According to a new survey by TIAA-CREF, most full-time faculty members at four-year colleges like their jobs, Paula Wasley reports on The Chronicle’s Web site:
The company polled 300 full-time faculty members, who had each been employed for three or more years at a single four-year institution, about their views on their careers, work-life balance, and retirement expectations.
According to a report on the survey, “Do Great Minds Think Alike: Faculty Perspectives on Career and Retirement,” 53 percent of the respondents said they were very satisfied with their job, and 43 percent were somewhat satisfied. By comparison, a recent survey of American workers by Harris Interactive and the International Herald Tribune found that 42 percent of employees were very satisfied with their job and 38 percent somewhat satisfied.
Full-timers’ one major disappointment concerned their pay, Wasley writes: “Only 23 percent said they were very satisfied with their salaries, while a quarter said they were not too satisfied or not at all satisfied.”
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11 Responses to Faculty Satisfaction
minnesotan - April 12, 2011 at 6:24 am
I just hope the computers are kinder masters than we were to each other.
iris411 - April 12, 2011 at 9:28 am
I don’t see why science and humanities are doomed to be enemies. Higher education is not a zero sum game. Even if this were a power struggle, it is not science again humanities, it is applied science, Business and economy against hard-core science which has not applicable use in sight and humanities whose impact cannot be measured in numbers.
enadler - April 12, 2011 at 2:20 pm
It is a rampant anti-intellectualism combined with a market mentality that disenfranchises anything of no apparent immediate monetary value. Higher education may not be a zero-sum game, but its source of supporting funds has become so, with attention and funds disproportionately turned to commercialization, job creation and economic development.
supertatie - April 13, 2011 at 8:05 am
I agree with iris411. The sciences are not at war with the humanities. The humanities are at war with themselves – and are perceived as being at war with society. And society is fighting back.
For example, the article in the Chronicle about the Tyler Clementi Act – and particularly the comments posted in support of it – demonstrate just how far the humanities have strayed from their roots. (Or, at least, the roots upon which American society has been founded.) I read with some horror as one after another poster called for the imposition of draconian speech codes intended to prevent anyone – but particularly anyone they view as a “minority” (and in this case, homosexuals) from offense, or intolerance, or feeling bad about themselves.
Where are the passionate defenders of freedom of speech, and individual liberties, and responsibility, and human autonomy that used to be the hallmarks of the humanities? Now in place of liberty, the academy celebrates libertinism. In place of biology, we have faculty teaching about the use of sex toys, and exhibitionism (Northwestern’s John Bailey – http://www.newser.com/story/113286/northwestern-professor-john-michael-bailey-hosts-live-orgasm-for-sex-class.html). In place of graduate level English, we have dominatrices who are recruiting their students to participate as sex workers, and attacking students and faculty who challenge her. (http://chronicle.com/article/In-Professor-Dominatrix/124369/). In place of the quest for truth – which presumes its existence — we have “deconstructionists” who proclaim that all truth is “relative” – if in fact it exists at all.
And all this transpires while tuition skyrockets, and student loans become mortgages held by graduates who cannot find jobs with meaningless degrees that have prepared them for very little in the way of meaningful employment.
Yes, as someone who has been in higher ed for two decades, I understand that these stories, and the many like them, do not reflect the sum total of what is being researched and taught in the humanities. But they are not exceptions to the rule, either. Many Americans today view too much of the humanities as deliberately eroding the cultural underpinnings that make civil society possible, and doing so as some sort of academic exercise engaged in with detached amusement, without regard for the consequences of educating multiple generations of adults who come of age thinking that there is no truth, that all morality is “relative” (or individually determined), that all cultures and governments are “equal,” that “tolerance” is synonymous with “approval,” that technological progress and free markets are bad for the earth, that sexual promiscuity is more socially evolved behavior (when in fact, it reflects a devolution to more primitive and animalistic conduct), that parenting is unnecessary, that there are no biological differences between men and women, that children can be raised by the state, that power concentrated in the hands of human beings is not dangerous, as long as the humans who have it are sufficiently “progressive.”
In the face of these destructive, ahistorical, and demonstrably false assertions, it is little wonder that there are calls for a greater emphasis on the STEM fields.
Having had a traditional (and superb) education in the humanities, I can quote Marx, who said, “The last capitalist we hang shall have sold us the rope.” The last humanities department to turn out the lights may have called for the abolition of electricity in the name of excessive carbon footprints.
Res ipsa loquitur.
academicwanderer - April 13, 2011 at 12:05 pm
You can quote Marx … as long as you don’t plan to take a job as Provost in a public university in the rural south (like Kennesaw State).
gahnett - April 13, 2011 at 3:39 pm
You lost me at “Markets quantify before they do anything else”.
Judging by your last paragraph, it’s not clear to me if even you believe this nonsense regarding the separability of humanities and STEM or whether you state those positions purely for argument’s sake.
burger1376 - April 13, 2011 at 10:30 pm
All I know is that if we don’t have more STEM students who are native born Americans, we are doomed as a nation.
versabox - April 14, 2011 at 1:20 pm
I think you’ll find that students at schools like MIT, Caltech, and Georgia Tech do just as well with “promotion and expression of ‘values’” as students at schools like Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore.
fizmath - April 15, 2011 at 10:50 pm
Scientific thinking grew out of the Humanities. The founders of modern science studied the classics, philosophy and theology. That gave them a starting point from which to view the world and analyze it critically. They believed the world to be a product of a divine creation and therefore intelligible.
The problem with emphasizing STEM subjects is that most students lack the desire, patience and competency that is needed. The people who run the world typically don’t study STEM subjects but rather rhetoric and writing. An economy that does not value a quality liberal arts education is doomed to fail. I suspect that is happening at the moment.
tee_bee - April 16, 2011 at 12:48 pm
It is a zero sum game when it comes to accreditation. Ever try to get more humanities or social science into an engineering curriculum? The accreditation requirements simply don’t allow it.
iris411 - April 16, 2011 at 12:58 pm
I don’t know what you are talking about. All science majors are required to take a certain number of humanity credits in writing, foreign language, and so on. For biology major, there’s extra requirement on ethics. Many EE and ME students study Japanese, many math students study French. However, humanity college students never need to study math again, ever. If there’s a a bias at all, it’s too little math requirement in humanities, not the other way around.