July 25, 2010

Goodbye to Those Overpaid Professors in Their Cushy Jobs

Goodbye to Those Overpaid Professors in Their Cushy Jobs 1

Jay Premack for The Chronicle

John Hare, an English professor at Montgomery College, in Maryland: "I have to spend 15 hours a week in a classroom talking about things that I really love. ... For this I get paid."

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close Goodbye to Those Overpaid Professors in Their Cushy Jobs 1

Jay Premack for The Chronicle

John Hare, an English professor at Montgomery College, in Maryland: "I have to spend 15 hours a week in a classroom talking about things that I really love. ... For this I get paid."

By Ben Gose

The notion that college professors lead easy lives isn't quite dead, but it may soon be history.

A decade or two ago, it wasn't hard to find state legislators, pushing for university budget cuts, who complained about the leisurely lives of academics. Try a Google search for such criticism today, and not much turns up.

There may still be full professors who teach three or four classes per year, head off to their cabins for the summer, and send their own children to college with