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Forbes 2013 Career List Flamed By University Professors
An anonymous reader writes "The Forbes list of 'least stressful jobs' for 2013 is headlined by... university professors. This comes at a time in which the academic community has been featured on controversies about 100-hour week work journeys, doctors live on food stamps, tenured staff is laid off large science institutions, and the National Science Foundation suffers severe budget cuts, besides the well known (and sometimes publicized) politics of publish or perish. The Forbes reporter has received abundant feedback and published a shy, foot-note 'addendum'; however, the cited source, CareerCast (which does not map to any recognizable career journalist, but rather to a Sports writer), does not seem to have had the same luck. The comments of the Forbes reporter on the existence of a Summer break for graduates ('I am curious whether professors work that hard over the summer') are particularly noteworthy."
Here is the CareerCast report the article is based on, and a list of the "stress factors" they considered. The author of the Forbes article passed on a very detailed explanation of how tough a university professor's job can be.
My wife works at a rehabilitation/nursing home and there are so many college professors in there that have gone Looney. Some think they are aliens and others have gone Looney in other ways
Hey, what about us drones, man?
The thing is, in the academic career your life may be as stressful as you choose it to be. Those that live a stressful life are those that choose to do it this way. That is a lot more freedom of choice than you have in about any other career.
In this sense the article is very accurate. If you are looking for a low stress profession you may as well choose the academic career and opt to avoid any stress within it. Chances are you will succeed, which cannot be said about mostly everything else you decide to work at.
Judge on the state bench. They get fat salaries (usually well over $100K), pensions, the usual perks of state employees (vacation and sick day carryovers etc), and many have lifetime tenure on top of that.
I'd say its pretty accurate. We follow a planned path for classes, and don't have to take crap from students and parents. When you're tenured, then you're really on easy street.
As for examples of it being hard for some, well, there are always examples of that for any job. The reality is that it's not stressful at all.
If you want to be relevant, do something really good for your society, justifying your course, working on it the level it deserves, keeping your senior professors happy, doing projects and research then this is full time 24/7 stressful job.
This is total bullshit. If university professor is the least stressful job, the rest of the country must be raging mad. Apparently they didn't talk to any of the university professors i know. Particularly in the biomedical sciences with funding shrinking and pay and job security linked to extramural funding this i extremely stressful time to be a university professor.
Randal Graves: Some guy just came in refusing to pay late fees. Said the video store was closed for two hours yesterday. So, I tore up his membership.
Dante Hicks: Shocking abuse of authority.
Randal Graves: Hey, I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule.
--Clerks
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
How do they find the time to sleep with the grad students that need the extra credit?
So, if we are so productive, what are we producing and for who?
If our technology is so advanced, why do we need to work so much?
What happened to the leisure society concept?
I'll grant that life is incredibly stressful for tenure track professors scrabbling for grants and publications at the big name / big bucks research institutions. However, at smaller, more teaching oriented institutions or community colleges, surely life is more relaxed?
I appreciate all of the comments and encourage you to read them. My intention here was to relay an intriguing list put together by a career and job listing site, CareerCast, that surveyed data on 200 jobs and drew up a list of professions it deemed least stressful, according to metrics I describe above, which are weighted toward categories like physical demands, environmental conditions and risking one’s life. CareerCast didn’t measure things like hours worked and the stresses that come from trying to get papers published in a competitive environment or writing grants to fund research. Does not look like any reputable source was used to elaborate this study. No wonder it turned out botched.
..is "drill press operator" a job all its own? I haven't been to a single machine shop or factory where they have one person who's only job is to run the bloody drill press. If there was such a person he would be forever in the way of everyone else who had work to do.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Professors often are the type of people who stayed in college because they were afraid of going and getting a job in industry (and lets be honest, finding a job in industry is hard if you have no experience, so I don't blame them).
After I graduated, I worked for a while as a student teacher at the university. When I'd been doing it for a while, a professor came up to me and said, "Isn't this great? It's such a nice job and you get 4 months of the year for vacation!"
So yeah, there are definitely professors who are there because of the low stress, and they think their job is most stressful because they have nothing to compare it with.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
OK ... so how does somewhat get to be a professor?? By being a grad student first ... meaning slave-heading-for-Stockholm-syndrome. There is *no way* that Forbes is right on this. I wouldn't want that job ... these are very hard working, dedicated people!
When I was a prof, we taught in a cardboard box by the side of the road . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It just bothers me to see people spinning up myths and expending so much energy in debate that is so fact-free.
Jock uses BS study to say playing sports is stressful, nerds are butt-hurt! Also, turns out some reporters are terrible at their jobs!
The complaints in the summary are somewhat sensationalistic.
The story in the link of the "Doctor living on food stamps" is about a Ph.D. in medieval history who is an adjunct professor at a community college teaching only two courses.
This isn't exactly a normal professorship, she's not even working full time.
The other story about '100 hour work weeks' isn't talking about professors at all, it's talking about grad students. If you want me to feel sorry for the stresses of being a grad student, yeah I do, but once they become professors it's not the same.......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Academia is hard. Those who coast through grad school usually don't finish. You have to love it to do it, it's the only way you can survive it (and I did a few years in the real world after college--- that I could not survive).
On the job market there is a lot of supply and not much in the way of jobs. Want a job? You better have a publication or two and be willing to move to literally anywhere. In the rare event a coaster does get a job, they usually won't get tenure, and have to start all over again.
Sure, there are some senior faculty who have tenure who coast- deadwood we call them. Those are the exception and not the norm.
As for large break periods- over Christmas break I've been in the office every day- for up to 10 hours. Publications are much easier when you have no students milling about. 50-60 hour weeks are my norm.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They have this air about them like a respected news source... But they're Tiger Beat.
The problem is that many non-academics believe that the primary job of college professors is teaching undergraduates, and so they see any time not in the classroom as "time off" (never mind that the ratio of classroom prep time to classroom time can approach 1:1 if you really care about doing it right). In some institutions this is much of what college professors do, but in most schools that have any pretentions of being a research institution, academics are expected to produce publishable scholarship. Scientists and engineers spend much if not most of their time in the lab; humanities profs tend to work less collaboratively, but still spend a lot of hours reading, researching, and writing in whatever their field is. Most schools will give lip service to the idea that working with students is the most important thing, but in reality most of the incentives are geared towards producing quantifiable amounts of research (so many books, so many published articles, etc.). Far from having semester breaks "off," professors often use this time to focus more intently on their research, and sabbatical years are generally used to polish off major works of scholarship. On the surface, it can seem like this is work you're doing for you rather than for your job -- after all, it's your name on the book, and you take your reputation with you if you jump to another school -- but this work is one of the university's primary missions, and it's what they're paying you to do, as it reflects back on htem.
It's also worth nothing that in those schools where teaching undergrads really is the primary mission, professors spend much more time in the classroom than the stereotype discussed in the Forbest article (i.e., 3 or 4 classes a semester as opposed to the two typical of a research institution).
Finally, there's an awful lot of diversity within academia as to what professorial workload is like. In particular, more and more academics are being hired on interm or adjunct bases and end up spending a lot more time in the classroom for a lot less money than what tenured and tenure-track profs get. The irony is that the way to get onto the tenure track is to publish impressive research, but the lower-level jobs often don't allow you the time to do it.
You had a BOX!?!? Luxury...
Trying to find the MOST expensive option for text books, lab fees and classes every quarter. Then hand the class off to some caffeine junkie intern.
Yeah, real stressful. Those fees don't set themselves ya know.
This exactly. I am frankly not surprised that a Forbes article is being promoted as "authoritative" on slashdot, a site that leans libertarian and as such is *heavily* anti-intellectual.
you had capitals and punctuation luxury
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Plus profs have to deal with woeful writing:
This comes at a time in which the academic community has been featured on controversies about 100-hour week work journeys, doctors live on food stamps, tenured staff is laid off large science institutions, and the National Science Foundation suffers severe budget cuts, besides the well known (and sometimes publicized) politics of publish or perish.
Combines: 1) noun phrase (work journey?) 2) clause 3) clause (by large institutions 4) clause...
That final link is hilarious - if you think about the claims that are made in it.
He makes a big point of the "free" work he has to do prepping for the class (preparing the syllabus, et cetera), then adds in extra time during the semester for coming up with the tests - which should be part of preparing the syllabus.
Of course, for most college teachers, "preparation" is "what book do I read out of each week?" Total real time? About an hour.
He then talks about office hours - 8 hours per week, just sitting there waiting for the students to come bask in his knowledge. Never mind, of course, that most professors only get a few students per day, and they never spend more than a few minutes on each. Most of the rest of the time is spent doing that class prep he moans about.
In other words, he double counted most of the things he pretended that he does each week.
Let's look at this realistically...
Monday- Wednesday-Friday:
8-9 class
9-10 kill time until office hours
10-12, office hours (Two students drop in for ten minutes each, do all actual paperwork and class prep during this time.)
12-1 lunch
1-2 second class
2-3 office hours (One student, maybe. Grade papers until four if tests that week)
Go home
Tuesday-Thursday:
9:30-11 third class
11-12 office hours (One student, maybe. Take early lunch if bored)
12-1 lunch
2-3:30 fourth class
3:30-4 office hours (Nobody shows up, go home early most days.)
Go home
Here's the funny part... he pretends he has MORE work the second year. This assumes he lost all of his tests and prep paperwork from the previous semesters, and has to completely rebuild his syllabus from square one every semester. Um... nope. Hell, in a lot of cases, new professors get "hand-me-down" course outlines and support materials from the guys who had to teach the class in previous years.
Hey guyz guess what? I've worked *plenty* of 50-60 hour workweeks and holidays. Deadlines all over the place. Pressure to perform. Stress levels off the map, schedules, budgets, and meetings.
At a construction company. As a labor crew leader.
Note to professors: It's called "the real world", deal with it.
.
C|N>K
..called Paris 8 Vincennes St-Denis, and i can tell you that this study is true according to my experience.
Welcome to Big Data Research, where the algorithms can't lie. Actually evaluating the stressors of real jobs using scientific methods is so old-school. And if the outcome appears incorrect we just need a bigger database...
ALL WE HAD WERE TELETYPES AND PAPER TAPE
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's optimistic. If you're teaching a grad student course on a new subject, it easily takes 10 h to prepare a single lecture hour.
You have apparently never had to teach before.
You're crazy if you think the job has no deadlines. There are many hard and fast days where stuff begins and ends - semester start, midterm, and semester end, to begin with - as well as deadlines for any paper submissions for publication. At the end of the semester, grades are due at a specific date and time, and if you haven't turned them in by that deadline which is set by the institute, you're in serious trouble.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
"On the surface, it can seem like this is work you're doing for you rather than for your job -- after all, it's your name on the book, and you take your reputation with you if you jump to another school -- but this work is one of the university's primary missions, and it's what they're paying you to do, as it reflects back on htem."
And most universities own everything created by their professors.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Books are often not set by the professors, but by the institutions, and they like to change books every few years. So that first year, the professor has to read the whole textbook prior to the semester beginning to determine what to use during the class, then build tests and power points/lectures on the materials included in the department-wide criteria used for the class.
And then some pinhead in administration decides it's time to change textbooks to something that suits their particular ideology or viewpoint better (or more likely, was authored by a buddy), so the prof gets to do it all again the next year. Some material can be recycled - previous book chapters are frantically photocopied and become "supplemental reading" - but if the criteria for the class changes, the entire previous class's work can be shot.
Also, that assumes a professor is teaching the same classes every year. If someone in the department is out sick or goes on maternity leave or sabbatical, the rest of the department will have to divvy up their classes to ensure everything ends up taught.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
You only considered teaching, so I'll do that as well. If you taught four courses using that schedule, you'd likely find yourself out of a job and with no good references from this one.
You're right. Office hours are typically underutilized by students. I get four or five each week, but they usually stay for 20-30 minutes. Students usually prefer to ambush you before/after class, so that time is harder to quantify. I try to avoid scheduling anything within The only time students stay for less than 10 minutes is when they have a question about their grade. If they're stuck on a short problem, it's usually because of a fundamental flaw in their understanding. Those students take the longest because I want to make sure that they understand things before they leave.
However, there is more prep time for courses than you give credit for. When I'm writing lectures (the first time), I usually spend 1.5-2 times the length of the lecture on it. I teach mathematics, and a lot goes in to the examples on the board and those that the students work in class. The problems must be clear and gradually build on the concepts that we're covering while not being trivial. "Hand-me-down" course material is helpful, but there is still work to do. Worksheets can sometimes be used directly, but I always rewrite the lectures. Everyone has a different way to write lecture notes and I need to be very familiar with the lecture before giving it. One of our graduate students was caught using someone else's lecture notes without sufficient prep and is now being observed very frequently because his lectures were terrible.
Another large time sink is grading. Even when there is a grader (or online homework), you can't (or at least shouldn't) just copy the grades into your grade book. You look through the problems and see what students are missing. If you spot a trend, then that's indicative of something that needs to be covered in more depth. Though online homework makes this take less time, it's harder to see where the problems are because there is no way to see the student's work.
Quizzes usually take an hour to grade, proofs take 1-2 hours per proof assigned. I usually spend 6+ hours grading exams and another 1-2 looking through them.
When I'm teaching a class for the second time, I'm usually spending a lot more time prepping extra material for my students. I am also significantly revising the lectures and worksheets from the first time because I have a better understanding of how the students will approach the material. Even after that, I'm still constantly tweaking things because every class is different and need material presented in a unique way.
(never mind that the ratio of classroom prep time to classroom time can approach 1:1 if you really care about doing it right).
Maybe for a discussion section. If you are spending only 1:1 time for a large-lecture class, that's amazingly little, unless everything is just the same as it was last year. Say hello to a test lecture (that's already the same amount of time) with modifications as you give it (more time). That's not even going into actually creating material for the course, choosing a textbook, slides, refreshing all the details the little buggers are going to try to catch you out on and so on.
Yeah: once. It's a bit like telling me that high school teachers spend all this time on lesson plans: those who have never done it before certainly do. By the tenth year of teaching the same thing you should be looking at maybe a few minutes of finding interesting examples (most of which will just be bookmarks that you noted while surfing the web for amusement) and possibly refining your style based on student responses. I know that my teachers in HS, even the dedicated ones, worked like this. You could easily tell when they were teaching material that was relatively new to them because the lectures weren't as polished; OTOH the conic sections segment of Algebra II could have been recorded and played year after year. Hell, that's Khan Academy's killer app: have the kids watch good lectures at home that explain the concepts, while saving valuable teacher interactions for the school day. I'd much rather do that than the other way around.
You had a cardboard box! We only dreamed of having a cardboard box! We had to lecture in a hole in the ground, writing on the dirt with a rock. Every night our department chair would thrash us to sleep with his belt.
Have you ever considered that this kind of bullshit in a high-profile media outlet can be so deeply insulting and outraging that one takes the time to react even if one can barely afford it? Because you know if the general public has the illusion that you're doing almost nothing, your crippling workload will only get worse? What would your wife do if she was #1 and her profession was being painted as having a very light workload and long breaks? If you answer "nothing", then your wife has a very thick skin and no sense of self-preservation.
power points
They are called "slide-shows" you stupid M$ $lave.
I wonder how stressful it is being on a corporate advisory board when some people are company executives and sit on multiple paying corporate boards. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/corporate_community.html http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/97242609.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate
On the other hand, there's new material and research every year, and you want to provide new exercises at least every other semester...
I agree. For me, the ratio is slightly less than 1:1 for repeat lectures from the last year that I decided not to change much (maybe just reordered stuff). But for new classes, I can easily spend at least the whole evening (let's say 4-6 hours) per class preparing it; to be comfortable in the subject to answer most questions, decide what to focus on, digress based on the students' interest, I need to be sharp on the material so that I get to tell about 1/3 of everything I re-study for the lecture (proofs I won't cover, historical backgrounds, alternative approaches, etc. - folks like me who have atrocious memory lose here as for me it's not enough to be sharp on the details if I've read it just 1 or 2 times when I was just curious/studying the subject in the past); add to that preparing homework or exercises to make sure they actually make sense, build on the new knowledge smoothly and can be solved with just the material we have covered, and so on. As I've gained more experience I often even don't bother with a test lecture anymore so that's not counted in (though my lectures would improve if I could convince myself to reserve enough time for one).
So, you will end up with just about 8 hours per week spent just giving a single weekly class. This semester, I went easier on myself and decided to introduce no new classes (aside of one topic I researched during the xmas break), so I just spend the morning sharpening up for my two classes in the afternoon on the day I teach, and I even get around to do some advising for my students on that day if lucky - happy me.
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
If this is taken at face value, then
EITHER all other jobs in the US really, *really* stink up stress by the boatload,
OR being a professor in the US equates in stress levels roughly to being a PhD in Europe. A first-year one, at that.
I've found covering graduate level courses, at least in physics, to be pretty far removed from teaching intro high school math in terms of repetition and reusing previous material. The closest to set curriculum seems to be some of the intro E&M, mechanics or quantum courses, so after a few years one could take it easier with preparation of materials. Except, for a variety of reasons, the universities I've worked at are continually shuffling which professors are teaching the graduate courses. There are some trends, but it seems at some point the ones typically teaching graduate courses end up teach several different ones within a few years. Even in that case though, they frequently get questions that require preparing new material for the next lecture to answer. Additionally in those, and especially ones that are more introduction to subfields, have to adapt as the research going on at the university demands different emphasis on topics to prepare students to work there. Some of the courses had more than half the curriculum for the semester voted on or influenced by what field the students were going into, and the other half having large chunks changed based on who has or will teach the other parts of related courses. It was enough so that when I was in grad school, I sat in some courses twice because they covered quite different material, and even found myself sitting in on parts of a course long after grad school because of some new chunk added.
As a college professor, you have to teach new things to people who already know everything. That does sound really hard to do.
My prof had a gall bladder removed. Why? Because of stress. Stress from what? Working every waking moment on proposals, projects and departmental stuff. It's only stressful if you care, student jobs were at stake, if you don't get the next round of funding then you don't progress and neither do you students. Another prof that was tenured didn't care much and had money coming his way so it probably wasn't that stressful for him, of course he had been tenured for years when it wasn't so hard. Getting tenure is a beast, it's getting more competitive all the time and I view it as finals week multiplied by 2 and extended for 3 or so years, if that's not stressful I don't know what is. Which is one reason that I would choose not to have a tenure track position, I don't want all of the stress and time commitment.
If you think there's grad students having to take Algebra II, you should go and learn something before commenting again. If you seriously think that grad classes (aimed at bringing people up to front line research) can be the same material for ten years in a row, well, you should probably just shoot yourself now and save us from the disasters your sheer stupidity can cause.
Grad classes take a LONG time to prepare properly, because to teach them I have to be at the cutting edge of the field, up on a good deal of current research in the area, and able to explain research published in the last two to three years. This is HARD.
This exactly. I am frankly not surprised that a Forbes article is being promoted as "authoritative" on slashdot
I don't see any such signs of promotion aside from the appearance of the article.
a site that leans libertarian and as such is *heavily* anti-intellectual.
Not sure where you get "anti-intellectual" from. After all, libertarianism's primary opponents are strongly anti-intellectual, believing in such things as the free lunch, throwing money at problems can fix them, or acting on impulses of envy. And how anti-intellectual are such ideas as actually following the rules you make or empowering people by making them responsible for their own actions?
Please explain to me how an agenda of personal liberty is anti-intellectual. Thank you.
Or are you confusing libertarians with republicans?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What? Do you have a cite for that? That flies in the face of my understanding of academia.
My experience: I worked for 15 years as an engineer, mostly at startups, and then went back for a PhD and became a professor of computer science; I'm up for tenure next year so this post is anonymous. I'm at a research university - not a top-tier one, but good enough that I'm expected to bring in significant grant funding and do leading edge research or I won't get tenure. It's more stressful than the startups I worked at, although not horribly so. (i.e. they weren't a walk in the park...) Some of the factors adding to the stress:
(1) Deadlines. Conferences and grant submissions have strict, non-negotiable deadlines which typically only get altered for natural disasters. I've yet to see an industry deadline that didn't have some wiggle room. (including salespeople doing a song and dance while you fixed the last bug for a demo)
(2) Competition. I went from being an irreplaceable member of a team (at most of my employers, at least) to a situation where 500 people would apply to replace me if I lose tenure. In addition, if I messed up at a previous job I could go somewhere else and try again, while you really only get one shot at an academic career.
(3) Politics. Fixed-sized organizations (schools, universities, hospitals) tend to have nastier politics than organizations which are planning to grow, because every person who gets ahead means someone else loses out. Look up Sayre's law on wikipedia, although I'm not sure academia is the worst offender in this area - google "nurses eat their young" for a non-academic example. (note that my department is actually quite decent in this area)
(4) Teaching. Half your work (i.e. teaching) has strict deadlines several times a week, and the other half has long-term goals measured in months or more. It's all too easy to let teaching expand to 100% of your time, which means there's another 50% that has to get done when you should be sleeping instead.
(5) Funding. In a research field, getting funding is crucial - in CS it's mostly to pay the PhD students who actually do the work. It's not as much work as getting funding for a startup, but the amounts are far smaller and you have to do it for your whole career.
(6) "Service". Serving on the hiring committee and wading through those 500 job applications. Serving on the admissions committee and wading through a zillion grad school applications. Reviewing papers for conferences and journals. Flying to Washington to review grant proposals for the NSF or NIH. Other than NSF reviews, where you get a per-diem and can make a bit if you skimp on the hotel, the rest is of course all unpaid.
Once you get tenure, you can in theory sit back and do almost nothing. The worst your department can do is not give you raises, make you teach an extra class or two (including all the night and summer classes no one wants to teach), give you a bad office, and deny you any grad students. I can think of plenty of worse jobs, but none that are so hard to get. I think the only reason the tenure system works at all is because it mostly weeds out anyone who has so little self-respect that they'd be satisfied with this, which means back to the rat race again. If someone slips through who is willing to sit on their butt, it's a mess.
Note that I can't speak for other fields. In computer science (and many other technical fields) the competition is shaped by the fact that almost anyone involved could drop out and get paid more. You don't worry about student loans (beyond undergraduate) in these fields, because your grad school was paid for by someone else's research grants. There's a general consensus about what constitutes research, which is shared to a large extent by the broader public. In other words, I'm the exact opposite of an English professor in many ways...
So am I happy with my career choice? Yes. Just like pro athletics, the reasons it's stressful are the same reasons people choose the career in the first place - because you're trying to compete with other people who are the best. I gave up nearly half a million in salary to go back to grad school, and would be making nearly double what I'm making today, but I might also be saying "I could'a been a contender..." instead of actually going for it.
Just throwing in my 2 cents of agreement. I work at a tech school that has essentially laid off nearly all of their full time faculty. This means the adjuncts (i.e., me) have to pick up the slack, and I can't very well say no because (1) they will just find someone else if I do not, and (2) they will consider me "not a team player" and give me less of a workload in the future.
I am doing essentially the same amount of work as a full time faculty because of the course load I have, but do not get any benefits and get paid probably around half as much. I went into teaching because I love to do so, I love helping students learn more and guiding them with my experience and knowledge. But I just can't do it anymore, and I can't keep up anymore. The workload is insane, and is requiring more and more night and weekend classes (in addition to going in during the day for office hours, meetings, professional development, and squeezing in grading and writing recommendation letters); it is especially insane when the pay off is barely keeping up on bills. And I do not have a fancy life by any means. I pretty much just pay bills to live (home, food, health), my one "luxury" is this computer and internet, which isn't even so much of a luxury because my students and bosses expect me to reply and get back to them at pretty much any time of day. I actually had the dean contact me once a while back because a student had gone to him that I did not respond to my email within the 12 hours that he sent me one. The dean was understanding, but even if not a strict requirement, the student sure are demanding and annoying and manage to interrupt your life as much as possible. Which I would not mind if my schedule were less hectic.
Because I am adjunct, I am not guaranteed any particular course load so every semester is a gamble of whether I can make enough to pay my bills (except this past semester, where I got overloaded to make up for all the full-timers that are gone). And I get assigned the classes (last-minute, I might add) that the full-timers don't want, meaning I very often teach a completely different course load each semester, meaning I have to spend much of my "break" preparing for a new class I haven't taught before. This means making assignments and exams, reading, testing out labs, and everything else that makes the course go smoothly. I am up late nearly every night teaching or grading, up early for meetings, and can't even enjoy my weekends because a good chunk of Saturday is gone from teaching and grading the weekend class. Everything is closed on the one day a week that I have a slight amount of free time -- Sunday. So I can't do anything then with family. I miss out on everything.
I love teaching. I love helping students and sharing knowledge. But I refuse to do this any more. My resume is out circulating to get myself back into industry, because teaching is not working out near like I hoped. I feel terrible leaving because I really love teaching, but the environment is toxic. I feel bad for future instructors that will inherit this crappy work load, and feel bad for the future students that are getting sub-par educational experience from overworked, exhausted instructors (not to mention crappy falling-apart lab equipment because the school can't pay for that either).
I refuse to be part of this system any longer, and I hope we all start standing up against it. Professors and instructors need a union. I've heard of a few attempts around here to unionize, but it hasn't materialized yet. Maybe it is coming.
So there are only two possibilities: a low stress career that leaves time to post on the internet, or a high stress career that leaves no time to post on websites? If having time to post on the internet means you have one of the lowest stress jobs, I guess programmers and network admins have even less stress and more free time based on comments around here...
Never mind, of course, that most professors only get a few students per day, and they never spend more than a few minutes on each. Most of the rest of the time is spent doing that class prep he moans about.
This really depends on the course and the students taking it. I've had a course where there was only two students who used office hours the whole semester. They were actually the better students in the course, and the rest just didn't care about their grades when I talked to them about making silly mistakes on homework I offered to help go over before they turned it in (it was also a small class of about 20 students). Other times, I've had lines out the door and people stopping by at additional hours because they were trying hard to do really well, especially if it was say an intro class that pre-meds had to take and get all neurotic about, in addition to having forgotten most of the pre-reqs.
Disregarding that anyways, if I had a schedule that amounted to just what you outlined here for just teaching, I would be paid only about 10-20% more than what graduate students get for a stipend with no job security, as course instructors get treated like crap, and it takes a lot of research work to prevent them from confusing you with just being a course instructor.
I work for a research university (doing IT support) and while many professors do choose to do a lot of work, many do not. There are those that work long hours, get a lot of grants and so on. There are others that teach one or maybe two classes, do no real research, and don't even seem to be at work much. However they continue to get paid, continue to hold their jobs.
Also don't think that all professors work hard on the classes they teach. Many phone it in extremely badly. They don't update their curriculum, ever, they have their grad students do all the grading, they don't write good tests, etc. We've got one guy who we are struggling to get software last updated in 1995 working on our new Linux server because he is unwilling to update his course to something newer. Instead of lecturing he has a set of old computer based presentations from circa 2000 that he has his grad students play for the class.
He still has a job, and I've seen no move to try and oust him, even if the could (he has tenure, needless to say).
I think that may be what Forbes is on about. While some professors choose to have a very intense career, it is largely by choice. They care about their teaching, research, or both and heavily invest time in it. However they don't have to, they won't get fired if they are lazy about it. They can phone it in very badly, and yet still keep their job.
Also it takes quite a bit for a professor to get fired or laid off. We've suffered a lot of budget cuts in recent years, and I have not seen any faculty that were shown the door because of it. We had a few volunteer to retire to help their department out, but I cannot think of any that were laid off. That isn't something you can say for a lot of jobs. The job security is pretty good. I'm not saying it never happens, but it is an outside occurrence.
So I can see how it would rate as a low stress job. I'm not saying it is quite as simple as Forbes makes it out to be, but there is something to it.
The problem is that many non-academics believe that the primary job of college professors is teaching undergraduates
The bulk of universities' incomes coming from teaching rather than research does tend to perpetuate this idea ... if I recall the back-of-the-envelope sums are that about two-thirds of university funding (at "research intensive" universities) in Australia is for teaching (a mix of student fees and the part of the government block funding that is explicitly for teaching), but expected teaching workload for "teaching and research" staff is only 20%, and many of the staff are "research-only". Where 60% of the income is for teaching, but only ~10% of the institution's effort is spent on it, one might suggest students are getting short-changed.
Yeah, sorry, even the profs on Macs at universities are using PP. I'm sure some professors in the CS and engineering departments are using Linux and Libre Office, but I never saw any of them in any of my departments.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
and spent too much of my youth toiling in it.... screw you Forbes! You're just a propaganda tool. Go find someone gullible targets.
Maybe from vitamin D deficiency, not enough exercise, not enough mind-body interaction -- as well as the fact that one can "prove" any crazy thing by logic in the absence of experimental validation?
On the general topic see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/ ..."
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air.
Or also:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
5. age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias. "
For ways beyond that, see my online book:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
Or this book by Jeff Schmidt:
http://www.disciplinedminds.com/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
After I graduated, I worked for a while as a student teacher at the university. When I'd been doing it for a while, a professor came up to me and said, "Isn't this great? It's such a nice job and you get 4 months of the year for vacation!"
Professors don't get 4 months of vacation a year. Not even remotely close. Most professors are on continual cycles of grant writing just to keep their jobs. The top federal agency for research grants runs three cycles per year, and most professors who do work in the relevant areas are submitting at least once or twice per year (twice generally being the most one can do as the review process takes longer than the time that passes between cycles).
In other words, you are making shit up. Professors don't get 4 months of vacation per year. Not even remotely close.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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Unlike you, I actually gave a source for my statement. It is real. You did not. Do you have a source, or are you actually making shit up? My guess is you're an idiot. Thank you, sir.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yes, absolutely! We've collectively had it with this damaging stereotype slowly infiltrating all the media. To be successful in present-day academia, you have to live for your work. Many successful professors never had the time to raise children. Those that do (and a lot of those that don't) have marital problems, because every evening, every weekend, every vacation, you'll be taking work with you. Otherwise, well I guess you could find a teaching-only job in a backwater community college and not even try to compete in your field. Or leave science altogether.
And all that would be OK - we're really passionate about what we're doing and a lot of us love the job despite all the pain - but the fact that we're constantly being painted as lazy fat cats that have an easy life, that's too much. This stereotype is slowly destroying American science, because it makes policymakers think they need to put just a little bit more pressure on us. And with this article in Forbes, a line has been crossed. You probably could get away with making covert allusions in mainstream media that black people (or pick whichever majority you want) are lazy, but put it into a high-profile magazine like this and you'll have riots. What you're seeing are outbursts of a pain that's been building up for decades. The stereotype has become an acute threat. If we were farmers, we would drive our tractors to the capital and block all the roads, but since we're academics, we write angry walls of text.
Unlike you, I actually gave a source for my statement.
You quoted a person who you did not name, at a time you did not state. You could very well have made up the quote, as it has no reflection on reality.
It is real
Just because you say so?
Do you have a source
I work at a university. I interact with actual living, breathing, faculty members on a daily basis. I know what they go through to keep their jobs. If you want a source, you can start by looking at the funding numbers at the NIH - particularly the rates of acceptance for grant applications and the rate of awards in dollar amounts.
My guess is you're an idiot
You can keep on guessing. It won't help you to support your reality-free, fact-free claim of professors having "four months" of vacation.
Thank you, sir.
Always happy to point out when someone like you is making shit up.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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You quoted a person who you did not name, at a time you did not state. You could very well have made up the quote, as it has no reflection on reality.
Yes, and you couldn't even be bothered to do that. You literally wrote a post that was worse than a made up story. You have high skill in writing stupid posts.
I work at a university.
So do janitors.
Here is what you said: "Professors don't get 4 months of vacation a year. Not even remotely close. Most professors are on continual cycles of grant writing just to keep their jobs." Have you presented any statistics to back that up? Any data? No, you have not. All you have is some anecdote from your own university, which is ONE university, not MOST universities. You only mentioned what happens at your university, which is surely a poor one if it produces people with such a lousy grasp of basic logic.
So here's the question: can you back up your statement? No, you can't.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Completely agree.. like there are no syllabi to copy from, and every 3-4 months there are such major breakthroughs, in every field, that requires everything to rewritten.
TFA double dips the time. No student during office hours? Don't grade papers.. that's scheduled from Thursday 11-1 ONLY.
Prof's that do hard science *MIGHT* have something to gripe about. B
22 days where I work is all that is allowed by just the HR limits, assuming you had nothing to get done and no scheduling conflicts that prevent you from using those days anyways. Last year I only managed to use about 12 vacation days, some of which I was working while on the road, and my boss used less than that. That is for 12 month appointments. In principle you can get 9 month appointments, which would give you 3 months of "vacation" but those also only pay about $20-30 k a year for just instruction, so that summer is used to find another job.
I didn't quickly see the latest figures on how much teaching money was brought in, but if assuming every student paid out of state rates, which is 3-4 times as much as the majority of students that are in state would pay, and ignoring money spent to build buildings for research purposes, the ration of grants to tuition income was 6:4 and 7.5:2.5 at the last two public, US universities I worked at. At the last private university, the ratio of research money to tuition income was at least 5:1.
I've worked at 4 different public US universities in the last 5 years (not as a janitor, but as non-tenure researcher). They offered full professors 18-22 days a year of vacation. One of them I know wanted to take a whole, contiguous month off one summer for an extended camping trip, and had to jump through a lot of hoops to get that time off unpaid. The minimum length of time needed for a sabbatical would have amounted to him forfeiting grants unless he came in to work for free anyways.
My job is to oversee the real work of many research and engineering professors for the US government. When professors complain about 100 hour work weeks, that is because they are writing me reports and proposals. I see their salary information, how hard they and their teams work and what it is they really have to do to get funding (from my team). That said, they work hard in the same way plantation owners in the antebellum south worked hard.
There are very, very few professors who pay their workers reasonably. I'm funding maybe 30 professors right now. Every single one could pay their workers well. All but one chose not to due to laziness, expedience or incompetence (can't be bothered to ask for more, easier just to use the pre-arraigned scale or a belief that you can't or shouldn't ask for more).
The modern US college professor spends a vast amount of time marketing his research group, applying for funding and (if he's very good) managing his workers. He does not do an appreciable amount of research and his work is not hard. Many professors don't know how to get funding or think that long hours (and pages) on a proposal make up for a bad budget or recycled ideas. The good ones spend an hour on the phone with a program manager and then spend a few hours writing to get a year's funding.
They get paid well for this, usually over $200k annually. Keep in mind that a university salary is only part of their compensation. Only a very bad professor will be unable to supplement his teaching salary. Their workers are paid next to nothing and sold on a dream of future professional success which does not exist. Most professors don't realize this. Some violently object to my characterization and only back down when they find out I actually see the information on where all the students and postdocs are going and who is paying what to their workers.
The biggest problem is that not even professors understand what their job is. They come to us to get funding to do R&D in a particular area (I'm not NSF). If you're getting money from an agency with a real product or results oriented goal, you're competing with industry. If you take DARPA money, you're a defense contractor and maybe you beat out a bunch of professionals at Lockheed. We expect commensurate results. Universities are cheap research with a lot of "measurables" (papers, conference presentations, one-off patents). None of that is really useful when we need to develop off the shelf solutions. Honestly, we started hiring universities because they have very good political lobbying and every agency needs that. Along the way we started believing that they were competing in a meaningful way with the big industry contractors. Things are out of control now and we're asking them to create industrial bases, system components and long term technological support - the kinds of things which used to be done by industry and national labs. That gets us back to the start: professors write a lot of reports and proposals because someone has to explain what the hell is going wrong in all these government programs. That's their job.
Yes, absolutely! We've collectively had it with this damaging stereotype slowly infiltrating all the media. To be successful in present-day academia, you have to live for your work. Many successful professors never had the time to raise children. Those that do (and a lot of those that don't) have marital problems, because every evening, every weekend, every vacation, you'll be taking work with you. Otherwise, well I guess you could find a teaching-only job in a backwater community college and not even try to compete in your field. Or leave science altogether.
But making time to rant is more valuable than making time for family? You reserve no right to complain about losing family, due to lack of time, when you can "make" time just to complain about losing family. Sounds like many professors wanted prestige at any cost, and have gotten it. If the costs are too high, than fight that, but even you said it yourself;
Apparently your super-hard super-demanding private sector job still leaves you time to rant about lazy professors?
Dirt and a rock? DIRT AND A ROCK? Oh, you had the silver-spoon life, didn't you? We had to pull out our own teeth and use them to carve our notes into our own chests, and then sell the dripping blood to fund our own research. Bunch of fairy-footed pansies, the lot of you...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
a site that leans libertarian and as such is *heavily* anti-intellectual.
Not sure where you get "anti-intellectual" from. After all, libertarianism's primary opponents are strongly anti-intellectual, believing in such things as the free lunch, throwing money at problems can fix them, or acting on impulses of envy. And how anti-intellectual are such ideas as actually following the rules you make or empowering people by making them responsible for their own actions?
For libertarianism to be taken seriously, you have to ignore the entire established base of modern economic theory and 20th century history, as well as any recent attempts to implement it's concepts. Any evidence that it's ideas are flawed will be corrected when it's implemented "properly", which apparently should only ever be attempted in the successful first world country of one's origin which has a long history of successes traceable to socialist policies of various natures.
Anyone who supports communism as described in the manifesto is equally anti-intellectual these days, for precisely the same reasons.
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And yet, apparently, despite all your work, you still have time to post on the internet accusing people of not working hard enough because they post on the internet.
I can add a Danish perspective. In the last 10-15 years, the number of people accepted for the PhD program has ramped up by a factor of 2-3x from an already high level. On some studies up to one third of graduates are accepted into the PhD program. The PhD program is free to the candidate and in fact pays a decent but not in anyway high salary. But to someone who used to live on 1/3rd of that it's a good salary.
The problem is that it used to be that PhD students were the best students of that year, at least in the natural sciences. I remmeber that when I studied only 1 PhD student was accepted every other year, and he/she would always be one who was very clearly (after a 2 min. conversation) smarter than the rest of the students. Of course that person would also have top grades -- and that was when top grades were more scarce that is the case today.
Today it's not like that. Everything from the top students and down to the "joe average" (i.e. someone with half a brain) in the graduate studies usually gets offered a PhD. In fact, many programs have more PhD's than they can fulfill from the pool of candidate students. There's no prestige about getting a PhD anymore. And since the financial crisis came, it's in some way the opposite, in that the PhD is an obvious path to take for someone who couldn't get a better paying job in the private sector.
This state of affairs is extremely expensive to society. It's expensive to provide an extra 3-year education and salary to people who are just average intelligence. Also, the science that comes out of this is mostly bogus. I.e. not really innovative, just buying a lot of fancy equipment and applying what others already found out. Then publishing it with a twist. There has already been some articles out on how little the science produced in academia is contributing to the economy, and there has also been a few news stories about how the "too many PhD's" has lowered the quality. But it still seems most politicians are in the uncritical "more education" mode... so I suspect it will be a few years until anything substantial happens in this area.
No. Everybody in the college /university world has to do some sort of workload of preparation, teaching, marking (you mean those 50 essays the students wrote this week don't get marked instantly by some AI engine?! somebody reads each of them and does their best to offer personalised feedback? ... and the same again next week for another module... where does the weekend go? ). Not many jobs for life these days, everybody is being assessed and colleges are all trying to cut costs all the time. Very few fields can be taught without courses being revised frequently, transferred to this year's VLE, modified to fit in to the director's view of how the college should be presenting itself to current demand etc.
Having now looked at the CareerCast article, I believe it to have been a joke. Not a funny kind of joke, but more the "*grunt* *grunt* I'm a troll!" kind of joke.
Because OWS is going to change anything?
It all depends on you, man.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
You quoted a person who you did not name, at a time you did not state. You could very well have made up the quote, as it has no reflection on reality.
Yes, and you couldn't even be bothered to do that. You literally wrote a post that was worse than a made up story. You have high skill in writing stupid posts.
Wow, you really suck at defending your made up stories. You should just admit that you made it up, rather than trying to double-down on it. If you despise professors, that is your right to do so, but you could show your feelings towards them with arguments based on fact instead of bullshit. You do yourself no favors to make shit up like this and then subsequently dig in your heels.
I work at a university.
So do janitors.
That is a rather pitiful response, there. Or do you hate professors and janitors?
Have you presented any statistics to back that up? Any data?
You have presented no data whatsoever for your vacuous claim. Why would I expect you to read data if I provide it? I already referred you to look at the NIH funding information, which of course you conveniently did not quote my reference to. They are the largest (in terms of dollars and investigators) granting agency in this country and they have very detailed numbers on grant awards. But you have given ample reason to believe that you would not read any of their information, as you prefer to make things up and base your "argument" on made up shit instead.
All you have is some anecdote from your own university, which is ONE university, not MOST universities
You have errantly assumed that I have worked for only one. That is only one faulty assumption you have made.
You only mentioned what happens at your university, which is surely a poor one if it produces people with such a lousy grasp of basic logic.
Here you are also assuming that universities operate in some sort of vacuum, which is dead wrong with regards to research. I am regularly in contact with researchers from a large number of other research universities from all corners of the US and other countries as well. American universities in particular are with almost no exception in the same boat I have described.
So here's the question: can you back up your statement? No, you can't.
I can, but you won't read it. Your question really should be directed back at you - and it is well known and demonstrated that you cannot back up your statement.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
"The last American general to actually be fired was Maj. General James Baldwin, 1971."
-Thomas E. Ricks, The Generals
Stanley McChrystal? And the guy he replaced, David McKiernan?
That is a rather pitiful response, there. Or do you hate professors and janitors?
No, I don't hate either of those. I hate you. I hate you because you are dumb, can't use logic, don't understand what you read, and frankly aren't very good at writing either.
On the other hand, you do entertain me, so it's kind of a tossup.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If I am going to change something, it will be a much different and more effective way than sitting in a park.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In physics departments, things like Beamer that convert LaTeX into pdf slides are getting more popular. Also various other software that outputs PDFs or some of the non-MS mac software for presentations is doing well, because equation entry in MS Office is tedious.
They all still get colloquially called "power points" though. If that seriously upsets someone, I'll give them an aspirin and some kleenex.
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That is a rather pitiful response, there. Or do you hate professors and janitors?
No, I don't hate either of those
The way you are continuing to lie about the former, and then proceed to sling an insult based on your assumptions about the latter, it seems you are not being honest in response to that question, either.
I hate you
That might be the first honest statement you've made in this discussion.
I hate you because you are dumb,
can't use logic
That word, you use it, but you don't seem to know what it means.
don't understand what you read
I understand quite well what I read. I understand that you are making shit up and you are frustrated that I have called you out on it and other people have chimed in with statements agreeing with what I have said and pointing out that you are full of shit.
I'm sorry that while you are running about in your vengeful existence someone has pointed out that you do not have exclusive ownership of reality. It must hurt when such a giant and fragile ego such as yours is so rapidly deflated.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Hey, don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
I may be the only one that got your joke.
INT QRK
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Pot - kettle, kettle - pot.
Definition of Vacation
I'm not disagreeing with anything you said, but you're utterly missing the point. They're not complaining they have too much work; they take that as something that comes with the job. They are complaining Forbes is painting them as having not a lot of work, which is blatantly untrue and unfair. It's not about the work, it's about the defamation. I really thought that was quite clear from my previous post - or did you stop reading after the first paragraph?