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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.
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
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.
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 $2.5k. Speaking from a humanities viewpoint, a majority of the phds we produce will never land a job as a professor. In my particular discipline, it is common for there to be 6-10 jobs per year in any given subfield with 100-300 applicants per job. "Chances are you will succeed" is not the phrase that should describe the situation. Chances are very grim indeed. I advise all of my undergraduates not to go into academia and I give dire warnings to those that do.
Once an academic has a job, they can then expect to work 60-80 hours per week for the first five to six years. This will decrease over their career if they get tenure and take their foot of the gas, but with budget cuts and cut-throat competition for funding, that's not a wise idea. Quite simply, you have no idea what an academic job entails.
No, chances are that you'll fail, because you will never get tenure if you take a low-stress, laid-back approach to the job, unless you're at a community college perhaps. The academic career is completely organized around deadlines and management: the NSF grant application deadlines, conference paper deadlines, hiring grad students and postdocs, etc. In CS at least, if you don't bring in substantial funding, crank out many publications, and support a large-ish lab of students and postdocs (who you have to pay for!), you won't get tenure, and therefore won't have a job very long.
10 PRINT CHR$(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.
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
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
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.
We don't have deadlines? Hahahahahahaha. Oh my.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
As a college professor, you have to teach new things to people who already know everything. That does sound really hard to do.
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.
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.
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.
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.