cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This essay is drawn from the final issue of minnesota review to be edited by Jeffrey Williams, featuring a series of statements of professional commitment or belief -- credos -- by representative scholars. It's a very special series of essays, and a worthy capstone to Williams's extraordinary run as editor.

I'll follow up with more about Williams' accomplishments, and the future of the journal, which received several bids from institutions willing to step in where Carnegie Mellon stumbled. A letter of intent has been signed, and an orderly transfer to a great new editorial board is underway.

The issue also brings nearly to a close Williams’s spectacular series of in-depth interviews. Often twenty pages in print, these leisurely portrait-of-an-era conversations have been typically longer than the articles in the same issue. Despite Williams’ normally unerring judgment, the issue includes a talk with me, “Higher Exploitation.”

My credo: “We Work” for the minnesota review, winter/spring 2009

I once shocked a colleague by responding to one of those newspaper stories about a prof “caught” mowing his lawn on a Wednesday afternoon by saying that many tenured faculty were morally entitled to think of their salaries after tenure as something similar to a pension.

After all, in some fields, many folks will not receive tenure until they’ve been working for low wages for 20 years or more: a dozen years to get the degree, another three to four years serving contingently — and then, finally, a “probationary” appointment lasting seven years at wages commonly lower than those of a similarly experienced bartender.

In the humanities, the journey to tenure is often a quarter of a century and rarely less than 15 years: If you didn’t go to a top-five or top-10 graduate school in your field, you probably taught several classes a year as a graduate student, usually while researching, publishing, and doing substantial service to the profession — writing book reviews, supervising other faculty and students, serving on committees, etc.

Call it, charitably, a mean of 20 years in some fields. Averaging the probationary years, contingent/postdoc years, and graduate student years together, you get an average annual take in contemporary dollars of $25,000 or less. The low wage is only the beginning of the story. There’s the structural racism of the wealth gap, to which I’ll return, and the heartbreak and structural sexism for families trying to negotiate child rearing during that brutal two decades. In most fields, most of those who begin doctoral study with the intention of an academic career fall away long before grasping the brass ring.

So at the end of all that, you have a person who is earning within $10,000 or $15,000 dollars of $70,000 and has perhaps 15 or 20 years of career ahead of them.

All of the reasonable studies of faculty work suggest that this person will put in between 50 and 55 hours a week for most of those years, more or less voluntarily. There are plenty of enforcement mechanisms to make sure that most faculty will teach, serve, and do scholarship in some rough proportion to their abilities and inclination, but after a quarter-century of strict selection and socialization, it is rarely necessary to invoke them to get the faculty to do their jobs.

By comparison to the 20-year probation leading to academic tenure, police officers, kindergarten teachers, and civil servants earn tenure or job security in a year or two, often less. During training, a high-school-educated police recruit in 2009 generally earns a salary of between $30,000 and $40,000, or about twice what a doctoral student earns during graduate school. Today’s starting salaries for 20- or 21-year old metropolitan police officers and state troopers are generally in the forties.

They receive bonuses for completing two- and four-year postsecondary degrees, as well as tens of thousands of dollars in supplemental pay for overtime and special duty. In Cincinnati, for example, a recruit will earn $31,000 a year during a six-month training period, and then begin work at $46,000. Five years later — at age 26 — they will expect to earn a base pay of $56,000, or about what junior faculty in many arts and sciences fields are being offered after their 20-year apprenticeships, in their early forties.

The 26-year-old police officer earning about the same base pay as our 40-year-old assistant professor can expect to work as little as another 15 or 20 years, keeping up with inflation whether or not promotions are awarded, collecting additional fair compensation in such forms, as the Cincinnati metro police site promises, “overtime earnings, court pay, certification pay, training allowance, and night differential pay.”

The Ohio Police and Fire Pension Fund estimator estimates that in 2009 a 48-year-old retiree who had done nothing to save additionally and earned just under $70,000 in his final year as a 27-year veteran would receive a pension of about $42,000. That 48-year-old would then be free to work another job—a corporate security position, or a supervisory position overseeing poorly-paid retail guards, or real estate, or whatever, earning, say $60,000 a year, for a total annual income of six figures. Or the retired officer could work part time, 20 hours a week or so, and still pull in about $80,000 or $90,000 — likely quite a bit more than our largely fictional time-serving 55-year-old associate prof is pulling in on the imaginary 20-hour work week of just showing up to teach from old notes.

Pension benefits for military service and certain civil-service positions are similar: Your average worker aged 48 to 55 without too many promotions but with a quarter-century or more of service will be eligible for pensions of between $30,000 and $60,000, or the equivalent of between about $800,000 and $1,500,000 in your Fidelity or TIAA-CREF accounts.

No matter how you slice it, most public servants earn a better return on education and effort over the course of a career than most faculty, including those on the tenure track. It’s hard to make a case that the rather unusual instances of lifetime associate profs who skate by on 20- or 30-hour work weeks are gaming the system.

Instead, they are the unusual few who have refused to allow the system to game them.

Whatever one thinks of these rare birds, one has to acknowledge the strength of character it takes to refuse the overwhelming appeal of the administration, the ideology of the profession, and the continuous hailing of their students and colleagues to give so much more than the standard set by other workers in the public service.

Furthermore, comparing professorial salaries to career patrolmen and high-school-educated infantry is bending over backward to prove the point. A more accurate and fair comparison would be to college-educated military officers. Someone who retires after just 20 years service with the rank of captain (Officer-3 on a scale that rises to Officer-10) is eligible for a pension of almost $70,000 a year. Retiring at Officer-3 represents very few promotions over the years — possibly indicating a relatively undistinguished career.

So after 20 years, a low-ranking commissioned officer can cash in and collect a decent professor’s paycheck for doing not a darned thing. If he does choose to exert himself, he can go to work as a corporate middle manager, earning about what a dean earns. Either way, after 20 years, it’s his choice. He can work a bit and whack down a dean’s salary. Or not — and still collect more than our hypothetical time-serving prof pulls in for actually working. Similar comparisons can be made in state or federal civil-service employment, in K-12 teaching, and in many private-sector careers.

When you get right down to it, considering the long years of preparation and strain, it’s hard to find any position so poorly compensated as tenure-track college faculty — except, of course, most of the rest of college faculty, the majority who don’t ever become eligible for tenure and earn even less.

Go to part 2