WSJ Op-Ed: Faculty don't really work all that hard

[marshwiggle]

College professor used to be a pretty respectable job... and now that so many women and people of color are getting PhD's and seeking professorships, the field is suddenly "overpaid?"

Well, I think I just found the most depressing observation in this thread. I hope this isn't anyone's actual (attempted) reasoning. :(

About a year ago, a financial aid officer at a local HBC said of freshman composition: "How difficult is it to teach that class? A monkey could do it." She no longer works for that HBC. Many of her critics did in deed think she said that since "anyone" could be an English professor, those profs are overpaid.

This seems open to some contrasting interpretations. What was her academic background? For instance, if she had taken such a course and it was really dumbed down, then her own experience could support her claim, even if that's not the way it is at many other places. But, regardless of context, the institution would want to get rid of her since it doesn't put them in a good light. (It's actually even more likely to tick them off if she's right.)

[downer]

Freshman comp easy to teach? My impression is the opposite. It's impossible to teach, for a large proportion of students.

[mahagonny]

Oh, please.  This is yet another slap at us egg heads who do their work between their ears rather than by the sweat of their brows. 

It's not too much of a slap at me. My salary can't be too high because it is zero. I am paid either hourly or by piecework stipend. Besides, I'm not real faculty. I am adjunct faculty and the school has said it would prefer not hiring us. Broadcast it, actually, through the local media.
The WSJ can go ahead and sling their mud; I just crawled out of the sewer.

The question prompted by all this is does/should higher ed operate on a theory about what instructors should be paid that is independent of 'this is where the pay we offer falls in the range of similar positions at similar institutions.'

Well, that was one of the shortest GCF's ever. There! I said it. Now you don't have to.

[Antiphon1]

I'm not sure I entirely understand your reply, but here goes.  The referenced article seems to imply professors are overpaid based on their perceived lack of effort and truncated work week.  Were you a full time faculty member, would you agree with that view of your work as characterized by the WSJ?  The real quandary is whether all employees in higher education compensated at the same rates as similarly qualified employees in private industry?  Further, are part time or contract employees paid at the same rate relative to their qualifications in private industry?  I certainly empathize with your frustrations concerning adjunct pay. I'm not certain your response is about the article.

[mahagonny]

I'm not sure I entirely understand your reply, but here goes.  The referenced article seems to imply professors are overpaid based on their perceived lack of effort and truncated work week.  Were you a full time faculty member, would you agree with that view of your work as characterized by the WSJ?  The real quandary is whether all employees in higher education compensated at the same rates as similarly qualified employees in private industry?  Further, are part time or contract employees paid at the same rate relative to their qualifications in private industry?  I certainly empathize with your frustrations concerning adjunct pay. I'm not certain your response is about the article.

I haven't seen the article yet. I'm not a subscriber. I'm just noting that as far as feeling disrespected, the Wall Street Journal can't make me feel more that way than the workplace already does. And for that matter, I'm not really faculty, even though I make a living teaching. The university doesn't consider us faculty. So if it's a case of 'if the shoe fits, wear it' then it doesn't fit.

As for 'if I were full time faculty, would I agree with the author' I suspect the worst of what he says is true sometimes, if it's like other articles I've seen of that ilk.

[Antiphon1]

I'm not sure I entirely understand your reply, but here goes.  The referenced article seems to imply professors are overpaid based on their perceived lack of effort and truncated work week.  Were you a full time faculty member, would you agree with that view of your work as characterized by the WSJ?  The real quandary is whether all employees in higher education compensated at the same rates as similarly qualified employees in private industry?  Further, are part time or contract employees paid at the same rate relative to their qualifications in private industry?  I certainly empathize with your frustrations concerning adjunct pay. I'm not certain your response is about the article.

I haven't seen the article yet. I'm not a subscriber. I'm just noting that as far as feeling disrespected, the Wall Street Journal can't make me feel more that way than the workplace already does. And for that matter, I'm not really faculty, even though I make a living teaching. The university doesn't consider us faculty. So if it's a case of 'if the shoe fits, wear it' then it doesn't fit.

As for 'if I were full time faculty, would I agree with the author' I suspect the worst of what he says is true sometimes, if it's like other articles I've seen of that ilk.

Again, this thread is about the article referenced by the OP.  I certainly empathize with your situation but fear you are committing a logical error.

[mahagonny]

Let's skip over the empathy part --- I maintain a busy schedule. what logical error?

[eigen]

Let's skip over the empathy part --- I maintain a busy schedule. what logical error?

From my perspective, anything that starts with "I haven't read the thing we're discussing" and then goes on to give an opinion about something the poster has not actually read has a grevious logical error irrespective of the opinion that follows.

[mahagonny]

Aha! If you're lucky, you can see the article by using a browser that hasn't worn out its welcome, or doesn't keep track of your free uses.

Here it is:

'Who'll Take A Pay Cut For Free College?

Democratic candidates for president, in their impressive expansiveness, are promising free college. Some limit their proposals to community colleges, others to state-run schools, and a few, going for broke, want also to forgive student debt for private-college tuition. Since no realm of American life has undergone greater inflation in recent decades than higher education, this is no piddling promise. The cost to taxpayers could be in the trillions, though the prospect would please a nephew of mine who this autumn is sending a son to Dartmouth at the annual price of $76,000.
If government is going to pay for college, at least it ought to try to bring down the cost. I taught at a university for 30 years and have a few suggestions. Start at the top: I would reduce the salaries of university presidents by, say, 90%. (At the institution where I taught, the president made more than $2 million when last I checked.) I would also evict them from their rent-free mansions and remove their cadres of servants. The contemporary university president, after all, has little or nothing to do with education, but is chiefly occupied with fundraising and public relations. If universities were restaurants, the president would be a maître d'. To encourage their fundraising skills, perhaps they could be paid a small commission on the money they bring into their schools—cash, so to speak, and carry—excepting that on money used to erect more otiose buildings filled with treadmills, computers and condom machines.
The next big cut in the cost of higher education would be in superfluous administrative jobs, for the contemporary university is nothing if not vastly overstaffed. All those assistant provosts for diversity, those associate deans presiding over sensitivity programs, those directors for student experience—out, out with them. I would also suggest dispensing with courses that specialize exclusively in victimology, the history of victim groups told from the point of view of the victims. Young men and women do not need reinforcement in their already mistaken belief that they are victims because of their skin color, ethnicity or sexuality.
Another place serious money could be saved is college athletics. I've read that the highest-paid public employee in most states is the state-university football coach. The school at which I taught is not a state school, but its reasonably successful football coach earned $3.3 million in 2017, ranking him only 32nd among all college football coaches.
Nick Saban, the football coach at the University of Alabama, earns $8.3 million a year. Mike Krzyzewski, the basketball coach at Duke, earns $7 million. The argument for these astonishing figures is that football at Alabama and basketball at Duke more than pay for themselves. The Alabama football "program," as they like to refer to this most brutal of sports, with its postseason games and television fees, brings in nearly $100 million a year. Duke's perpetually winning basketball teams doubtless result in more student applications and alumni donations.
Under pure capitalism, Messrs. Saban and Krzyzewski might be said to earn their pay. But if higher education is to be free, as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would have it, we are no longer talking about capitalism. Coaches' salaries could be greatly reduced and the money earned by college sports—which means chiefly football and basketball—would need to be turned over to the federal government to help pay the cost of education itself.
Which brings us to the faculty. Faculty jobs in American universities have risen well in excess of any visible improvement in the quality of university teachers: $200,000-a-year-or-more professorships are now not uncommon. When I began teaching in my mid-30s, an older friend, long resident at the same university, said to me, "Welcome to the racket." What he meant is that I would be getting a full-time salary for what was essentially a six-month job, and without ever having to put in an eight-hour day. At the tonier universities, professors in the humanities and social sciences might teach as few as three or four courses a year, the remainder of their time supposedly devoted to research. Like the man said, a sweet racket.
Under free higher education, perhaps it would make sense to pay university teachers by the hour, with raises in the wage awarded by seniority. Surely they could not complain. After all, the two most common comments (some would say the two biggest lies) about university teaching are, "I learn so much from my students" and "It's so inspiring, I'd do it for nothing." A strict hourly wage for teachers, as free university education may require, would nicely test the validity of that second proposition.
Free higher education—what a splendid ring it has, sufficient tintinnabulation to cause one to forget the old axiom that you get what you pay for.'

(bold and italics are mine)

It's actually even better than I thought. Thanks, Eigen.

See, the author proposes raises in wage awarded by seniority. We never got that until we formed our own union, against the expressed wishes of our provost, and with zero support from our tenured faculty. Well, why should it be surprising that our right and opportunity to unionize means nothing to them, to state the case charitably, after they pointedly agreed to shut us out of theirs. And yet here is a tenured guy who wants us to get these raises as an incentive to stay. I don't see how I'd have much to fear with him.

It is true we don't know how many hours per week are worked by tenured people, so he might be spinning there. He seems to doubt that professors are doing the research they claim they are doing, but another question might be 'how much research that was done was actually needed?'

The article makes a lot of the same complaints about spending priorities (extra administrators, sports, lavish facilities) that are regularly made around here, but it's the part about professors being that struck a nerve. So if we want we can come out in favor of deep tenure, publishing mania, administrative bloat, lavish student centers, strange trendy curricula, kick-ass sports programs, etc. with the hope that some of the largesse continues to go to faculty. Except, as I wrote, I am not faculty. I'm a temporary employee that they're letting teach another semester. so i'm not going there, not with any particular vigor.

[fast_and_bulbous]

For public higher ed, this is what happens when you cut state funding to nothing and corporatize it. No surprise, really.

I'm all on board with getting rid of useless administrators and obscenely paid coaches.

But those hundredthousandaire tenured faculty and their fancy Honda Civics, not so much.

[Biologist_]

My campus has a WSJ subscription through ProQuest so I was able to read the article, but I can't get to the 458 comments on the journal's website.

Anyone know whether a few of those comments point out the factual errors in the op-ed?

[mleok]

My campus has a WSJ subscription through ProQuest so I was able to read the article, but I can't get to the 458 comments on the journal's website.

Anyone know whether a few of those comments point out the factual errors in the op-ed?

The AAUP Twitter post had a link to the article which also gives access to the comments:

https://t.co/XiWIzotjty

[mahagonny]

College professor used to be a pretty respectable job... and now that so many women and people of color are getting PhD's and seeking professorships, the field is suddenly "overpaid?"

Well, I think I just found the most depressing observation in this thread. I hope this isn't anyone's actual (attempted) reasoning. :(

Yet what I usually see on CHE and InsideHigherEd is that while women are seeking professorships, they still aren't getting them in great numbers. Whereas more than half of adjunct faculty are women, and academia, which is nothing if not liberal, is fine with that.

My campus has a WSJ subscription through ProQuest so I was able to read the article, but I can't get to the 458 comments on the journal's website.

Anyone know whether a few of those comments point out the factual errors in the op-ed?

Haven't found any yet and I've read more that half. I did see this exchange:

'This essy is full of untruths and cliches.  I opened it expecting some insight.  I was disappointed.'

'What was untrue?'

'Well for one, there are a whole lot of adjunct professors out there who don't make anything near $200,000, nor do the vast majority of most tenured professors either.  Sure, there are some, depending on the school and discipline.  It's generally widely acknowledged that faculty don't fall into the same category as the administration (or the head coaches in big time sports) in terms of pay.'

and

"The retired professor forgot to mention the burden of the huge public pensions collected by these people. Of course, why retire when you do little or nothing to begin with? A vast amount of these public pensions are underfunded, adding stress to an already broken bureaucracy. The irony is that the great minds could be the ones responsible for breaking the country's back."

The author certainly knows about the large number of adjunct faculty and their work conditions. I suspect he declined to mention them for a reason: the verdict on tenure track faculty is not affected. If you believe someone is overpaid, he is not less overpaid because someone working alongside him, also teaching students, is paid a lot less. Or maybe he laid the groundwork for saying adjunctification is a great thing (which some administrators obviously believe) but wouldn't own it. At the same time, his whole argument starts with 'what are you folks with the good jobs willing to give up in order to make free tuition feasible' which seems to be a fair question.

Let's skip over the empathy part --- I maintain a busy schedule. what logical error?

From my perspective, anything that starts with "I haven't read the thing we're discussing" and then goes on to give an opinion about something the poster has not actually read has a grevious logical error irrespective of the opinion that follows.

Not sure that's what Antiphon1 meant.

[ciao_yall]

College professor used to be a pretty respectable job... and now that so many women and people of color are getting PhD's and seeking professorships, the field is suddenly "overpaid?"

Well, I think I just found the most depressing observation in this thread. I hope this isn't anyone's actual (attempted) reasoning. :(

About a year ago, a financial aid officer at a local HBC said of freshman composition: "How difficult is it to teach that class? A monkey could do it." She no longer works for that HBC. Many of her critics did in deed think she said that since "anyone" could be an English professor, those profs are overpaid.

This seems open to some contrasting interpretations. What was her academic background? For instance, if she had taken such a course and it was really dumbed down, then her own experience could support her claim, even if that's not the way it is at many other places. But, regardless of context, the institution would want to get rid of her since it doesn't put them in a good light. (It's actually even more likely to tick them off if she's right.)

If HBC stands for Historically Black College then any use of the term "monkey" in the context of that HBC is problematic.

Second, the more remediation the students need, the harder it is to teach Freshman Comp.

[Antiphon1]

Let's skip over the empathy part --- I maintain a busy schedule. what logical error?

From my perspective, anything that starts with "I haven't read the thing we're discussing" and then goes on to give an opinion about something the poster has not actually read has a grevious logical error irrespective of the opinion that follows.

Not sure that's what Antiphon1 meant.

That's exactly what I meant.  Your cherry picking and inflation of an apparent favorite complaint twist the original article's main arguments.  As to the comments, you chose a couple of the very few mentioning the employment status of professors.  Most of the comments attacked or defended administrators and coaches.