After the Wealth of Nations book of Adam Smith, the main concern of people from any rank or class has been targeted mostly to maintaining their economic well-being and maximize their profit. This has definitely motivated people to work harder and try to be more and more skilled and experienced at a field that will promote their financial state and earn a better living. This approach has had, as other theories and movements, its good aspects and its "evil" aspects. It has definitely raised the wealth of the people who knew about it, but also has impoverished the countries that it is applied in terms of labor and is accused recently of the international poverty. The reason for this: it does not know any moral or spiritual value but is based totally on materialistic concerns and in some way it teaches how to exploit people as much as possible. The way that someone's work and effort is valued is in economic terms the most paid is the one who gives the highest marginal utility or the biggest surplus, or in everyday language the one who makes the highest profit.
This fact is also witnessed in negative ways in the university life, in the way how the attempts of everyone is valued and appreciated. Strange and surprising to everyone the coach of the basketball team is paid much higher than the president of the university. Why would everyone ask? Simply because he brings to the university a higher income than the president does. If this is legal, is it fair that someone who does a job that has nothing to do with the university' primary goal that is education, to have a high salary than the representative of the instituion to the outter world ? And this is the result that brings the immoralistic application of the theory that Adam Smith taught some centuries ago.
When it comes to the teachers it becomes worser. Teachers are the real runners of the university, those who "give life" to the university by offering what is required from it, by being the closest to students who are the primary source of income to the university. Teachers are the ones who work the hardest in the university life, who prepare what the students have come to university and spend their finances on. If a university has good teachers, it also has a good reputation, it also has more "customers"(students), it is also paid more attraction by the business and other fields that bring income, it is greated higher by the education experts. All these accomplishments give the university the opportunity to charge higher tuitions and fees and to attract more sponsors than its concorrents. Students who graduate from such universities have higher GPAs, are more knowledgeable and well-rounded, have a better understanding of life, are more prepared for their future professions, and so serve more to their families and the nation. They are the future sources of income that will run the countrie's activities tomorrow. And all of this is mostly thanks to the work and efforts of the teachers, who work the hardest in class and out of class and are the least paid among the officials. As is stated in "The Exhausting Job of Teaching" article by Shari Wilson, the teaching load is exhausting. A teacher has always to find ways how to explain better to the students, to make students work harder, to have grading policies that are more effective and fair. This definitely requires skills beyond their expertise. They have to apply to the fields of knowledge that solve the issues regarding these topics. This fact is also stated at the " Faculty" article by Nelson and Watt, teachers at the university do not have just to be graduate of "their own" but also to know all the trappings of the specialization of their faculty". The way that brought them to the status of being a teacher at the university is also one of the hardest. They have to finish a terminal degree in their field of knowledge, which generally means a five-year lasting Ph.D. degree after the college degree. There are plenty of workers who have just a college degree or at most a master degree but are much more paid than the teachers. Their jobs may be much easier to perform and require less effort but they are making more profit although there might be a smaller demand, a smaller market, a smaller supply for their field. But the ones who prepare all of these jobs, the architectures of these sources of income, the teachers are paid less and improperly to their efforts. After some years, the students that they are teaching in their classes will earn a better living than they do after years of tireless work and efforts. This is a real paradox to the common sense and conscience.
You bring up some excellent points here, Herion. But what's even stranger is when you consider that although the average time to degree in some of the science fields may be around five to six years, the time required to complete a Ph.D. in the humanities averages as much as 10 years (depends on the statistics you're consulting). This is often because graduate students end up adjuncting or working as graduate student instructors to pay the bills, which leaves less time for research, which is the primary point of the doctoral dissertation. So imagine that a person spends eight years (we're being optimistic!) in graduate school attaining the terminal degree in his or her field, sometimes postponing family life or other priorities and occasionally "earning" some hefty debts--then spends an average of two to three years as a visiting assistant professor or in a postdoctoral fellowship, jumping from institution to institution, sometimes each across the nation from the previous one--only to finally land a tenure-track job that earns him or her a $35K salary plus benefits. This person might be in his or her mid- to late 30s by this point but could have been earning twice that within just a few years of graduating with a bachelor's degree (sometimes more, depending on the field)! Is it any wonder that such a small percentage of the world's population bothers with this academic career track?
ReplyDeleteWe're not crazy, mind you, though the joke is that we are masochistic. The Adam Smith link is interesting, but I wonder if anyone has done any studies on the relationship between academic attitudes toward work and career track (this strange cycle of infinite deferral) and other theories of issues like work ethic. The perception an academic has of his or her own teaching, research, and service seems quite different from other people's attitudes toward their own labor in that the former tends toward the sense of work being all-consuming, ubiquitious, and around-the-clock (one is always thinking about how to teach better, contemplating how to work out that analytic argument or experiment, and/or feeling immensely guilty for NOT grading that stack of papers or being in the library), but I don't have enough experience outside of academia to be able to comment more qualitatively!