Yeah, the joke for professors is you can work any 60-70 hours of the week you want, so long as you show up for lectures, office hours, and meetings. It’s got different sorts of pressures to a corporate or industry position, but it’s not low-pressure. And if you’re not at the kind of university that has a big stable of TAs handling a lot of the grunt work, you’re gonna have a number of late nights marking exams and papers or projects every semester, unless you exclusively give students multiple-choice questions.
Also, getting to the point of being a tenured professor is a process in and of itself. Not getting tenure means you likely get laid off.
One other thing a lot of people are missing here is that most “professors” at universities today are not tenured, or even tenure-track. They’re adjuncts or sessional lecturers, who are paid more along the lines of $70k a year (often less) for what is in practice a similar workload with similar education requirements, except consisting entirely of teaching, with literal zero job security. Sessional lecturers sometimes find out only a couple of days or weeks in advance what they are being asked to teach for the semester, if anything.
Hm… I seem to have mistaken “flexibility” for low hours and underestimated how much professors work. Is “teaches math at Stanford” really viewed much lower than “researches math at Stanford” (or whatever college)? It seems like universities could drum up some prestige around being a good teacher if that’s really the main incentive.
Yeah, the joke for professors is you can work any 60-70 hours of the week you want, so long as you show up for lectures, office hours, and meetings. It’s got different sorts of pressures to a corporate or industry position, but it’s not low-pressure. And if you’re not at the kind of university that has a big stable of TAs handling a lot of the grunt work, you’re gonna have a number of late nights marking exams and papers or projects every semester, unless you exclusively give students multiple-choice questions.
Also, getting to the point of being a tenured professor is a process in and of itself. Not getting tenure means you likely get laid off.
One other thing a lot of people are missing here is that most “professors” at universities today are not tenured, or even tenure-track. They’re adjuncts or sessional lecturers, who are paid more along the lines of $70k a year (often less) for what is in practice a similar workload with similar education requirements, except consisting entirely of teaching, with literal zero job security. Sessional lecturers sometimes find out only a couple of days or weeks in advance what they are being asked to teach for the semester, if anything.
Hm… I seem to have mistaken “flexibility” for low hours and underestimated how much professors work. Is “teaches math at Stanford” really viewed much lower than “researches math at Stanford” (or whatever college)? It seems like universities could drum up some prestige around being a good teacher if that’s really the main incentive.