I recently ran across a great quotation from the late Bill Lane, who was a longtime professor at Western Kentucky University: “Never despise your own gift and never covet another.” This caused me to ponder something I see repeatedly: discipline envy.
A sense of envy that can so easily turn into rank jealousy finds fertile ground in the “perks” of other academic disciplines, whether they occur in the form of greater institutional support, higher pay, lower teaching loads, elevated prestige, public approbation, or any other boon. As one humanities professor told me, “Every time I hear about the STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] initiatives from our governor or our institution’s president, I just want to scream. It’s a slap in the face to the rest of us.”
Likewise, it’s easy to envy our nonacademic counterparts in professions like law, medicine, business, and government. I’ve heard more than one professor lament, “I’m so much smarter than my friend who became a lawyer/dentist /marketer, but I make a third the salary for my efforts and achievements.”
What “perks” of your discipline do you hear people in other disciplines lament? What is the reality about those perks?
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18 Responses to Discipline Envy
dr_redrum - February 8, 2010 at 4:11 pm
Summers off.
jeffgryan - February 8, 2010 at 4:13 pm
Grant monies and the like aside, it’s the travel to exotic places to do fieldwork (I’m a geology professor….)
12094444 - February 8, 2010 at 4:16 pm
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics)
carriemagg - February 8, 2010 at 4:31 pm
Absolutely nobody envies me. I teach composition.
22273693 - February 8, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Library Journal’s Annual Periodical Price Survey uses STM (Science, Technology, Medicine) If you want to add E = Engineering, I see no problem. If there is a well known/used STEM that says Mathematics, fine.
cwinton - February 8, 2010 at 4:52 pm
As one of those in a STEM area (actually, more than one), I would cite others complaining about our1. salaries (never mind the pay, no matter how adjusted for 9-month or benefits, was less than many of our students were receiving from the private sector with BS and MS degrees);2. availability of grant money (or its companion, contract work) to support research assistants & associates, travel, labs, etc. (never mind the overhead that was going to support the graduate school, which covered all disciplines and made possible graduate degree programs in disciplines with fewer grant opportunities)3. lowered teaching loads (never mind the added time was rarely sufficient to cover the time demanded by funded research – a good bit of which is administrative in nature, by the way);4. better equipment, computers in particular (never mind this is a tools of the trade issue – grants rarely will supply funding for what is viewed as basic infrastructure for a research area);5. ability to attract top students; for example, a graduate student population having the highest average overall GRE scores on campus (never mind, despite colleagues suspicions to the contrary, this was in part due to our expectation that our students, in addition to being computationally adept, should be able to express themselves effectively both orally and in writing).From our side, the complaint was that when P&T time came, it was not uncommon to find faculty from other areas who thought nothing of trying to impose their own (often peculiar from our point of view) disciplinary standards to measure the worth of someone from our area (teaching too limited, hasn’t published a book, not enough journal articles, too little community service, etc), typically discounting successful grant acquisition, invited participation in prestigious symposia, widely cited state-of-art development work or software, and other markers typically reflecting success in highly competitive peer arenas. I can’t say I particularly envied colleagues in other disciplines, except to be mystified on occasion; for example, being placed in charge of a general education task force because I was the only one in the group perceived as lacking a vested interest to protect.
rcosgrov - February 8, 2010 at 5:01 pm
carriemagg,Okay, nothing envious about our work– but at least we’ve got solidarity…?
jodprov - February 8, 2010 at 6:10 pm
Eat your hearts out: I get to read all the Latin I can. Makes my head feel *so* good. Classicists rock.
breazeale - February 8, 2010 at 7:26 pm
Summers “off,” for sure: all the working world envies us that, as well as for our “working week” itself — so far as it is publicly discernible.Within my own public research university the humanists have paranoid fears that everyone else in the institution simultaneously depends upon, condescends toward, and is trying their best to destroy them — by benign neglect, if not by more aggressive means.And all those other colleges and faculties are all too often reminded by us in A&S of how insular and self-serving our own professional interests and perspectives can be.It can sometimes dissolve into a near-poisonous atmosphere of mutual distrust and recrimination, though strategically distributed people of good will can sometimes prevent this.Jambontoo
englishwlu - February 9, 2010 at 6:34 am
I’ve noticed many law professors want to team-teach with English professors. I think they envy the simple fact that we get to talk about books in our classes! Even in our comp classes (though the law professors don’t volunteer to teach those.)Hang in there, carriemag, you know the pleasure of reading and writing and that sharp, gratifying learning curve in the well-taught composition course. OK, not for every student. But you know what I’m talking about.
cinematic - February 9, 2010 at 9:04 am
My colleagues in other disciplines jealously resent the fact that our prime organization, the Broadcast Education Association, holds its annual convention in Las Vegas every year. (This is due to the fact we meet in conjunction with the National Association of Broadcasters who needs the Vegas convention space for their exhibits.)
philosophy - February 9, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Perhaps an oft-told tale: a legislative committee is considering whether profs at the state’s universities “do enough work” to deserve their salaries and fringe benefits.”What is your teaching load, Professor?”"12 semester-hours, Senator.”"Well, Professor, I must admit them’s long hours; but on the other hand, it’s light work.”
jffoster - February 10, 2010 at 6:32 am
Well 11, I certainly don’t resent your conventions in Lost Wages, Nevada. I wouldnt go if the LSA or AAA or ALT met there. I dont gamble, I dont golf, and from what I hear here there aint much else there.
nrklomp - February 11, 2010 at 9:38 am
I envy the lack of unreasonable competition in the sciences.The humanities are like Thunderdome sometimes. Also, I envy that people think they can just “get” what a physicist of any stripe does and why they do it, but cannot understand why someone who studies literature does what they do. The ubiquitous “why?” is disconcerting.
smkelly - February 11, 2010 at 7:28 pm
As an EFL teacher, no one in academia envies me. I’m guilty of envying the French and German teachers who get twice the money for half the teaching (half as many classes and tiny classes of 8 students versus 26-30 in mine). Yes, they must publish, but I publish and serve on an academic journal’s board.They get tenure and we now have term limits of 6 years. After that we must leave.
kkellermann - February 13, 2010 at 4:50 pm
That’s a shame, smkelly. I teach ESL, and I love it. Sometimes I hear from other folks in the English dept who envy our being able to work from students from so many cultures and language backgrounds. Yes, there are still many challenges, but it creates a very interesting environment, and there are always plenty of discussions and opportunities for the students to learn from each other as much as from the teachers, especially when it comes to cultural differences and similarities. One colleague joked to me that she wished that her own students were so eager to learn English as our ESL students are.
laoshi - February 14, 2010 at 12:43 pm
I chose ESL as a second career, and I also love it. But I’m not sure if anyone in academe envies me. Let’s just say I’ve found my briarpatch!
ming1951 - February 15, 2010 at 1:20 am
Another perk of the ESL/EFL fields is being able to take advantage of ever-present, data-rich classroom “research laboratories.” Here interested researchers can explore the intricacies of adult or juvenile language acquisition, a window to the complex cognitive and affective processes of the mind. Not much expensive equipment required, either.