Category: The Happy Academic

According to a CNN/Money Magazine rating, being a college professor is the second best job you can have. Sounds great, right? Well, sorta.

As I have mentioned many times here before, I think being a college professor is a great gig, and when people complain about being in academia (which is the subject of so many academic blogs, especially the pseudoanonymous ones), my basic reaction is always the same: this beats the heck out of most jobs, hands down.

However, I think the CNN/Money Magazine ranking is a bit problematic for several reasons. Let’s start with the first three paragraphs about “why it’s great:”

While competition for tenure-track jobs will always be stiff, enrollment is rising in professional programs, community colleges and technical schools — which means higher demand for faculty.

It’s easier to break in at this level, and often you can teach with a master’s and professional experience. Demand is especially strong in fields that compete with the private sector (health science and business, for example).

The category includes moonlighting adjuncts, graduate TAs and college administrators.

So, in sum, it’s “great” for a)people teaching in “the professions” (as opposed to, say, English or writing or that vast space called “the humanities”); it’s easy to “break in” as long as you are in a field where you could make a lot more money in the private sector; and, by including adjuncts, TAs, and administrators, they are lumping together several very different kinds of jobs.

I do agree with them that what’s “cool” about the job includes “Professors have near-total flexibility in their schedules. Creative thinking is the coin of the realm. No dress code!” But obviously, they are minimalizing the ease of getting into the college professor racket, and I wish I made close to the quoted “average” salary of $81,000.

By the way, this “study” claims that best job is “software engineer.” That is clearly wrong. I think the best job one could have is “wealthy philanthropist” and/or “man/woman about town.” But maybe that’s just me.

The Chronicle had a first person piece by Louise “not her real name” Churchill called “Professor Goodgrade.” Basically, Prof. Churchill/Goodgrade has changed her grading policies/criteria so that she’s handing out “A”s left and right. Why? So she will get tenure.

Two examples from the article:

I approached the pile of papers with a new attitude. I was only going to give A’s and B’s, except in extreme cases.

I gave a lot of B’s on papers that should really have received some form of a C. I gave A’s where in the past I would probably have given an A- or even a B+. I felt a little polluted, but I also felt the need to receive better marks myself on those cursed computerized forms. I need these students on my side. I need them to like me.

After I returned that set of papers, the class dynamic didn’t seem to change, as it had in other years when I had handed back a slew of C’s. It even seemed to improve, as if the whole class had breathed a collective sigh of relief. I took pains to apologize, in a humorous, self-deprecating way, for a cranky outburst I let escape on a day of numerous class disruptions. I empathized with their stress during midterms and in the weeks leading up to finals. And I padded their grades. I need to get tenure.

and…

I do worry a bit that if my evaluation scores go up, someone may notice that the number of A’s and B’s I’m giving at semester’s end has also gone up, but I don’t think that will happen. I hear from students and other faculty members that grading standards are quite lax among a significant number of my colleagues, most of whom already have tenure. There are a lot of easy A’s out there. So why do I find it so hard to join in on this A fest?

I’ve lowered my standards. I still teach with the same rigor and enthusiasm and I still enjoy the material, but I don’t hold students as accountable as I used to.

I need to get tenure.

Well, good luck to you, Prof. Churchill/Goodgrade, but I doubt this strategy is going to work.

First off, I think it’s not a good thing that the institution in question here seems to be putting quite a bit of weight on “fill in the bubble” scores. I don’t have that much of a problem that these sorts of student evaluations are a part of the mix, but the main way of scoring teaching for the purposes of tenure? That seems a problem, especially at a school that is supposedly emphasizing teaching.

Second, I personally have not experienced the correspondence between the overall student grades and the overall evaluation. Now, I have noticed that in upper-level/graduate courses I tend to get better evaluations, and I also tend to get better evaluations in classes I’ve taught many times before. But I have had plenty of experiences where I have given relatively poor grades (simply because the students weren’t that good) and I received decent evaluations. And vice-versa. So who knows?

Third, it seems to me that Professor Churchill has some other issues she needs to sort out. I think it’s kind of odd that she mentions being “cranky” several times in this piece, for example.

And along those lines, it seems to me that something that Professor Churchill needs to think about (and this perhaps goes with the crankiness) is that teaching and grading are not some sort of contest between the students and the teacher. I think this is a pretty common mistake for younger teachers; it’s certainly one I made. Thinking back, I can come up with a couple of different occassions where I gave grades to “show them,” so to speak. That wasn’t a good idea.

Ultimately, I’m not convinced that Professor Churchill’s strategy is going to work. It seems to me that the way to get good evaluations (besides demonstrating that you know what you’re talking about) is pretty easy: treat your students as you would want to be treated, be polite, professional, consistent, fair, and pleasant. Simple enough.

As part of my blog reading and writing this morning, I thought I’d point people to Dean Dad’s post of a book I’m not liable to read anytime soon, the 2006 edition of The Search Committee Handbook: A Guide to Recruiting Administrators. He rejects the lame explanations in the book about why the pools of candidates for administrative positions have dropped in recent years and suggests instead that the reason why people aren’t applying for these jobs is because potential applicants just aren’t there. Universities and colleges haven’t hired enough faculty in the last twenty or thirty years, and these are the folks who would be applying for these administrative jobs now.

His explanation makes some sense, but from my point of view, I think it’s more than that. First off (and this depends a lot on who you listen to), a lot of administrative work has already been forced on to faculty. I say “depending on who you listen to” because I’m in a field (composition and rhetoric) where it seems pretty normal to do some administrative work, because I don’t think I have enough of a point of comparison to argue that the administrative work that faculty do now is so much more than it used to be, and because it seems to me that plenty of faculty managed to avoid this work by simply refusing to do it.

In my department, there are basically two types of faculty administrative work: the sort of thing that everyone does (most people pitch in to write silly program review documents, for example), and what I call “quasi-administrative” work, where a faculty member receives course release to head a program or a special project. For example, I am the writing program coordinator right now, which means I receive a course release a term to do stuff like advising grad students, scheduling classes, helping to recruit faculty, and other various paper-pushing activities.

Which leads me to reason number two: never say never, but I am unlikely to apply for a full-time administrative job (a department head, some sort of dean, etc.) because it strikes me as generally unpleasant and thankless, an opinion that I am sure has been formed in part by my experiences as a faculty member who has been called upon to do thankless administrative paperwork in the past. Being the writing program coordinator is kind of fun, mainly because it involves working with students and colleagues in my field. But doing this work full-time and doing this work with minimal contact with faculty and no meaningful contact with students seems like a bad idea to me.

Like I said, never say never. Administrators make more money than faculty, and there are some potentially interesting administrative jobs here at EMU. But this kind of work is simply at odds with my lifestyle as a happy academic. I like my job because I like to teach, I like to do research, and I like the extraordinary flexibility of my schedule (though it must be acknowledged it is both a blessing and a curse). Administrators don’t teach (well, some do, but they don’t teach much), they don’t do research (again, some do, but not as a rule), and they have to work regular and fixed hours (and they are expected to be at all kinds of administrator-like functions beyond 9-5).

Plus I don’t have the wardrobe.