Tom Lutz writes in today Times:
On paper, the academic life looks great. As many as 15 weeks off in the summer, four in the winter, one in the spring, and then, usually, only three days a week on campus the rest of the time. Anybody who tells you this wasn’t part of the lure of a job in higher education is lying. But one finds out right away in graduate school that in fact the typical professor logs an average of 60 hours a week, and the more successful professors work even more — including not just 14-hour days during the school year, but 10-hour days in the summer as well.
Why, then, does there continue to be a glut of fresh Ph.D.’s? It isn’t the pay scale, which, with a few lucky exceptions, offers the lowest years-of-education-to-income ratio possible. It isn’t really the work itself, either. Yes, teaching and research are rewarding, but we face as much drudgery as in any professional job. Once you’ve read 10,000 freshman essays, you’ve read them all.
But we academics do have something few others possess in this postindustrial world: control over our own time.
I remember the moment that I decided to go to graduate school. I was 22 years old working on the 16th floor the Gulf and Western building, which is now a Trump monstrosity. I had a hangover or I assume I did, because those were crazy times. I put down my manuscript for a moment to get my head together and gazed out the window at Central Park. It was early afternoon and the park was crammed with people. You could see the joggers and the roller bladers making the big loop. There were the moms with strollers and the old people on benches. There was probably even the crazy man with the bagpipes. And I wondered why these people weren’t reading boring manuscripts in on the 16th floor. How could I have this life of leisure? Oh, go to graduate school I thought, which was just totally insane because my dad was a professor and I never saw him with the time to go playing bagpipes in Central Park, but somehow I thought I would be one of those cool free time professors.
But now that I know the TRUTH that academia is a lot of work, I am sticking with it. And, like Lutz, the flexibility is a big part of it. I am going to schedule my classes around the kid’s school bus. I can make them dinner and take them to karate practice. Sure, it will mean that I will have to work in the evenings, but that’s cool with me. There are few other jobs that will allow me to do that.
Apt. 11d 
The flexibility rocks, yes — me too.
Even granting the misery of long meetings, grant applications, sloppy undergrad essays, and painful ‘years of training to earnings’ ratios, there’s a self-indulgent rationale that carries a lot of weight for me: you have to love a job that will actually pay you to think, read, talk, write, and teach about stuff that you find really, really interesting, and lets you seek out and work with other people who share those interests.
Also, … okay, this is a silly conceit I guess, and falls well within the self-indulgent rationale, but still being sleep-deprived from APSA (and thus prone to posting maudlin blog comments?) I’ll embarrass myself and throw it out there:
There aren’t many other lines of work where wrestling with how to be a good person, parent, lover, partner, and citizen can all be legitimately rolled up into the job description.
I mean, how crazy is it getting paid anything by anyone (let alone having a shot at serious job security) to live an examined life and to play even a triflingly small part in advancing human understanding for the ages?
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Yes– I only teach in the evenings, and I do my research and writing from home while my kids play, or during their preschool hours. Flexibility is crucial– maybe corporate America could learn something!
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Loren expresses my feelings well. I love being a teacher and academic in a large part because it makes feel like I’m part of a larger intellectual and moral project; the personal wrestling that ought to be–and, on some level, unavoidably is–part of everyone’s life is (or at least is potentially) built into academia in a manner unlike many other professions. In short, it is plausible to speak of teaching and scholarship as a vocation. The vocational ideal has been on decline for probably about as long as the guild system, and there’s not a lot of people who would want it otherwise; the material benefits that have come from breaking up and streamlining the world of labor are too obvious. But for me, spending five years finding a niche within our own admittedly screwed-up community was worth the costs (though I wish they would have been less, all the same!).
Flexibility is important too, of course.
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I mean, how crazy is it getting paid anything by anyone (let alone having a shot at serious job security) to live an examined life and to play even a triflingly small part in advancing human understanding for the ages? Yeah, I am not sure if all those papers I heard last week are really advancing human understanding in a serious way. 🙂 And I think we should be getting paid at least as much as a Kindergarten teacher, no matter how much we love what we do.
I really am lucky that I love teaching and reading, but at this stage in my life, flexibility is everything. Without a flexible academic schedule, I wouldn’t be employed. Talk to any female professor long enough and she might admit that she went to graduate school because she thought it would be a family-friendly career. I hadn’t thought things past the free running time in the park, but a lot of my friends did.
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Nope. I went to grad school because I loved school and I wasn’t ready to work. Then I realized I could stay in school forever and make a career out of it. And then I realized that teaching was my dream career. Anyone who knows me knows this is what I was naturally meant to do. I love knowing things and telling people about them and persuading them that what I have to tell them is valid. I love the performance of teaching. I love it all.
How it would affect my family never came into play. It was always about what I wanted to do.
You’d have to ask my husband about his career choices. I think he does what he does (web coordinator for a university) in order to make money so we can have financial security. I don’t think it’s his dream job, though he likes it; I think photography is his dream job; right now he does stock photography as a part-time thing.
Oh, speaking of which, I was bloghopping the other day and clicked on http://roxanne.typepad.com/rantrave/ – that’s my daughter in the header.
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She’s SOOO cute and smart. How funny to just bump into your daughter that way.
yeah, I like all those things about teaching, too. I’m really excited to go back to the classroom next semester. It’s just the scarcity of jobs and the low pay have been a real problem for my husband and myself. The difficulties of working around my youngest kid’s speech therapy schedule means that job flexibility is the only thing I have the luxury to care about.
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I’m convinced that our jobs are easier than that of a kindergarten teacher’s. The caveat is, unless we promise to deliver on the intangibles (the immeasureable ones, like producing great work in the field). But, a promise to be great, means that you have to pour your heart and soul and into your work, and I see that’s the price of flexibility combined with real pay. When people take a job that has a great deal of flexiblity, and the work is intangible and immeasureble, and work to a “good enough” standard, rather than a great standard, the profession stops being a profession. And, then, people loose both the flexibility and the pay (maybe not the folks who got in first, but the one’s who come later).
I’m a researcher; I have a lot of flexibility, but also a lot of risk. I never really understood why people who wanted to teach (rather than do research) preferred college to high school teaching. But, now, I get it, if you don’t do the scholarship required in my job (which is mostly judged by my research accomplishments), then teaching college is easier than teaching highschool.
bj
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I was miserable when I couldn’t be teaching. I never really was able to take any other job (I considered my administrative job a form of teaching, plus I taught 6-9 credits a semester). I know I’m lucky, but I was also pretty single-minded and didn’t let anyone talk me out of my ambition to be a teacher. I had some troughs, but everything I did was focussed on that goal.
I just had my first day of classes today. Still buzzing.
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bj: “I never really understood why people who wanted to teach (rather than do research) preferred college to high school teaching.”
Just following along on one of Russell’s thoughts: at it’s very best, I think college teaching is a bit closer to being a carpenter or mason with competent apprentices, and a bit less like teaching young teens from a settled curriculum.
I’m with Russell in having no desire to go back to a medieval world of market-thwarting guilds. Nonetheless, the vocational ideal has some appeal, I think, and in principle (if not typically in practice) it distinguishes college from high school teaching.
Personally I like research, but I can understand why someone would prefer teaching over research, yet because of temperament and background prefer college teaching over high school (although I would think a really excellent high school, with small class sizes and lots of interesting senior programmes, might sway this sort of teacher away from, say, a big, underfunded, 4-4 load college with a viper’s nest for a faculty lounge).
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I think perhaps my view of high school teaching is skewed by the high school that I went to, a really excellent high school with small class sizes and compliant students who really wanted to be educated. The concept of high schools having a set curriculum, versus the desire to teach at the cutting edge is interesting though, since high schools really should teach the basics.
But, in my mind, I was comparing community colleges to high school. Why do people want to teach at CCs over high school?
bj
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I’ve taught both college students (as a TA) and highschool students (overseas) and I’m pretty clear on why college teaching is more glamorous. For one, a college instructor spends far less time actually in the classroom. Secondly, college students are much more respectful to your face. A college instructor can go YEARS without having a student yell at them “kees my peh-nis” or “f*** you, American girl.”
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Where’s the Invisible Adjunct when you need her?
Look, I love much of academic life. That buzz after teaching a good class is amazing, Wendy. But academia for most of us has to be first and foremost a job. Academia needs to do a better job of compensating us properly, cutting back on adjunct-abuse, giving women the time to have children, and supporting dual academic families. I worry that when we all get so sure that “academia is the only life for us” that we turn a blind eye to those major problems of the profession. We become too afraid to protest.
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Laura, you’ve gone way off track from my original response. I was saying that I didn’t choose my career because it made for a more family friendly career. I chose it because I love it.
I don’t feel the need to dress my decisions up in some sort of gendered rationalization that it’s better for my family. I had a goal, and I went for it.
That’s all I was saying. Does the profession have problems? Hell yes. But I still want to be a professor.
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oh yeah. I wasn’t responding to your comment there. Just concurring about the teaching-buzz remark. My comment was just a side idea that I had while driving around new jersey and thinking about this comment thread and this morning’s op-ed. I was wondering if we’re just so grateful to not be teaching kindergartner or going to 9 to 5 job or being able to talk about ideas, that we put up with more than we should. It was a tangent.
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Non-monetary compensation
Both Glenn Reynolds and Laura McKenna take note of this op-ed by Tom Lutz that appeared in Monday’s New York Times on the academic lifestyle: On paper, the academic life looks great. As many as 15 weeks off in the summer, four in the winter, one in the…
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“At it’s very best, I think college teaching is a bit closer to being a carpenter or mason with competent apprentices, and a bit less like teaching young teens from a settled curriculum.”
That puts it very well, Loren. The point isn’t that the academic world isn’t disfunctional; it really, truly is, and I strongly discourage students from shooting for a life in academia until they’ve thoroughly familiarized themselves with all the madness and risks and costs. Rather, the point is simply that the academy offers a certain set of people an experience which, in today’s world, is really only available to a select few: belonging to a guild. Not a very workable guild, that’s for sure (I discussed that way back here, building off an Invisible Adjunct discussion here). But still, the possibility of being part of a “vocation.” That’s not for everybody, to be sure; it’s a good thing that there are social and economic options now that allow for entrepreneurship and innovation and transition. (Though I would actually dissent from your complete dismissal of guilds, Loren; I think we may have forgotten at least a few medieval lessons worth remembering.) But so long as there are people that feel the pull of the vocational ideal, the fact that there is, for a random and ridiculously fortunate few, the possibility of making a living as a teacher and scholar is a wonderful thing.
“I can understand why someone would prefer teaching over research, yet because of temperament and background prefer college teaching over high school (although I would think a really excellent high school, with small class sizes and lots of interesting senior programmes, might sway this sort of teacher away from, say, a big, underfunded, 4-4 load college with a viper’s nest for a faculty lounge).”
You’d think that between state research institutions, community colleges, and small liberal arts schools, there would be a better understanding of how they all serve different constituencies and can play different yet complementary roles. But what actually happens is almost everyone pursues the same pie, measuring themselves against a single yardstick, with winner-take-all results. In some ways, the European system which defines clear and distinct education tracks, leading from secondary education through technical school or a university and beyond, makes more sense, even if it is a little stifling. At least you won’t necessarily have an environment where faculty and administrators often become mean, having accustomed themselves to protecting their turf and fighting over crumbs.
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Laura, that Chace op-ed is wonderful. “See you in 55 months,” indeed.
I was making the transition into community college teaching when I, very surprisingly, landed this job–and it’s a good thing too, because if I hadn’t spent a month or so re-evaluating what I like about teaching, and figuring out how to adjust to the CC environment (Hugo Schwyzer really took the time to help me out here), then I would’ve bombed this interview. In retrospect, I think most educators could do well to re-evaluate their goals similarly.
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Well, I’m not an academic-but I’m an ex-highschool teacher, and teaching in a community college would be close to my dream job.
I really like teaching; I like getting people to understand things that they didn’t understand before (especially in areas I think are important, like statistics or economics). What I hated about teaching high school was that teaching was maybe 10% of my job; 90% of it was keeping the students in their seats and quiet.
Things I don’t want to do again, ever:
Rule on whether “jigaboo” is a racial insult.
Determine whether pinching your girlfriend’s butt is a public display of affection or sexual harassment
Justify the above choice to said student’s parents
Try to kick someone bigger than me who wandered in to my classroom(high as a kite) out
Try to teach algebra to students who need to be taught fractions first
It’s my theory that I would be able to teach at a community college, instead of being cop/social worker.
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But, do you get to teach in a CC? or do you do all of the above (in SamChevre’s post), but with older students? I guess they don’t have to be there.
I think what I’m really arguing is that if a CC job is just easier than teaching high school, I’d expect that you should get paid less. If it’s easier than kindergarten teaching, then you should get paid less. The added value of university professors comes from treating the job as a calling, rather than a job, and the value that is added to the teaching, research and scholarship, as a result.
bj
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I am about to complete my PhD and I am considering going into academia but I am dithering. Having read all the previous comments I completely agree with the interest/moral/knowledge/wisdom aspect but as I am in my 40s and also have a mortgage and 3 kids (1 at Uni, 1 about to go, 1 waiting in the wings) I dither. I know a role in academia is not for the money. Shall I make the plunge because I think it’s what is now calling or keep the frustaration but also the money?
I am currently employed on a teacher’s salary (with all holidays and very well paid) but as an advisor to other schools.
Earlier in life I wouldn’t have such a difficulty deciding but with age and experience kids (and pensions) are now important considerations
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bj,
You got the key point; in a CC, the students don’t have to be there.
And at least here in VA, CC teachers make substantially less than high school teachers.
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As someone who turned down several academic jobs for a research/policy job, let me say there are certain advantages to leaving academia behind:
Location: I spent my graduate school years in a small southern town with four restaurants. As an incentive to finish my dissertation as quickly as possible, it was great. As an incentive to accept my best academic offer in a similar midwestern research university, it wasn’t. My partner and I now happily live in a large east coast city.
No teaching: You either love it or you don’t. I didn’t. Many don’t. I’m thrilled to never have to grade anything ever again.
No tenure: I find it a blessing to do my research without worrying about a tenure clock. I had a pretty unproductive year research-wise right after my dissertation, which might have ruined my chances for tenure with the current publication lags. The impact of that year on my professional career has been slight to none.
Money: Generally speaking, salaries outside academia are much better. If you’ve got tons of student loan debt (and I do), it’s not something to be brushed lightly aside.
I just wanted to say that academia is not the only place in which you can get paid to think, and work with interesting and bright people. The only thing I miss about academia is the flexibility, and I have to say the private/public sector is moving in the right direction on this, with teleworking programs, alternative weekly schedules and flex time.
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As a fellow educator, one who has worked in academia full-time, as an adjunct, and also in an online distance learning format, I know from personal experience how many hours a week I put it in order to teach my students. I’ve calcuated my actual hourly pay, and it’s not much above minimum wage!
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