4 ms·

It has always seemed a crazy disconnect to me that so many in academia will endlessly complain about the expectation that what they teach prepare their students

It has always seemed a crazy disconnect to me that so many in academia will endlessly complain about the expectation that what they teach prepare their students to obtain a high-paying job while happily cashing the checks and asking for more.

mjburgess 6y ago
I have found that academics often find their dependence on students embarrassing, and the idea of earning befuddling. The university is a kind of "eternal adolescence" which promised to provide dysfunctional high-IQs without the trappings of such obligations. With the marketization of education, academics find themselves obligated to their students (how undignified!) and for the first time needing to justify their worth (how are they meant to do that?!). These are, of course, things that everyone else has been doing for the past two centuries -- now, finally, The University is getting a shock to its system. I was a person who, for the longest time, associated such pseduo-Nobel attitudes with "being educated". Now, I think the whole place is infatalizing and infantalized. It is a very bad place for one's ideological health: it inculcates a kind of outrage that any one should be obligated to do anything; a stort of pathological Utopianism artificially sustained by state funding. I think it's a large part of where extreme student activism comes from: a kind of rage that the circumstances of our life are constrained at all. Shouldn't there just be infinite money and infinite time? Shouldn't the whole world just be a campus?
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  IDK what university you're talking about. When I was a PhD student, I worked 60 to 80 hour weeks doing research and teaching. My advisor brought in much more grant money than was spent on our lab equipment/salaries (and worked even hard than we did!) Our lab ran a (pretty healthy) profit, even before considering tuition and patent royalties. I spent some time teaching. Again, 60 hour weeks and all of my advisees landed six figure jobs after graduating. To the extent that the sort of institution you describe exists (low accountability), those professors are probably making less than the high school teachers in the same town. For example, an assistant professor at UCMO makes $50K-$60K; a high school teacher with several years of experience and a phd in Missouri makes closer to $70K-$80K (and with a much better pension): https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=UNIVERSITY+OF+CENTRAL+MISSOURI https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=UNIVERSITY+OF+CENTRAL+MISS... And in terms of time/effort, the two jobs are pretty comparable. The well-paid lazy professor doesn't really exist anymore, at least in STEM. Professors are either well-paid researchers expected to bring in substantial grant money (which is a hard job with long hours), or they are relatively poorly paid teachers.
  - mjburgess 6y ago
    humanities departments. Most science and engineering depts have been doing research justification, financing, hiring from industry, etc. for awhile.

mjburgess 6y ago

I have found that academics often find their dependence on students embarrassing, and the idea of earning befuddling. The university is a kind of "eternal adolescence" which promised to provide dysfunctional high-IQs without the trappings of such obligations. With the marketization of education, academics find themselves obligated to their students (how undignified!) and for the first time needing to justify their worth (how are they meant to do that?!). These are, of course, things that everyone else has been doing for the past two centuries -- now, finally, The University is getting a shock to its system. I was a person who, for the longest time, associated such pseduo-Nobel attitudes with "being educated". Now, I think the whole place is infatalizing and infantalized. It is a very bad place for one's ideological health: it inculcates a kind of outrage that any one should be obligated to do anything; a stort of pathological Utopianism artificially sustained by state funding. I think it's a large part of where extreme student activism comes from: a kind of rage that the circumstances of our life are constrained at all. Shouldn't there just be infinite money and infinite time? Shouldn't the whole world just be a campus?

throwawaygh 6y ago
IDK what university you're talking about. When I was a PhD student, I worked 60 to 80 hour weeks doing research and teaching. My advisor brought in much more grant money than was spent on our lab equipment/salaries (and worked even hard than we did!) Our lab ran a (pretty healthy) profit, even before considering tuition and patent royalties. I spent some time teaching. Again, 60 hour weeks and all of my advisees landed six figure jobs after graduating. To the extent that the sort of institution you describe exists (low accountability), those professors are probably making less than the high school teachers in the same town. For example, an assistant professor at UCMO makes $50K-$60K; a high school teacher with several years of experience and a phd in Missouri makes closer to $70K-$80K (and with a much better pension): https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=UNIVERSITY+OF+CENTRAL+MISSOURI https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=UNIVERSITY+OF+CENTRAL+MISS... And in terms of time/effort, the two jobs are pretty comparable. The well-paid lazy professor doesn't really exist anymore, at least in STEM. Professors are either well-paid researchers expected to bring in substantial grant money (which is a hard job with long hours), or they are relatively poorly paid teachers.
- mjburgess 6y ago
  humanities departments. Most science and engineering depts have been doing research justification, financing, hiring from industry, etc. for awhile.