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Nice Work If You Can Get It

Nice Work If You Can Get It

Last updated on: September 5, 2016 at 7:30 am by Vance Morgan

Nice Work If You Can Get It 2016-09-05T07:30:47-04:00 Vance Morgan

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Not long ago, I read a Huffington Post article summarizing the results of what a bunch of anthropologists found out concerning the daily work habits of university faculty.

What Do Professors Do All Day?

After spending two weeks with a non-random sample of sixteen faculty of different ranks at Boise State University, the researchers found out that on the average the faculty worked 51 hours during the work week and 10 hours on the weekend at a host of different tasks. Amazing. It took a study to find out that teachers have full-time jobs after all and actually do work-related things on the weekend (although the numbers for both week and weekend seem a bit low). I’m wondering how to square these remarkable results with an article I read a couple of years ago claiming that “University Professor” topped the list of “Least Stressful jobs of 2013.” Of course I had to respond . . .

Those who read this blog regularly or even occasionally know that I believe I have the greatest job in the world. For those who are finding this out for the first time, let me repeat—I have the greatest job in the world. As a matter of fact, it is so great that I don’t consider it to be a job at all. For me, teaching is a vocation rather than a job, something that I truly believe I am called and was born to do. I raise eyebrows occasionally on the campus of the Catholic college at which I teach when I say that I consider teaching to be a vocation for me just as much as being a priest is the vocation of the guys who walk around campus in white robes. But even though I love what I do to an almost unhealthy extent, I taken aback when I learned from a colleague via Facebook that “University Professor” is listed by CareerCast.com at number one in its top ten list of “Least Stressful Jobs of 2013.”

The Ten Least Stressful Jobs of 2013

Really? Or as one of my colleagues commented on Facebook “Bullshit!!! [pardon my advanced degree French].” I guess I must have failed to notice how non-stressful my job is during my 25 year university professor career.

Every person who teaches in higher education has a virtual file full of stories about how difficult it is to get a non-academic friend or family member to understand exactly what is involved with being a college professor. Most difficult is getting someone to understand that this is not a part-time job. For instance, Cousin Bob finds out that the typical teaching load for a faculty member at a teaching college or university is three or four three-credit courses per semester (or perhaps five at a two-year college), meaning that the faculty member is in class at most fifteen hours per week. Must be nice to make a full-time salary at a part-time job! Cousin Bob remarks. Early in my career I often patiently pointed out to the Cousin Bobs in my family that a good rule of thumb is that a teacher spends three to four hours outside of class (preparation, reading, grading, meeting with students, etc.) for every hour spent in class. “Really?” Cousin Bob replies. But he clearly is not convinced, since as we all know, easy working hours is the main reason that a person becomes a teacher.

Then, of course, Cousin Bob wonders about all of the weeks of the calendar year that I am not in the classroom. Christmas break, Spring break, the summer—teachers apparently get at least twenty weeks per year off. Must be nice to make a full-time salary at a part-time job! With what begins to feel like infinite patience, I explain to Cousin Bob that teaching is only one part of a university professor’s job. In order to advance through the ranks of promotion and, more importantly, in order to get tenure, one must research and publish on a regular basis. For most college faculty, the time and focus required for this aspect of the profession is not available during the semester, so the “breaks” are all about research, writing, and praying for publication. But I’m not in the classroom, right? Must be nice to make a full-time salary at a part-time job! You get the idea. A colleague once told me about his frustrated response to a relative after one too many such conversations. Upon hearing Must be nice to make a full-time salary at a part-time job! one too many times, my colleague replied “It actually is really nice. If you were smart enough you could have a job like that too.”

CareerCast’s explanation of why University Professor is the least stressful job of 2013 has more than a whiff of Cousin Bob behind it, just expressed in a slightly less aggressive fashion. For instance, the article explains that

University professors are at the pinnacle of the education field. Their students are largely those who choose the classes they attend, and thus want to be in class. Unlike elementary and secondary educators, the performance of college professors isn’t evaluated based on standardized tests. University professors also have the opportunity to earn tenure, which guarantees lifetime employment.

A full response would require something more like a book chapter than a blog post. Suffice it to say that the author of the article (1) has apparently never heard of core requirements if he thinks that college professors face “students . . . who choose the classes they attend, and thus want to be in class,” (2) is not aware that despite the (usual) lack of standardized tests, college teachers are evaluated by their peers, answerable for the results of student evaluations, and are under regular scrutiny in every aspect of what they do, and (3) needs to learn something about the tenure process (assuming that the faculty member is fortunate enough to be teaching at an institution that uses the tenure process).

Tenure. Such job security is certainly unusual in today’s job market and tenure is an attractive “perk” of the academic life. Once one earns it, that is. Tenure-track positions are hard to come by in academia, more and more so as many institutions opt for hiring year-to-year adjunct professors or special lecturers then proceed to treat them as well-dressed slave labor (don’t get me started on that one). Should a teacher be fortunate to land a tenure-track position in today’s heavily buyer-skewed academic marketplace, the stress she or he will experience in the next several years leading to the tenure decision will be sufficient to last a lifetime. As is undoubtedly the case in many workplace environments, the tenure decision is often as much or more about internal campus politics as it is about the qualifications of the candidate and those things that she or he can control. “The opportunity to earn tenure” is indeed that—an opportunity that, unfortunately, for many talented and qualified teachers will never be available.

Then there’s the money. The article author points out that

Harvard University pays full-time professors $198,400, with a 7:1 professor-to-student ratio, while University of Chicago professors receive $197,800 per year with a 6:1 ratio. Among public universities, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) is highest paying, with an average wage of $162,600 for its full-time staff.

Really? All of them? At all levels? In all disciplines? Such “statistics” are useless without context, about as useless as telling a lawyer in a public defender’s office working 80-100 hours per week and struggling to make ends meet that the senior lawyers in the top firms on Wall Street often make seven-figures annually. Here’s an anecdote from the real world. At least a dozen years into my teaching career, still paying off the loans from ten years of college in order to earn the PhD required to teach at the college level in my discipline, it occurred to me one day that the second semester seniors in my Business Ethics class, most of whom would be entering the work force shortly after graduation as entry-level persons with undergraduate business degrees, would be starting at a monthly salary noticeably higher than my own. As I once told a younger colleague when I was chair of my department, in response to his complaints about how little he was being paid, “if you became a teacher for the money, you’re a moron.”

I have reached the level of experience and rank (a tenured, full professor) at which one could expect that maybe stress levels might reduce and ultimately disappear. But persons such as I are those who are tapped, appropriately, to significantly commit themselves to the third leg of the academic stool (along with teaching and research): service. After four years as chair of a department of 25 faculty and having recently completed a four-year stint as the director of the core academic program at my college, responsible for 80 faculty and upwards of 1700 students at any given time, I realize that one sort of stress just gets replaced by another.

And actually that’s fine, since it is all part of the vocation I was born to inhabit. There are many attractive features to the life of a university professor. I can think of no other profession in which one’s creativity is required more often or in which one has more autonomy and flexibility. But it is anything but stress-free. A teacher never leaves the office. Your work goes with you everywhere. I realized at one point early one December that, other than Thanksgiving Day, I literally had not had a day off since the middle of August. This is why I have recommended the teaching profession to no more than a half-dozen of my best students in more than twenty years of teaching. If you are looking for a profession that will fit nicely with your family obligations and other interests, don’t become a teacher. If you want to make a living wage at a stimulating 40-45 hour per week job, don’t become a teacher. If you want to “work to live” rather than “live to work,” you probably should not become a teacher. If you think of teaching as one among many equally interesting career possibilities, don’t become a teacher. But if you are incurably obsessed with the life of learning, if the dynamic of new ideas exhilarates you, if you suspect that you might have the heart of a teacher and nothing else will fulfill you, then this highly stressful but highly rewarding vocation might just be for you. It’s nice work if you can get it.

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