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When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all. I knew a history professor that would come into the university for his 1 or 2 classes per week and then would go home for the rest of the day(s). He made 100k+. Not to mention that there are some professors at my university who make close to or over 300k/year and do not teach, but they are much more rare and have fat CVs. The other side of the coin is that before you get tenure, you may be working a lot for very little and only when you're close to 40 (on average) will you be granted tenure.

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I'm going to disagree with this for science and engineering. All of my tenured colleagues work very hard. You have to if you want to keep running a lab, which is the main reason why people choose to become professors. If you stop working hard, you will stop getting funding and PhD students. The department will make you teach more and can make your life difficult if you are being a drag on the department, even if they can't fire you.

That said, for the liberal arts, history, etc., things may be different. They don't tend to have large labs and their goals are different. I honestly don't know.

Things are different for those doing theoretical science where the main instruments are pen and paper. External funding is often not required at all. This might not please the department, but the tenured professor would be just fine.

When I did my PhD I worked in Math and CS (plus had friends in Physics with similar observations): many professors on the theoretical side had no need for and were not interested in getting grants. They would get some minor travel money for conference expenses and pay themselves over summer so they would not have to teach then, but even if they got nothing they would be just fine on a base salary. And I am talking about reasonably well known full professors, not some young researcher at the end of a rope (career-wise).

Things are different when you have experimental labs to run. That is when you need external funding and have to do all that is involved in getting it (proposals unlimited, etc.)

It's not just the lab supplies. I worked at an institute that reserved the right to cut salaries if an individual was not bringing in enough money.

You can't get students without grants. Most professors want students, because they like doing research, and so have to apply for grants.

> You can't get students without grants.

That is definitely not true for many non-experimental science departments. Many students are TAs and as such care not a bit about grants. When I was getting my PhD I had to teach 4.5 hours/week (often structured as 6 and 3 at alternating semesters), which gave me my stipend and free tuition (and was a useful skill to polish). Maybe I spent another 4-5 hours preparing for classes and grading (we got student graders but I seldom asked them anything as grading was quick enough).

I was paid by the department and it did not matter to me whether my advisor got grants or not; what mattered were research interests and his guiding of research. This was the picture across the department; changing advisers was quick and based on mutual interest, not financials / grants.

That's a very light TA load. It's far more normal to have a 20-30 hour a week commitment to your TA responsibilities (multiple lectures, grading a few hundred assignments every few weeks, etc) so it's a lot harder to fit research around that.

Are you serious? Can you share the school and department? This is an honest question -- I always thought 4-5 lecture or classroom hours was normal. That's what I had and that's what my friends had. Most of us never even used graders assigned as grading duties were light and it would often be more trouble to explain how you wanted it graded anyhow.

I have never heard of a 20 hour TA load. Again, just wondering.

Every CS department I have ever heard of has a 20 hour TA load as standard.

I was in a stats department for grad school. My assistantship load was nominally 20 hours, but I managed to teach a course as a GI in probably ~10 hours/week (doing my own grading). It took more time commitment if it was my first time teaching the course, and when I had to write/grade exams.

I'd imagine my experience wasn't an uncommon one.

20 hours of work is pretty extreme and I suspect cuts down on your mental ability to do research (you have to take classes, too). I suspect the department usually has to say it is a 20 hr/wk position (probably so student gets free tuition), but the actual work is often less -- my friend who went to U of Maryland for PhD in CS had a similar experience to mine -- 7-10 hours a week of actual work at most.

This is just a couple of data points, though. Maybe we were just lucky.

>> When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

There is another benefit (of course, understanding with all the dues you have to pay along the way.) JOB SECURITY While I make more than a professor, as with most tech jobs I can lose it anytime. When the economy is bad, even great job performance is no guarantee for continued employment. Sometimes entire companies disappear. It is difficult to understand this if you havent been thru a downturn (I've been thru 2) and it is difficult to appreciate this until you have hard responsibilities in live (mortgages, family to support.)

This is another reason why many jobs which pay less (government jobs, k-12 education, police forces, etc) are still attractive -- because they offer relatively more job security. It means you can commit to liabilities -- a higher mortgage, etc without having to sock away funds for rainy days.

Great point about job security being a valuable part of tenure. I read "Are you a stock or a bond" and the author (a professor, actually) recommended that folks treat their income stream (and the safety of that) in a similar manner to other investments. So if I have tenure, I can invest more in risky assets (possibly even on margin). If I am a software contractor, I should invest more in bonds because my income stream isn't stable.

Thought that was a great way to think about income stability in an actionable manner.

    When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

This is just laughably untrue. Sure, we may be able to dig out examples of tenured professors doing the minimum they can get by with. But you can find rare examples in pretty much any profession - the point is that they are rare.

Pretty much all the tenured professors I know well work their asses off - and due to area of expertise, many of them could make 2x - 5x salary in industry but aren't interested.

"When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach."

I doubt this is true for the United States, but it is definitely false for many European countries. Tenure gives you job security, but it also brings an enormous amount of administrative obligations. In my experience, conversations with tenured faculty tend to revolve around how much they hate the endless bullshit meetings they are required to attend, the long many-page forms they have to constantly fill out for uni administration, and how it has really eaten into their time for research or family life.

I think you mean the amount of work you have to do. Tenured professors typically get that way by (1) being passionate about their subject and (2) working very hard -- as well as (3) being really good at it, of course -- and the amount of work they actually do may be a lot more than the amount they have to do.

>When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

I think you are mixing up the amount of work a tenured professor has to do with the amount of work they do do.

A tenured professor has to do very little. The idea (even if not the reality) is that a tenured professor has proven themselves enough that the one employing them is willing to ease back any rules so the professor can do science like they want to.

The end result should be (and I think is, but I don't have any hard data at the moment) is that tenured professor do a far larger amount of work than they have to, and are comparable if not even greater than other professions with similar salaries. In large part because they are doing what they love.

Consider a programmer who loves programming and does it at home and at work. A professor is similar, except since they get to pick the topic they work on (to some extent), they are working on the same project both at home and at work.

The last tenured professor I worked under put in a lot more than 40 hours, and he was high up enough to not have any classes to teach (I think he periodically taught a grad class, but it wasn't ever semester).

There are lazy and burned out tenured profs. But they are a small minority. To get tenure at a good school, you have to be something of a work beast, and self-driven. That doesn't go away just because you get the tenure letter in your mailbox one day.

I know hundreds of tenured profs in science and engineering and there is a very strong work culture.

When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

Some of the hardest working people I know are tenured professors. Managing international research projects is no walk in the park.

> Some of the hardest working people I know are tenured professors.

Some of the harder working people I know are post docs...

Teaching is a distraction to the real work that goes on in universities. Just because you don't see professors teaching, doesn't mean that they aren't working extremely hard, on very important and stressful tasks (i.e. tasks that are fundamental to the university being a viable organisation)

> Teaching is a distraction to the real work that goes on in universities.

This is the most concise statement I've ever seen of the sickness at the heart of the academy. By and large, and with a few heroic exceptions, professors don't value instruction. It's why I was told my ambition to improve the preparation of engineering graduates through better instruction was a fool's errand, "career suicide" in my advisor's words. And it's why I took my Ph.D. and left academia. This attitude is going to come back and bite them when the marks wise up.

Your adviser was right though. If there was an infinite amount of money then they'd have lecturers who are dedicated to lecturing. But there is never enough money so...what options are there but to do the things that will bring more in so that your role/group/department/university survives.

I've seen it myself...groups whither and disappear due to lack of funds.

You're right, of course, there's no place for teachers in the academy, except as members of that most degraded and despised class, contingent faculty. But I think this is a serious problem. Not to put too fine a point on it, but many recipients of engineering degrees being turned out by our well-respected institutions of higher learning can't engineer their way out of a wet paper bag. I worked with people who didn't understand the physical models underlying their discipline. I worked with people who didn't trust statistics, who were easily misled by noise in their data and preferred to eyeball regression lines. I worked with one individual who somehow had a B.S. in electrical engineering despite having real trouble with the concept of plotting points on a Cartesian coordinate plane. These people had degrees from R1 universities. The indifference of career academics to these outcomes is a disaster. It's a disaster I'd hoped to avert, but I can only do my best to get out of its way.

No doubt about it. People made it through 4 years of my CS degree from a good university, and couldn't code a line. However these people all found their place in the workforce which suited their own skills.

I'm not sure how much can be done at the teaching level, but like you, it's something I'd also like to help correct.

I can easily accept it in some European country where government pays for it all. I have much harder time to accept this paradigm in USA, where 19 years old are paying a lot of money or going into debt just so they can study at the university.

Yes, college graduates do better then non college graduates which is why those people still do it. But since they are paying a lot of money, university literally owns them more then just "you are a distraction".

> where 19 years old are paying a lot of money or going into debt just so they can study at the university.

True enough. My Euro-centric brain didn't consider this. Even in Europe actually, non-European students pay a lot to join a course.

My sense is that American unis do offer some "value for money" when compared to European schools, through flexible options for minors and majors, and grad school. Maybe the teachers are still poor though.

Do undergraduate fees contribute to a faculty's research funding? And if not why are student fees so high, if there is such a low (albeit understandable) emphasis on undergraduate teaching?

In my country (and all of Europe) no. The fees are a nominal administration fee, which admittedly is crawling higher each year. The government, and the EU, then funds each student, and yeah that money would help with research.

I'd suggest that faculty don't want there to be a low emphasis on teaching, it's just that there aren't enough resources to do the critical tasks first. This is bearing in mind that teaching duties are always fulfilled either way (just not to the satisfaction of some people).

I think our difference in perspective is a result of our experience with different systems. I've met a number of professors who expressed contempt toward the undergraduate population at the Big State U where I did my graduate studies. It's not that they're reluctantly doing a bad job at teaching, they're doing a bad job and they really don't care.

> When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

No. False.

Perhaps this is true in some countries. In the USA and Europe, the average professor works 61 hours a week and encounters very high levels of stress, linked to continuously having to obtain research funds.

> 61 hours a week

That's an oddly specific number that I wouldn't expect to agree exactly across the USA and "Europe". Do you have a source?

>When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

In my experience, the exact opposite is overwhelmingly true.

measuring output of intellectual pursuits is a fool's game. that history professor may be spending all their time watching Netflix, or they might be reading and thinking and conversing with their colleagues, participating in the general intellectual milieu, without publishing anything, but still making a positive and important contribution to society.

Besides, sometimes you will pursue an idea for a year or two and find out that it comes to nothing, and you have very little to show for it. But not giving professors the space and trust to do just that is counterproductive in the long run.

Watching my supervisor in engineering convinced me that I did not want to become a professor. He worked hard... teaching, mentoring, grant writing, plus a whole pile of administrative duties.

My programming 101 teacher was exactly like this except instead of going home he would go to his lab. He was extremely disorganized and would spend the first 30-45 minutes of class making sure his java programs were working for the lecture.

A student finally asked him why he doesn’t come prepared to class. His response was he teaches he easiest class the can and only the minimum amount of classes he needs to. He wanted to work on his research and get grants not teach.

He was making 150k.

> He wanted to work on his research and get grants not teach.

Working on research that's worthy of grants is extremely taxing, and is the part that makes universities function. Teaching undergrads is a chore.

I understand but the students are the ones struggling due to an absent teacher. I’m greatful he wants to do research but jaded due to the fact he doesnt care about the class or students.

My education was subpar due to his lack of effort.

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm only too aware that expertise in a field doesn't make you a good teacher. I did badly in some subjects for the same reason, I feel.

>When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

If you're in a decently good school, this is not true.

>The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all.

In both universities I went to, the only way to reduce teaching loads was to pay your way out of it. And the only way professors would do that would be to get grant money to supplement the lost income.

As for the history professor making $100K, what is the COL in that area? In my university, I just looked it up, and they average about $75K (which, to be frank, is decent for the little work they do).

In any case, most of the 80 hour/week work is in engineering and science...

From that POV tenure could be considered deferred compensation, but it is more likely that it is a sinecure.

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