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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?
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.
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
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?
So according to you......being a professor is more stressful than any other job because pay is going down and they are worried about losing their job? Really?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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
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.
No, it is most stressful because you typically work 12-15 hour days, including weekends and holidays and this apparently is not enough to earn your salary.
Nope. I mean exactly the opposite. It can be less stressful than any other job, because if you do not worry too much about career you need to do very little and will have almost no pressure over you. You just have to go there and give the same class forever and grade your students once in a while.
If you want to overwork yourself, take lots of research projects with deadlines, and go intop university politics it can become a very stressful career, though. It is a matter of choice. A choice you often do not have in most professions.
Bullshit.
Suppose you choose not to make your academic career stressful. Here's what happens: if you're a grad student, you won't graduate and will have wasted your twenties. If you graduate, you can relax and take a cush job at a cash-strapped community college where you will earn peanuts and always be on contract. But say you keep working: if you've busted your ass as a grad student (say published a few papers a year in top venues), you can compete to be in top 5% that manage to get tenure track jobs. If you relax after getting the tenure track job, you can rest assured you'll be looking for work once your tenure is denied after a little more than half a decade (this means you're fired). Suppose you kept on working and now have the tenure track job-- that's great, except universities are cutting tenure positions so you better hope your department isn't on the chopping block. Oh, and you still have to write grants or you won't get funding. So after fifteen to twenty years of running yourself into the ground and relying mostly on luck, the job becomes as stressful as a NORMAL job. Oh yeah, I forgot to include working as a post-doc while waiting for a tenure track position; it's becoming much more common to pursue several post-docs.
In conclusion, you are an unrepentant moron who is ultimately detached from reality.
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."
Ridiculous. Around 70% of all college courses are now taught by contingent faculty. These faculty have no offices, no long term contracts, and no support. The average pay for these courses is $2k to $2.5k. Speaking from a humanities viewpoint, a majority of the phds we produce will never land a job as a professor. In my particular discipline, it is common for there to be 6-10 jobs per year in any given subfield with 100-300 applicants per job. "Chances are you will succeed" is not the phrase that should describe the situation. Chances are very grim indeed. I advise all of my undergraduates not to go into academia and I give dire warnings to those that do.
Once an academic has a job, they can then expect to work 60-80 hours per week for the first five to six years. This will decrease over their career if they get tenure and take their foot of the gas, but with budget cuts and cut-throat competition for funding, that's not a wise idea. Quite simply, you have no idea what an academic job entails.
Chances are you will succeed, which cannot be said about mostly everything else you decide to work at.
Depends on your definition of succeed. You can choose to do nothing more than the minimum required teaching once you get tenure. I've seen a few professors go down this path over the years at the various places I've worked. They end up making very little money as they get no raises without contributing to the department in some way, get the crappiest teaching assignments, and get ignored in other ways if perceived as being lazy. It didn't take long for several of them to end up with salaries below that of newly hired, non-tenured professors as everyone else's salaries & inflation progressed. In one case, there was one making less than a full time, temporary hire instructor, which is a position that occasionally gets filled by graduate students if in extreme shortages of instructors. It would be probably stress-free, but when the place is trying to get rid of you, would require the stuborn resolve of George Costanza.
The stress comes from those trying to get things done, and to get research done, which also contributes quite a bit to their salary. Or from being non-tenure, which at some places can take a long time to get past, especially when funding is tight.
They have this air about them like a respected news source... But they're Tiger Beat.
No, chances are that you'll fail, because you will never get tenure if you take a low-stress, laid-back approach to the job, unless you're at a community college perhaps. The academic career is completely organized around deadlines and management: the NSF grant application deadlines, conference paper deadlines, hiring grad students and postdocs, etc. In CS at least, if you don't bring in substantial funding, crank out many publications, and support a large-ish lab of students and postdocs (who you have to pay for!), you won't get tenure, and therefore won't have a job very long.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
it is most stressful because you typically work 12-15 hour days, including weekends and holidays
This doesn't match any professor I've ever met.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I note that you have offered no rebuttals of the parent's points save "I know what I am talking about". I'm not sure you do. Would you please expand on how and why you think the parent is wrong? Note that if by "getting into an academic career" you mean "getting tenure", the I suggest you re-read the parent post carefully.
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
There's a difference between knowing about a topic and delivering 30-45 detailed lectures on it, tailoring it to the learning needs of students, etc. It IS easy to be a bad professor, but it's easy being bad at anything. "Programming is easy. You just learn a few programming languages and then it's all just retyping stuff you already know. Pretty easy way to make good money."
Further, "good money" is a questionable statement. Putting aside the 70% of faculty who are contingent (making $2k-$3k per course), you'll find that most faculty are making in the $40s-$50s. Doesn't sound so bad for a starting job, but then you have to remember that they've been earning nothing for most of their 20s. Keep in mind, they're also working most evenings and weekends (endless grading for some fields), not to mention required service on university committees, being a reviewer for journals, etc.
I love being a professor, but it is not easy money and it's usually extremely stressful until your 40s (at which point it begins to be more like a "normal" job). So yes, a lazy, tenured professor at the "peak" of his or her career may have it really good. But that's not representative of the field and, even then, it usually requires immense sacrifice and stress to get to that point. One might as well say that CEO of start-ups have jobs that aren't stressful because "they're rich and get to order employees around and set their own schedule." Sure ... but that doesn't describe most CEOs and it doesn't give any sense of what it takes to get to the "easy" stage.
There is no rebuttal to offer save saying he lies, as everything he is saying is overblown. He exaggerates basically about every difficulty he lists. Furthermore nothing he says disagrees with my statement that you can relax and keep your job if you don't care too much about career.
Good luck getting a decent job in academia with that attitude. If you want to qualify "being a professor" as "being a lazy professor with a low salary at a crappy school that doesn't care about teaching or research," then sure, it's easy. But couldn't that be said for any career? "Being a lazy programmer at some low level company that doesn't realize how shitty you is really not stressful at all. Therefore, being a Programmer is one of the least stressful jobs possible."
you had capitals and punctuation luxury
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Here are the actually stresses in a job. Will I be working tomorrow. If I don't work tomorrow, am I getting paid enough so I can save money, or will I get a severance of unemployment sufficient to get to me to the next job. Before the wingnuts go off on me, I am not saying that anyone deserves these things, only that these things do lower stress.
One way to get a lower stress job is to get the education and training so that one can get a job that has less competition. Fo instance, we expect teachers to have college degres and most of the time no felonies, and an ability to not kill the children who have nothing better to do than to attack teachers. This is a very large pool of people, but not as large as say an office manager. An office manager is a very important job with it's own set of requirements that limits the pool, but an office manager will likely start at less of a salary than a teacher, and will be more likely to less job security.
This is why we have all these people getting MBAs, so they can enter what is a much smaller pool of people who can be executives. What is interesting is that all these people are buying MBA, but hardly anyone goes into a wekkend doctoral program. I do not see many people who want to be a professor because the money is good and the work is easy. I mean I know many managers who have an house and an expensive car and get home before 5pm. Professors OTOH may be teaching classes at 7. I am in a univeristy class where the professor teaches from 7 to 8.
It is true that a professors schedule can be flexible, and they can make it harder or easier. What I don't agree with is that as a group, those with masters or higher do not often have the same flexibility. I don't have the flexibility to take just any day off to get errands run, but many managers I know do.
As I said, this is Forbes, and anyone who is not pushing papers is going to have an easy job. I am sure they would say that wprking at a car wash is easy, simply because they have no conception fo what real work is. That is producng a real product that will drive profit, not just taking a percentage off a trade, or leveraging the arbitrage.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Yeah, working for two years straight with no weekends or vacations is an exaggeration. Sub-10% acceptance rates are an absurd liberal myth. Underfunded labs don't exist. There is no competition nor backstabbing. Living on a diet of rice, caffeine pills, and vitamin supplements surely must be impossible. Plus, my academically minted anxiety disorder is made up too! Get fucked, Fred.
Speaking as a professor in the humanities, you have no idea how awful the job market is. In my discipline (history), you can expect 6-10 decent jobs per year to come open in each subfield. There will be 100-350 applicants for each of these. Getting to the point where life as a professor is "easy" requires either very low standards (you don't care how much you're paid) or going through a few decades of grueling, underpaid, 60+ hour work weeks. It's a great job, but anyone who declares that, as a profession, being a professor is "easy" and not stressful has zero understanding of academia.
Mod parent up - professors complaining that their jobs are more stressful than others are doing so without any rational basis for comparison if their academic career didn't have any gaps while they did other jobs.
We don't have deadlines? Hahahahahahaha. Oh my.
And as I said, if you are competitive and decides to be a career academic you will indeed have a stressful life, but then again it is your choice. You can still live relatively well with no stress if you do not, though.
Assistant professor is a very busy, very stressful position. Once you reach Associate, though, you've got a guaranteed paycheck for the rest of your life. "Stress" regarding how you're remembered and whether your latest venture will be successful and bring you wealth is NOT equivalent to what people in the real world are feeling - will I have a job next year, how am I going to pay for rent and food after this month's medical bills, etc.
Good grief, at our university faculty were angry that their annual salary increase for 2012 was too small! Meanwhile, staff haven't gotten a raise in seven years and there are 20% fewer of us...
#DeleteChrome
In conclusion, you are an unrepentant moron who is ultimately detached from reality.
Then you get a job on Wall Street or run for a House seat in Congress.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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...
Suppose you kept on working and now have the tenure track job-- that's great, except universities are cutting tenure positions so you better hope your department isn't on the chopping block.
Please provide examples of a university cutting the position of an existing tenured faculty member for financial reasons (without cause, in other words).
What they generally do is not allow OPEN/VACATED faculty lines to be filled - but that's not remotely the same thing.
#DeleteChrome
That's because most academics bring their work home with them so they can work until they fall asleep and then immediately begin again once they wake up.
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 sounds right. I work at least 5 hours every Saturday and Sunday. I get to my job between 8-9 each day and leave around 5. I then do about 3-4 hours of work at home each evening, except Fridays.
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.
Do you think you can submit a publication to a once a year conference any time you want? Government grants also have specific timetables both for when you can ask for funding and for how long you have to conduct your research. It's common for people in research to pull all-nighters working on finishing this stuff.
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 make some good points, but, I think, miss a few things. Yes, an executive may be a low-stress job at some times - but it's a heck of a lot of work to get there for most (look at Jack Welch's biography, for instance - interestingly, he actually did have an earned Ph.D and considered teaching). You don't get hired to the top job without having proven yourself first (sometimes, I'm sure, nepotism comes into play, but it does anywhere and one would expect it to be less likely in C-level positions that need approval by the board of directors).
Regarding teachers having college degrees: do "we" expect that, or is it just another artificial barrier to entry thrown up by public school teachers and their unions? There are periodic Slashdot articles about the potential for non-degreed IT workers, and it is generally agreed that it's more difficult to break in than for those with a degree, but certainly doable. You may even say "we expect developers to have college degrees", but it's not a prescribed requirement. Many government jobs, including teaching, don't even let someone without a degree apply.
An MBA isn't necessarily even going to pay for itself, either (see, e.g., The Personal MBA site and arguments), although if lucky one might make some useful personal contacts in b-school. To just learn the material can be done without the paper - the same could be said for a Ph.D, especially in fields where expensive equipment is not required; but people don't expect to hit easy street with a Ph.D as some do with an MBA.
I would also submit that fewer people go into part-time doctoral programs not because of the difficulty of the work (everything I've seen indicates it's more mind-numbing and even demeaning than challenging) but the difficulty of getting accepted. Compared to what I expected, my part-time Master's program was fairly easy, so I took the opportunity to get decent grades (although it really doesn't matter for anything). Now, that doesn't involve original research, sure, but it still seems reasonable that getting accepted - which depends on people recommending you as a researcher - is more difficult than actually completing the degree, especially with a good adviser. And then, indeed, there's the "post-doc treadmill" to face, struggle for tenure, etc., which I think the linked article did a fairly good job of enumerating. Understanding this, we had someone return to our development team from a Ph.D program when I was at Microsoft (I offer this as a single data point only and not evidence of a trend or the like).
Hear, hear. I worked a couple years teaching part-time at a community college and I can certainly vouch that as easy at teaching looks from a student's perspective, it's not. Not by a long shot. Doing an even halfway decent job was one of the most brutal jobs I ever had, and I didn't even have to deal with all the unpaid "extracurricular" responsibilities that are expected of those on the tenure-track, research not the least of it. There is certainly something to be said for the large amount of unstructured time, I loved the freedom of being able to just take the afternoon off on a beautiful day - but the flip side is you usually spend your evenings preparing lectures or grading when everyone with "normal" 40-hour jobs has left their work at the office.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If you are beginning a course you have to prepare classes, which takes even more time than giving the classes themselves, you may find yourself grading 200 or 300 exams. That sort of thing. If you have students you can dump most of the grading to them but you still have to prepare the classes.
You will not get a job in a top flight university without taking lots of research projects that bring funding to the university. You will end up in some 3rd rate college earning a lot less than those people do.
Suppose you choose not to make your academic career stressful. Here's what happens: if you're a grad student, you won't graduate and will have wasted your twenties.
I've seen an awful lot of grad students coast through their degrees, even in science: advisor writes the hypothesis, designs the experiments, massively revises (or writes outright) the papers. I've seen students roll in at 11am, putter around the lab until 6, and go home. For years. If you ask these people, they generally have the impression they're working hard, that they're busy all the time, and under constant performance pressure, but the reality is they're coasting. Now, those people may not be on stellar trajectories, but they still get PhDs (some even from reputable, high-output labs). And this completely omits PhDs in humanities, arts, and business.
If you relax after getting the tenure track job, you can rest assured you'll be looking for work once your tenure is denied after a little more than half a decade (this means you're fired).
This depends entirely on the type of tenure-track position you get. A huge number of faculty, even in the sciences, never publish a paper after their degree. Lots of universities don't even have research infrastructure. Now, teaching 3 or 4 classes a semester may not be "relaxing," but it is less than 15 contact hours per week. Once you've taught the classes a couple of times, got the powerpoints made and the lectures down, that doesn't have to be very stressful. Be a good performer, put on a good show/lecture, and you'll get tenure.
Just because your vision of a university professor is hard science prof at a research 1 school doesn't mean it's the experience of faculty at Pomona, or Young Harris, or Naropa. If you want to be one of the guys at Cal Tech or Harvard, then yeah, your life is going to be pretty stressful. If you just want to teach, and maybe have some spare time to work on a novel, or putter about in a lab, then there are universities that will give you tenure for that.
Spot on. I just started a tenure track faculty position (80% research) and just spent my first winterbreak trying to catch up on all of the research work that I couldn't do while teaching 300 undergraduates. That means 10 hours a day, every day. I'm fortunate that my wife could take the holiday and visit family, and fill me in on the happenings with everyone. But grants are coming due, paper revisions need writing, new papers are waiting, and conference talks are happening in a week. I'll be lucky to be caught up in on this work in April. But then again, I knew what I was getting myself into accepting this position (I've watched friends ahead of me in this game go through this). Easy position? Hardly. Would I trade it for anything else? Nope. Never a dull moment.
Many of us got into academia because in addition to enjoying teaching we thought:
All of these have since gone down the tubes. Even in non-tenure track jobs, one has to do advising and committee work (at least at our school). The next big thing is to teach evenings and weekends because that's more convenient for students. I'm already doing that, and it means that one can't actually go anywhere or do anything. My wife, who is an adjunct, is a facing a 35% pay cut plus a 30% increase in course load in a Pennsylvania State school. Generally, I always have overload and can't say no, or they'll get someone else. And that 12 hour a day thing, that's peanuts. Around here, I get home from work and fire up the laptop to grade papers and respond to emails until about 11pm. I've been working over X-mas "break" almost constantly, writing reference letters, doing two new preps for next term, and dealing with last minute grade changes from last term. The only day I actually got to take off was X-mas day when we went to see the Hobbit. Most of my colleagues are basically in the same boat.
One of my buddies with a Ph.D. got hired out of his adjunct job by a chemical engineering company. He says he's now making about twice as much, can't take his work home (yea!), sees his family in the evenings and on weekends, and gets more true vacation.
Almost nobody I talk to outside of academia has any idea of what life is really like. The Forbes journalist comes off as being completely out of touch.
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.
Note to you: anywhere where people live is the real world.
I've held a fairly wide variety of jobs in my life: Army infantryman, Air Force medic, civilian EMT, web developer, programmer, DBA, teaching assistant, research assistant, graduate research fellow. (Next, hopefully, comes the remainder of the academic track: postdoc, assistant professor, associate professor, professor ... if I'm lucky, and I reach the endpoint before "corpse" appears on the list.) So far, my working life has been about equally divided between military, industry, and academia. You know what? None of these fields is any less "real" than any of the others. In every single one of them, I've had to deal with long hours, unreasonable demands, and the feeling that I'm never getting paid quite enough. You know, like damn near everyone else in the world. And paying attention to the way my advisor and other faculty members live, I don't expect this to change until (if) I retire.
We academics understand perfectly well that other people in the world have hard jobs too. All we ask is that other people recognize that our jobs are, first and foremost, jobs, like anyone else's. And if you're not willing to do that, then just take your "real world" self-righteousness and shove it up your ass.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Yes, you have to prepare for class, and it can take three hours for every hour of class time, the first time you teach the class. The second time you teach the class, the preparation time is much, much less.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Please provide examples of a university cutting the position of an existing tenured faculty member for financial reasons (without cause, in other words).
In 2009, Arizona State closed four dozen academic programs, including layoffs of staff and academic faculty http://www.asu.edu/budgetcuts/
Actually, wouldn't "student teacher at the university" (given the horror stories we get about grad students and the pressures put on them), give something quite similar, or even worse?
I'd also argue that even simply being a student in academia gives at least some degree of insight - certainly more than being say, a customer of a car repair joint.
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.
professors complaining that their jobs are more stressful than others are doing so without any rational basis for comparison if their academic career didn't have any gaps while they did other jobs.
So, you think professors' parents name them "Doctor" when they're born?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You do realize that you're claiming that a new college teacher would be working 12 hour days, five days a week, at minimum? Up to almost seven days a week at the high end?
I spent a lot of time in college (attending and working), and the sight of a teacher - of any sort - working on campus during nights and weekends was rare indeed. Unless they were "counseling" a coed to improve her grades...
The buildings where faculty work are generally different from the buildings where students hang out. I can tell you that during my first 3 years, I took off 4 days for each Christmas, and was off campus 5 days each year for conferences. I got to campus around 6am, 7 days a week. On weekends, I did try to 'take it easy' a bit, and frequently left by 12 or 1pm, but weekdays it was just easier to work through until 6 or 7. Damn, there was a lot to do in those days, and no students or techs to do it for me, even if I'd have trusted them. I still look back on those as great times, because I was never more focused or more completely immersed in my work. The building was never empty of faculty.
It wasn't until a year or two after tenure that I made a conscious effort to take at least one day each week and not go on campus. My weeks average around 55 hours these days, but I have a team to do a lot of the physical work these days.
You don't have to work like that, and there are plenty of faculty whom I've never seen on a Sat/Sun. For the most part, though, what makes people successful in (research) academia is that they're obsessed with their work. Nobody tells them 'put in these hours or find another job,' they're putting in those hours because it's what they want to be doing.
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.
What kind of lazy construction company did you work for that only worked 60 hours a week? If you haven't worked at least 100+ hours in a week and seen someone injured because of it before, then you have never been a real construction worker.
Here's an easy analogy: being a professor is pretty similar to running a small business. You attract funding, you manage cash flow, you pay your employees and you produce goods (ie. in the case of a professor, the goods are research output). If you don't do these things well, your lab will go bust, just like a business would. Nobody would argue that being a business owner is stress free even though you don't have a boss breathing down your back, so why would being a professor be stress free?
No.
First off, student teaching is the easiest, most rewarding and arguably most important job professors and their post-docs/phds have. Teaching students is fun, and not a very stressful activity, especially when compared to writing papers.
Secondly and most importantly, being a student teacher is not a job.
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
Now, teaching 3 or 4 classes a semester may not be "relaxing," but it is less than 15 contact hours per week. Once you've taught the classes a couple of times, got the powerpoints made and the lectures down, that doesn't have to be very stressful. Be a good performer, put on a good show/lecture, and you'll get tenure.
What universities and fields offer tenure positions for just instructing 3 to 4 classes a semester? At the places I've worked, you would get maybe $2-3k per course you instructed, with no guarantee you would be rehired the next semester. As more tenure track professors retired, the number of people being paid as instructors like this has grown to the point of being the majority of how course instructors are paid at some places. To get tenure, you had to climb the ladder several years of successfully pulling in grant money and getting recognized for research, while hoping that there would still be a possible tenure position when you get that instead of some budget freeze preventing it, or the department deciding they want use the few tenure options on a different subfield, so as to not even give you a chance.
The first time, it's more like 10 hours for every hour of class time
For me it was about three hours. I've never heard of anyone taking 10 hours, anyone who does so needs to take time-management courses.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In at least some of the STEM fields, industry is the fall back job that many go to when they can't get academic jobs, as it is much easier to get industrial jobs, sometimes in completely different fields. I've had some standing offers on positions since various friends over the years all got fed up with the academic path and left for industry. In my experience from working some industry jobs between academic positions or before graduate school, and from the complaints of some of those friends, it is rather difficult to lure people into those jobs, not because of the difficultly, but instead because of the boringness and menial nature of some of the work. Just about everyone I know that went the opposite direction, from industry jobs to academia, pretty much all described the industry work as "Paid much better and was a lot easier, just so mind numbing."
small town technical college? or you could get ahead by using blackmail. of course in most cases you have to create the blackmail-able offence, but you are a man of higher education, surely you can figure it out. Stress is not a bad thing IMO. My job stresses me out, and I love it. Boredom and apathy at work would be the main enemy for most people if they are anything like me.
I believe in karma, which is why, when I do something bad to people, I assume they deserve it.
As a college professor, you have to teach new things to people who already know everything. That does sound really hard to do.
"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."
Know how I know you've never, ever worked in academia? If you "avoid stress" you will (1) never get the grades to be admitted to grad school, (2) never succeed in getting your PhD, (3) never find a postdoctoral position, (4) never pass any faculty's interview process for a tenure-track position and of course (5) never be granted tenure.
Maybe my advisor is going "low-stress" though. He's not too many years from retiring, and I'm fairly sure he's working less than 10 hours a day every day...
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.
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.
Once an academic has a job, they can then expect to work 60-80 hours per week for the first five to six years. This will decrease over their career if they get tenure and take their foot of the gas, but with budget cuts and cut-throat competition for funding, that's not a wise idea. Quite simply, you have no idea what an academic job entails.
Well...kinda sorta maybe, but not really, not always.
What's bang on about your post (the portion I didn't quote) is its recognition that there is not just one but many different types of jobs in academia.
I'm senior tenured faculty at a community college in California. I belong to CTA/NEA, which is often referred to as the fourth branch of the California state government. I work about 40 hours a week during the fall and spring semesters, which add up to 32 out of the 52 weeks of the year. During winter and summer breaks, I have work to do, but the amount I'm *forced* to do is not very much. I don't consider my job very stressful at all. I've got it dialed in. If I work extra hard on something, it's because I find it fulfilling. I'm in LA, and most Saturdays I'm in the mountains hiking or playing in the snow. On Tuesdays my schedule is set so I can go for a long run before I have to go to work. Last June I went to East Africa for three weeks.
If I didn't care about doing a good job, I could work about 25-30 hours a week. I would not assign any written work that required hand grading, not volunteer for any committee work, etc.
As you point out, the story is completely different for contingent faculty.
As you point out in the portion of your post that I've quoted, the story is completely different for faculty at highfalutin' research universities.
Find free books.
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.
What about hard work and intelligence? I wish they just hand me my PhD, except then it wouldn't be worth anything.
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.
"We" don't "produce" them. These are adults that make a particular career choice. And they can see their job prospects all around them, in addition to having plenty of counseling and online resources in most cases.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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."
We academics understand perfectly well that other people in the world have hard jobs too.
Well, as another academic, I think *some* of us are aware of that. In general it seems that a lot of people with desk jobs seem to feel that their profession is uniquely difficult, and that the reason the guy who cleans their office in the middle of the night gets paid less is because he doesn't work as hard. Academics seem just as likely to believe that as anyone else.
All we ask is that other people recognize that our jobs are, first and foremost, jobs, like anyone else's.
Amen to that.
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.
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."
Small town techincal colleges are hiring part-time faculty to teach 2 courses for $2k each per semester. Which makes the part-timers drive around between a few schools to make enough to eat each semester.
Think again.
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.
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.
So where exactly can one get one of these alleged jobs as a university prof that don't involve having an academic career and involve no stress?
I did one for six years.
I sort of fell into it: The state of Utah had a program which hired folks in the industry as profs for their Applied Tech College, and paid a decent (at the time) salary (I made about $50k when I left). It was a year-round position (they did have 9-month jobs), and to be honest, it really wasn't all that stressful for the first five years of it. Only in the last year (extreme budget cuts) did anything get ugly.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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
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."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
Or perhaps he distinguishes between working for the betterment of mankind versus patting the right people on the back for narrow gains.
I've studied philosophy part time since 2005 while working a 120% position in IT. Today I study 100% while working weekends.
I've yet to find a job so challenging and stressful as studying.
In a job you need only balance tasks, and if you reflect on your days after you win experience. In studying you are supposed to gain experience every day. It's not about reading x pages or get through 200 e-mails, but to actually understand what you are reading.
Why is it that execs ask me why I bother studying when they earn 120K/y without formal education? And why is it I think people are missing out a lot when they choose to leave academia with a Bachelor?
People are different. But the system favours little education, thus the few working in academia will usually work the equivalent of 200% of what you say is normal. That is the nugget.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
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?