away from academia at the moment has sharpened how much it perplexes me.
Audra,
As for physical demands, Three weeks ago during the final exam and grading session push, I put myself in the hospital for the first time. Stress, dehydration, lack of proper rest/sleep, lack of proper diet for two weeks put me in the emergency room. I couldn’t keep anything down and had a massive kidney stone develop. Because the pain was so bad, I was throwing up, complicating the situation of rehydrating me so they had to stick an IV in me. 24 hours later I was back in the hospital again. I have never had this kind of a health challenge and I’m pretty sure the last couple of years have had a lot to do with it…I have been trying to make positive changes, but its hard when you cannot access health care regularly and your life is so uncertain from month to month. I overworked myself this semester, that much I know, and, yet, I also know that I will be required to do even more work in a tenure track position. Anyways, I might have to have surgery on the kidney stone. I know that our job is not like being in the military or the police, but I feel, after three weeks ago, that I have certainly given my pound of flesh.
Thanks for your supportive comment
Lindsay
Lnz,
Sadly, I totally feel ya on this one. Back when I was coaching (leaving my former university names outta this
) — the 60-70 hour weeks, stress, and travel was doing me in as well. My first year there, I got a ‘light’ case of pneumonia. My second year there I ended up in the hospital with pneumonia. I can’t tell you how many of my friends are sick so much of the time because they never get caught up, their bodies are just worn down (on top of being in the bacteria/viral soup that is a college environment… nasty little germs 
). I’m always good for one nasty chest cold a year and usually around finals time for the fall semester. This year? Nada. It’s been nice not to feel just run down.
Sorry to hear about the kidney stones — that’s not good … another friend of mine (also a professor) had a nasty go-round with those this fall as well.
We’re not in a “well” profession in a lot of ways in the US. But in a tenure track position, there might be more work but compared to your situation, there’s also a whole lot more certainty… I’d rather have the work than the uncertainty.
I do think talking about the 800 lb gorilla in the room is good for us. I’m actually really stoked at 99% of the responses and the sheer volume of people who’ve read, linked, and shared it. I know it’s a rant, but it seems to have touched a nerve. I think we just need this conversation and at a broader level than our regular ‘happy hours’ with our friends/ close colleagues because it seems like we have this conversation over and over and over. Yet, nothing ever happens. Maybe if it comes out more and more, we can talk about both the schools where it doesn’t seem to happen (e.g., the ‘fuck you very much’ dude… though I suspect he has other anger issues…) as well as the schools where it does. There are lots of factors that come into play, but hell… we may as well talk about it.
Audra