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Paycheck or Reality Check?

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By Susanna Ashton

For the first time in eight years of tenure-track teaching, I will be receiving a paycheck in June, July, and August. That's not because of any additional summer teaching on my part, or because my employer thinks I'm fabulous and has decided to throw extra money my way. It's because of a new payroll option offered by my university in which my regular nine-month salary can be prorated across 12 months.

That option, as a colleague pointed out to me, actually means that I lose a bit of money in the long run. After all, I don't earn any interest on the allocated percentage of my salary that is set aside for those summer months.

My colleague, however, assumes that I actually do set aside significant summer savings that accrue interest. In that, he is sadly mistaken. I am ashamed to say that my savings generally run out by the end of July. By early August, I have begun putting far too many living expenses on my credit cards and wind up digging out from that debt until November.

My hope is that the 12-month payment option will help me sensibly balance my 2007 summer budgeting and bills. But the prospect of summer checks has also raised, in my mind, the larger issue of what, exactly, professors do during the summer. And what do the university and society at large think we do?

Many academics teach during the summer as part of their contracts or for personal financial need. For many of us, however, the summer is the one time of year we can focus uninterrupted on our scholarly work.

If you are paid only during the nine months when classes are in session, the message is that you are only doing nine months of work. My university's new paycheck option, I believe, is indicative of how it has embraced a modern identity as a research institution -- one in which faculty members are understood to be doing work even when they are not in the classroom.

Paying an academic salary over 12 months underscores the idea that intellectual exploration and inquiry -- the kind, incidentally, that also feeds the best teaching -- can happen in the so-called "off months."

This issue took a personal turn for me in another way a year ago. When I told my department chairman that I was expecting a baby in July of 2006, he exclaimed that it was "wonderful timing" because I "wouldn't have to miss anything!" He meant that in all kindness, but his observation nonetheless reflected the assumption that scholars who are not teaching over the summer are not doing work.

While having a baby after the spring semester did not alter my teaching schedule, it certainly put my scholarly agenda on hold for the summer. And insofar as scholarship is an expected part of my professional obligations, falling behind without an official and institutionally recognized excuse such as formal maternity leave could genuinely damage my career.

With my chairman's assistance, I eventually worked out my teaching, scholarly, and family obligations, but the incident reminded me of how much all of us -- even my very professionally productive chairman -- can internalize the problematic notion of summer time as time off.

The nature of summer work for academics has always posed a PR problem. According to many "civilians," we professors have great jobs because we don't work during the summer. That viewpoint is so widespread that an added benefit of teaching summer courses, besides the extra money, is that you don't have to get defensive about how you're spending your summer.

And since summer school has such depressing connotations for the average civilian -- conjuring up notions of failed high-school classes and underprepared students -- there is even a bit of sympathy afforded to faculty members who announce they are teaching in the summer.

Nonetheless, the tenure-and-promotion clock doesn't take a holiday as the lazy days of summer drift by.

One solution to that PR problem that I have found is to let my civilian friends and acquaintances know that during the summer I "work from home," or even that I "telecommute" from my "home office."

And now that the practice of working from home has become so familiar, it is actually as if the rest of the working world has caught up with academics, in a sense, rather than vice versa. According to a 2004 consumer survey conducted by the Deringer Research Group, almost a fifth of the American work force works at least a full day a month at home. And the survey question only considered work done during normal business hours. Just imagine how much larger that number would be if it contained all the people who take work home from the office to finish at night or on the weekend.

More civilians these days seem to understand that working under the strictures of your own self-discipline has its own set of hardships. I may do part of my reading, writing, and research in my pajamas but I never let the words "summer vacation" cross my lips.

So while I am troubled by the creeping corporatization of our academic workplace, I think that calling our summer research months "telecommuting" or "flextime" might go a long way toward enhancing our public image.

And, who knows, maybe opting for those summer paychecks might encourage me to be more productive when distraction beckons. But at least for those two weeks from the end of the spring semester to when the first summer paycheck arrives, I am going to let myself be distracted.