Professors say the darndest things
I think I have one of the best jobs in the world and I am shocked at how much my colleagues complain about academic work to their students. It has an effect. We have a captive audience and people listen to what we say and take it seriously and not just in the "will it be on the exam?" sense. Today I had a young woman in my office telling me she loved philosophy but didn’t want to get a PhD. Despite a fascination for metaethics, she was convinced that she ought to study law. Why? Because she heard female faculty members talk about how stressful, how busy, and how underpaid academic work is. I get red in the face angry whenever I hear this. It just isn’t true. Take the underpaid complaint. I heard this as a student too and I thought faculty members barely scraped by. I came from a working class family so I knew what badly paid meant. I figured faculty members must have inherited their houses and supplement their meagre incomes with family wealth. I was shocked and appalled when I found out the truth. University faculty members are not badly paid. Most of our salary information is public so I am not telling tales out of school here. Starting salaries for tenure track faculty range from $60 to $75 thousand a year. Many of my colleagues, whose salaries are public info thanks to my province’s "sunshine law" earn over $100,000 a year. Again, that’s not badly paid. My salary puts me in the top 5% of women’s incomes. Yet, we are a whiney bunch. We tend to look at those who make more and think we’re badly off but really that’s just utter rubbish. Daycare workers are badly paid but university faculty members are not. Stressful? Well, sure there is a rough patch pre-tenure. Publish or perish is all too true. And the demands of teaching can be hard too. But once we have tenure we have more independence and freedom than most professionals. Academic freedom is a tremendous amount of job security too. And while I do work long hours, for the most part it’s work I love: reading, writing, talking to students, thinking. My children when they were young practically lived on campus. We have good campus daycare and summer camps. The environment is much like a giant park. What better place to raise kids? I don’t teach in the summer and though I need that time to get writing done I have a good two months when my classes are done and my children are still in school. Of course, I hate it when people presume I have summers off. That’s not true at all. I have papers to write, graduate students to supervise, and classes to plan. But it is true I work at my own pace. The work is very flexible which is both a blessing and a curse. The upside? I can grade papers on the beach. The downside? I grade papers on the beach. It’s not just a job, it’s a lifestyle, an identity and that’s both the best and worst side of life as an academic. Whenever I feel a complaint about my work starting to surface I compare my life to two other sorts of working lives I know. There are women in my family who wait tables for a living. That’s hard work. That’s badly paid and stressful, hard to do with kids. Academic work is not. But I also look at my female friends who are lawyers and I think about the hours they work, the clothes they have to wear, and I don’t envy them the money they make. So I talked to this young women about her choices and her reasons, and I hope I was able to help dispel some of the myths about academic work.
