Sincerely,
TheSheaf.com administrator

Here’s the thing. I AM a professor. My salary is barely over 40% of your imaginary figure. My department head and the dean don’t even approach $100,000. That “pension” is actually a 401k where the majority of the money being invested is deducted from my already small paycheck.

And don’t even get me started on “easy.”

How easy do you think it is to give 100% in the classroom, and then an additional 100% in institutional service, and another 100% to my research/personal projects? That’s right. As a professor, I have one low salary, a crappy retirement plan, and three full-time jobs. If I don’t do well in the classroom (as reported on your student evaluations), I don’t get tenure. If I don’t publish and present at conferences, I don’t get tenure. And if I don’t serve on committees and task forces and advise students I also don’t get tenure.

Students, you don’t see 80% of what us professors do. You have no idea how many hours we spend re-reading the textbook at 7:00 a.m. to prepare for class even though we’ve assigned this same reading for the past five semesters, calling agents to book speakers for the college lecture series during our lunch break, meeting with students all afternoon to discuss homework or scheduling problems, attending 4:30 meetings to brainstorm about how to prevent you from transferring or dropping out, and going home to grade papers at our kitchen tables for a few hours in the evening. This is my typical day. Sound easy? Because to me, it sounds like I deserve more money. Sure, I get summers off, but I make up those hours during the other 9 months of the year.

“Oh, I’m SO sorry that you might have to earn less than $40,000 a year right out of college. Some of us can actually live very comfortably on a salary in that range, and are content with the idea that we might have to work to earn more than that.”

“Maybe it’s different in Canada, but we “knobs” here in the States…”
SARAH (from Rate Your Students), you’re right, it is different in Canada than in the States. Making $40 000/yr in the states right now is enough to live comfortably in your cheap 8000 sq ft house. Where we are living in Canada, a 800 sq ft house, in a pretty shitty neighbourhood is roughly $280-295 000. So, the $35 000 you make from your history degree may not be that comfortable where the writer is from. The majority of our brilliant professors go to your country because they are offered a lot more money than the shitty $100 000/yr that our Canadian college can afford to pay them.

Your elitist attitude is quite apparent because you personally attack someone because they have different opinions than you. Your bashing of Vaughn’s writing is a little hypocritical seeing as you quoted every single word in his writing. When writing, you don’t quote a whole journal you are drawing your resources from. If you were a better writer than him as well, your quotes would have been quite limited as EVERYONE who is posting has read his article.

A Phd is not an education degree, granted I’m sure it’s hard work, after all, I am planning on getting mine one day, but I still think I lack teaching skills. Therefore I will do, but I will not teach.

As for costs, since I don’t have time to work a full time job during the academic year, I have to work a bottom of the totem pole oilfield job in the summer in order to pay for only half of a year. I am a 20-year-old female, I’d like to see a handful of my bad professors spend a summer doing what I do, and I’ll be completely honest in saying it is one of the shittiest jobs anyone could encounter.

I have been increasingly wondering why I am still in school getting a business degree… and the truth hurts, social sciences just don’t pay.

Keep up the good work, Vaughn!

By the way, many real-world people are real-world failures as well, on some level, because they stifled their dreams. You’d be surprised how many wished they could still be in college, writing poetry, living the life of the mind, going on long trips abroad… (you know, the things professors do…)

College isn’t a life-long meal ticket. Your success or failure is in fact your own responsibility.

For instance, if you applied for a job at my organization, I would Google your name, find this essay, and immediately push for you to be turned down on the basis of immaturity and lack of writing/logic skills. FYI.

(Sigh)
I’ve tried to fight this. I have a picture of a certain comic on my desk to restrain me in precisely these circumstances….

The remainder of this comment has been removed due to abusive language.

I’ve got news for you, pumpkin. The real world is going to eat you alive. Universities will put up with whiny, entitled crybabies like you, but I’ve never met an employer who would.

And as someone above said, this is going to be Google hit number one for your name from here on out, so good luck even getting a job.

My advice from the real world? Get used to this phrase: “You want fries with that?”

One has to wonder what you are doing in college in the first place. Maybe you should go start your own business … or, perhaps join the military or something. Your heart’s clearly not in it, man.

Have a nice day.

;)

“Most professors have been in university since age 18 and have never actually gone into the ‘real world’ they so often reference.” Really? REALLY? Tell me this is a joke. All tenure-track professors (and plenty of non-TT faculty) spend three times as much time in school as the “non-failures” you so admire. A PhD takes most people seven years. Give it a shot and get back to me.

“We pay their salaries and they are condescending in return”: If you take the same tact in class as you did in this article, I should hope so.

“Perhaps they tried and failed after a while, or maybe they just wanted the easy $100,000 a year with a nice pension”: The vast majority of professors, even TT, make so much less than this.

If you’ve had some truly bad professors– and I can’t rule that out, they’re out there– then that’s a bummer. But I find it difficult to believe that someone who makes such erroneous generalizations about the broader teaching community and, furthermore, demonstrates a complete underestimation of how much preparation, research and constant study goes into teaching at a university wouldn’t know a good professor at point-blank range.

But beyond that you seem to have absoltuely no concept of what exactly the ‘real world’ comprises of. For example, do you think people who work in non-profit sectors or in any field other than business are really going to be raking in the big bucks? On what planet? You pay their salaries? How so? Do you really think your $6,000 contributes a whit to salaries? You’re at one of the most heavily subsidized universities in the world, buddy.

“Those who don’t, teach?” Are we ten years old? Sadly, some professors actually think that students may want to learn some skills about thinking critically and understanding the world around us at a higher than fifth grade level. Clearly, however, you’re not one of these students given that your assessment of the value of university life rests on the level of similarity between your campus and that of a fictional Animal House-type scenario.

Please, do everyone a favour and drop out. The value of everyone else’s degree drops when idiots like you are conferred with one. But we know you won’t, because a know-it-all who doesn’t possess even the most basic of analytical skills is unlikely to succeed in life without that piece of paper. Because the second you open your mouth, or put pen to paper the sheer magnitude of your ignorance is going to become immediately apparent to those of us in the “real world.”

This article makes you sound like a whiny child.

Dude. $6K a year ($12K USD?)for a university education is a steal. Over here in the States, it’s $25K USD. And teaching is about 30% of your professor’s job. Your professors are also paid to do research and publish in their field, go to conferences to share their work, serve on University, regional, and national governance committees, evaluate colleagues’ work for publication, etc., etc., etc. It’s about 6 jobs in one, and the pay scale is terrible. We do it because we believe that thinking, reading, and writing matter — more than getting rich — though students like you make clear that not everyone is worthy of a college education.

Last year, I sent out well over 120 letters for jobs in English language and literature. I got one offer. 3/4 of my colleagues did the same thing and did not get that offer (it was my third years). For every single position in my area that opens up, you can expect 400 applications, and those numbers are rising every year. When the recession hit and there was a news report of 100 people applying for a janitorial job, I thought, “This is news? That’s a gimme!” There is far more competition in academia than a self-fulfilling, prophetic failure like yourself could handle. You’re dropping out of a class of 25, after all.

“It’s even more fun when they have the ‘What do you know? You’re just a kid,’ approach to students.”

If you know it all, why are you taking classes? In fact, I have a strong sense that you don’t participate in class anyway, impending failure boy. Really, what do you know? If you had a clue, you’d be passing. The arrogance of a pimple like yourself to presume to judge someone who has spent their entire adult life devoted to studying a subject is as breathtaking as your exit from school will be unnoticed.

HJ