My wife is a professor, and has been for 12 years. The department head and the dean positions are often treated like a hot potato - nobody wants to give up rese

My wife is a professor, and has been for 12 years. The department head and the dean positions are often treated like a hot potato - nobody wants to give up research time to do administrative work. There is no glory in being an administrator, so time to write high profile papers, no time to get big grants that make you a hero in your department, no time for ..... Instead the dean and the department heads spend their time dealing with continual budget cuts, assigning people to committees that they don't want to be on (see above paragraph). In a publish-or-perish world, most academics do not want to give up publishing for a little extra money. So the universities must make it tempting enough of a position (pay, essentially) in order for the professors to give up their freedom of schedule, having to be on campus 5 days a week, and the added headache of trying to herd a bunch of academics who are lost in their own thoughts. Also keep in mind that professors do not typically get the salaries that they could get in industry. Tenure is great until they delete your department. My wife does sociology, which really means she does a lot of statistics. There was a time 5-7 years ago when I found her some job postings that she would be qualified for as a statistics analyst and the pay was 50% greater than her academic salary to start. She coldly informed me that there was more to life than making money and that she enjoyed her work. So I did the good husband thing and shut up.