Things I did wrong as a professor (2016)

I would venture that most people equate professor with teaching. While many of the people that responded to monksy, understand that the position is much more than that. Seeing this dichotomy is important to having a productive discussion.

This happens a lot in life. Another example from higher education—University President. Most people equate University President with something along the lines of U.S. President and hold the requisite expectations for them. Reality = fundraising figurehead.

Also, you've completely ignored my first point above. Even if we accept that teaching is the primary responsibility of a "Professor", it does not follow that this teaching manifests primarily as classroom teaching. Advising is teaching, and is the primary form of teaching undertaken by professors at certain research-intensive universities.

Incidentally, there are job titles that describe classroom teachers at research universities -- "instructor" or "teaching professor". The author of this post was not an "instructor" or a "teaching professor". He was an assistant and then associate professor. Classroom teaching was not a majority component of his job.

Luckily for every software engineer out there, historical cruft in the names of job titles is a bad criteria for evaluating job performance.

Repeating this line over and over does not make it so. (Tenure-track CS) professors at Harvard are not there to (primarily) teach (undergraduate) courses. This is just a fact.

> If you can't/don't want to teach you should be a professional researcher and admit that

Professional researchers do not typically advise doctoral students. So professors at research universities are doing a lot of teaching that someone at an industry lab probably would not be doing.

Classroom teaching is not the only form of teaching, and professional researchers do not grow on trees.

> Via tuition, etc... fraudulent to the students paying tutition

Tenure-track professors at places like Harvard fund themselves through grants, not undergraduate tuition dollars.

Teaching is why people get professorships at teaching universities, where the main part of your job is to teach (typically 6-8 courses per year).

If you are getting a job at a research-oriented university, you typically teach 1-3 courses per year, and the focus of your activity is on running a world-class research program (doing research, training PhD students, and raising money to pay those students / buy equipment, etc.). Teaching is still important and takes time, but you have a lot of other responsibilities. There are an enormous amount of pulls on a professor's time, though, and most work very long hours (my colleagues and I probably work 60-80 hours per week and we aren't at Harvard).

I don't think it is appropriate to delegate teaching to TAs (I delegate much grading and help with homework assignments). Regarding pay for research assistants, there simply isn't a way to change this in the US. There just isn't enough government funding. To pay a single PhD student a stipend of around $30K per year for 20 hours of work per week* costs a budget around $60-80K with overhead and other factors per year. Many US agencies (e.g., NSF) only fund around $100-150K per year if you win a grant (7% success rate for many of them), so you can only fund 1-2 PhD students with that and you fought really hard to get that award to pay your students (lots of rejections). Most universities also won't let you pay them higher salaries, even if you want to as a professor.

I used to complain about these things as a graduate student, but once you get the job (and have made a ton of budgets) you see the world differently. I'd love to change things, but don't blame the professors for things way out of their control.

* 20 hours of work per week that's not related to their thesis, etc. Most of the time we are trying to get students funded on projects where that 20 hours of work does apply to their thesis, so that they get more out of it. They of course must work much more than 20 hours per week on their thesis project(s) to do cutting-edge work and graduate on time.

> Teaching is the reason why professors are there.

This is a commonly held belief by non-academics. It is not one held by academics at R1 schools.

Note that there are many lower level universities (not R1) at which the teaching is sometimes quite good. There are also very real things called "teaching colleges". If someone wants to go to a place with great teachers, they largely should not go to an R1 school.

> If you can't/don't want to teach you should be a professional researcher and admit that.

Being a professor at an R1 school is basically making the claim that you are a researcher -- one who happens to teach from time to time.

> That is what the tax payers support when supporting universities. (Via tutiion, etc.. [grants are not considered in this])

Are you sure about that?

This is a potentially huge discussion, but "teaching" is not high on the list of added value if you attend an R1 school. In fact, the instruction is often terrible. The idea is that you will be given access to resources, and smart, motivated people know how to avail themselves of useful resources.

Taxpayers get research labs that spawn new industries, develop mature industries, and contribute to high value-add labor markets (great for local economy).

Students get access to bleeding edge research, researchers, and tools.

Much tuition these days goes towards facilities that the people who can pay want (e.g., nicer dorms, gyms, etc.). Note that many of the top student scholars at R1 schools pay little or no tuition.

One could also argue that people pay tuition for access to certain social circles -- social capital is a real thing with real value at a wide range of R1 schools.

I could go on, but the value derived from how tuition and taxpayer money is used is a deep and complex topic.

> The current setup where a professor can delegate teaching to TAs, and overwork/underpay assistents/juniors is ethically wrong, often illegal in work practices (payment below min wage), and fraudulent to the students paying tuition.

The delegation part is fine -- the content of the classes that have TAs is not terribly challenging or interesting to a professional in the field, so delegating it (especially for large classes) is an intelligent allocation of human resources.

That said, the illegal parts you mentioned are terrible and should not happen. To be fair, the only cases I've directly seen of overly worked TA/RA labor was when the grad student was doing something wrong (e.g., grading with heuristics that were overly granular). That said, I have read stories, and I believe that they are true at least in part if not in whole.

At first, I was kinda startled and couldn’t answer really, tried to bullshit him like the answer I gave above. He called it though and said that he is disappointed by such an answer and that he’d expect everybody to work on 2-3 things. Otherwise, he concluded, there is a lack of introspection to be assumed. Fair point, I thought

I am good at lots of things and bad at others. I will be most valuable on a team with others who can mitigate my weaknesses. I don’t want to be hired for a role where I will be expected to excel at my weaknesses.

If someone asks me this question, I dig deep ad give an honest answer. There are lots of jobs. I don’t think of my interviewer as an adversary. When I’m interviewing I’m looking for someone who wants to hire me with eyes open.

It's not a good question. People answer it in many different ways. Some people give a clearly rehearsed stock answer that they've read online. Some people give an example of something they're not great at, and how they think they have started to rectify it. A small number of people give an open and honest answer.

Some people will flip it back at the end of the interview when they're asked if they have any questions. "Earlier you asked me for my biggest flaw, so what's the w biggest flaw with this company?"

> And hence, why are interviewers asking this question in the first place?

Ideally they don't, but if they are asking it they should be looking for either honesty, or for interview preparation (because some variant of this question is routinely asked).