A recent post taking professors to task for complianing about their cushy jobs appeared over at Rate My Students. Like most posts with a point to make this one is biased and an incomplete representation.
There are ways in which I view my job as very cushy. After several years of food services and retails work during high school and my undergraduate years, I made a vow to myself that I would not spend my life working at a job where I had to ask permission to go to the restroom. In fact, it is hard to imagine many jobs that provide more day to day autonomy.
Being a tenured/tenure track faculty member is secure in the sense that there is no need to worry on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis about having a job or how much your paycheck will be that pay period. These are very good things. These jobs also provide benefits and even the not great packages are better than what many people in this country have.
College professor is among the more esteemed jobs in our society. Losing ground (I think) and not nearly as respected as in many other countries but certainly not something for which you need to apologize at your next reunion.
Does that mean my job is a little corner of paradise? Not entirely. There are plenty of daily stresses and a plethora of incompatible institutional goals that complicate life. For example, even at a small teaching institution the thing that will make or break my case for tenure is scholarship (i.e, publications) but the things that fill my days are teaching and service/administration related. As a result the idea of vacation quickly becomes research time. Daily stresses include time crunches, too many meetings that are not productive, complaining students, technological glitches, etc.
The hours for those of us who are doing more than phoning it in are very long. Sure that is true of many other professions but the long hours of academia are magnified by two things.
First, the flawed perception that our jobs are so cushy that we only have to work a few hours a week (after all I only teach 12 hours a week for a little over 8 months of the year) leads to a lack of understanding by those outside of academics (our families, our non-academic friends, state legislators who fund our salaries, etc). This isn’t helped by the fact that much of our job is invisible because it takes place in our heads, in the middle of the night, at home in our pajamas, etc. Now before you are tempted to say, “so work where you can be seen” more, let me say that this isn’t always possible. Often what you need to work is not available if you are being visible (e.g., quiet time without distractions, a decent computer, privacy, time in a library/the field/the lab, etc.).
Second, as this response over at Rate Your Students discusses, the salaries for most faculty are far below those earned by others with advanced degrees that are often earned more quickly and similar time demands. With a Ph.D. and eight years of experience, my earnings are still below $50K a year and when you factor in student loan payments and taxes it drops down to about $27K to use for actual living and another $2 or $3K is spent on expenses directly related to my jobs (e.g., material for classes, research, professional dues, supplies, etc.)
However, few if any of us entered this profession for the money. Most of us came entered into our work with the mind set of a vocation. I think most of us became professors for because we valued knowledge or wanted to believed in the power of education to change lives.
So why the dissatisfaction? Here are things that lead to my own dissatisfaction and I suspect they are part of larger patterns not just idiosyncratic personal preferences.
First, being a college professor has changed dramatically in the last several years as colleges and universities have started to treat students as customers and to focus first and foremost on the bottom line and profit. Faculty are ask to do more and more with less and less in the way of resources. Many departments have lost faculty lines despite increases in enrollment. Even at teaching intensive colleges the expectation of publication has grown but labs, faculty computer resources, and library holdings have not been updated to reflect this change. Increasingly faculty are losing the very autonomy that was a major perk of this job to oversight, assessment, dress codes, mandated Saturday classes, etc.
Second, most of the folks who become university faculty were decent or better students. This means that we see the antics of our students through the lens of a very different world view and reference group. Add to that generational differences and there is lots of room for misunderstanding. (this set of points deserves more elaboration at some point)
Third and the biggest issue for me, the personal cost of being a university faculty member is enormous. I don’t just mean the dollars and cents cost of the education to become one but the sacrifices in relationship and balance in life. In most fields, you don’t choose where to live when searching for an academic job — instead you hope to get a job and go where it takes you even if that is far from family or in the exact opposite of your preferred living situation (e.g., rural when you are a city person, cold climate when you find 80 degrees cold, etc.).
Academic life is also complicated for marriage and parenthood. Couples where both members are academics often face years of living in different states if they both hope for full-time positions. Marriages between academic women and non-academic men are especially fragile. Motherhood is a risky bet especially before you have tenure as it may cause others to see you as less dedicated to your job but waiting until after tenure often means waiting until you are at least in your mid-thirties and often closer to forty which brings its own set of problems. Of all the things I gave up in order to be a college professor, being a mom is at the top of the list.
Heck even dating and having friends can be tough. Imagine being dressed up and relaxing with a drink someplace out on the town and having one of your students as your server — sort of takes the romance away from things. In small communities being a faculty member means living on a very public stage even when you aren’t at work.
So is my job cushy? Yes and no. When I get to share something that fascinates me with a student who gets it? Oh yeah. When there is 10 inches of the snow piled up on the ground and I can choose to work from home? Yes. When I spend yet another Christmas Day alone because the people I love are several states away ? No When I am wasting days that I should be writing dealing with students who submit papers consisting of text copied directly from Wikipedia? No. When I see my .75 percent raise for a year combined with increases in insurance and parking? Not really. When I spend five years in a probationary period with unclear guidelines for what I must do during those five years to be granted tenure? Not so much.
Am I ready to leave academics? No. Can I imagine a time with the negatives will outweigh the positives? Yes.
