We spent the weekend in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania with an anthropologist friend who has two 3-year-old bitches (Lab and Husky) and 4 acres of land on which Alex and Sammy could play with them. One of the nice things about colleges located in areas where real estate is cheap is that the professors live close to the campus and are available to students for informal dinners and shared extracurricular activities. Thus over the weekend we encountered a few other Gettysburg College professors. I asked one of them whether faculty could bring their dogs to work. She replied “The college’s Affirmative Action lawyer, before she left, made up a lot of new rules. One of them was that junior and senior faculty could not sleep together. Another was to ban dogs in the buildings.”
This is a good measure of how desperate PhDs are for jobs as college professors. The college pays lower salaries, to people of the same age, as the public high school down the street. The high school teachers were able to go to work at age 22 without suffering through a long period of starvation wages as graduate assistants. The high school teachers are union members who ever have to worry about losing their job, compared to the college professors who live for 7 years in fear of being tossed out as a middle-aged has-been (“denied tenure” is the polite term for this event). And now these poor souls are expected to get through their day without a dog at their side and without the possibility of an interlude with a more senior professor.
[Note to parents: if you want to know why tuition prices have risen so fast, consider that a very small liberal arts school was paying a full-time lawyer to work on affirmative action; Walmart has a “Chief Diversity Officer” but they had $billions in revenue over which to spread the cost.]
I doubt that a few “diversity” people are the cost, compared to the tens of millions dumped into non-academic things like sports teams. Most colleges seem to run like businesses, not academic institutions, and are focused on their “money making” components—the sports teams.
petrilli: Most universities I’ve been around have self-supporting athletic departments, and I’m not sure how tuition costs are increased by what you describe as a “money making component.” I would ascribe the increasing costs to supply-demand effects: people are insensitive to costs of something that is considered a social and economic necessity, and ballooning housing prices (for parents who own homes) and available student loans only add fuel to the demand side.
Philip: Being able to spend time with one’s dog and/or children is considered a luxury / privilege of the elite in today’s society. Factory workers, Wal-Mart checkers, mortgage processors, teachers, nurses, healthcare administrators, skip tracers, attorneys, bank tellers, waiters/waitresses, and cubicle-dwelling engineers (except at a few dotcom type places during the tech bubble) are forbidden companionship during most of their waking hours. Granted, people are drawn to becoming professors for the perceived freedom and status, but try showing up for work at Test Engineering at a Big Three auto company with your dog.
On the other hand, a recent newspaper profile of a businessman who provides coffee supplies and/or coffee consulting to convenience stores mentioned that he constantly travels with a King Charles Spaniel, perhaps as an indication that “he has arrived.” Perhaps Coffee Man and the King Charles, Philip and Alex, and Paris and Tinkerbell will meet for lunch soon.
Philip,
Oprah, Sophie, and Solomon have been invited to the lunch to add gender balance and ethnic diversity. Oprah will convince the restaraunt to donate the meal, then discuss her “philanthropic donation” on her show.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2004-09-13-oprah-cars_x.htm
The previous post should begin “Philip:”
I don’t know about professors, but if you’re the Governor of MT you can bring your dog to work. http://www.helenair.com/articles/2005/02/02/montana/a01020205_02.txt
Reportedly Jag, the border collie, is a good judge of character. ‘‘He’s not a Rottweiler or a German shepherd. But he’s a student of people. He looks them over. People with a negative aura, he picks up on that right away.”
On a more positive note; ‘‘He’s a good icebreaker,” said Schweitzer, whose wife brought the wiry black-and-white collie to Helena from the family farm last weekend. ‘‘Most people like dogs. Most people feel comfortable with dogs. He puts people at ease.”
Unfortunately, Jag seems to have failed at putting some of the (Republican) legislators at ease ;-). Must be that negative aura…
The bulk of the Echo Boomers (born between 1982-1995) are starting to work their way through college. Your professor friends can expect a some fat years ahead during which the pendulum will swing their way. Just be sure to remind them to re-write to rules during the good times so that they can sleep with whomever they wanted. 🙂
First jobs suck, and most of the ones after do, too. A lot of the bright kids tried to route around the damage by going to graduate school. I’m suspicious of this: I think a lot of people will just end up in deep debt that forces them to take worse jobs, or, get jobs in academia where they’re exploited for even lower pay than they had before they went to graduate school.
Lesson: if you have a good idea, don’t wait for a job or academia to give you cover to do it. More: http://www.cadence90.com/wp/?p=3735
People go into the military knowing that soldiers die
People go into teaching knowing the pay sucks
People go into teaching college because they think it’s all peaches and cream, summers off, good pay, tenure is beautiful, etc. However, as they’re doing the grad work, if they don’t come to realize that ‘tenure is only good if you get it’ – then that’s their own damn fault. From two semesters of jobs with titles beginning with ‘graduate… ‘ I knew that much. And I knew I didn’t want to do it anymore!
There are very few careers that people go into that they don’t realize that it is a whole lot of hard work and not as much pay as they might want. Your best bet is to not get yourself into debt, take what you can, improve yourself, save for retirement and keep trying to move up.
And if people hate that their boss won’t let them bring their dog to work, perhaps they should become their own boss. 🙂 Of course, then they can’t move up – they’re at the top of the heap – not always a great place.
You are right on the money when you say that many PhD are desperate for jobs. College professors are cheap. The profession is obviously very attractive for many intelligent and educated people. That happens in many fields. It is possible to hire a fully competent airline pilot for very little.
I can’t wait for Philip to get a new job again, so I can hear how awful it is to be an amateur pilot, flying around the world with your dog and flirting with women half your age. Sure, it *sounds* pretty seductive now, but I would have said the same about programming or college teaching just a couple of years ago. It won’t be long before the BigCos realize you can retire an Indian for a tenth of the price…
Can the high school teachers bring THEIR dogs to work? Are sexual liasons between them not grounds for disciplinary action?
I mean yeah, I guess you can make a case that being denied the right to have a dog with you at work is a bad thing, but it doesn’t work as a point of contrast unless the high school teachers live under a less restrictive rule. (I for one have never worked in an environment that allowed dogs except as helpers for the blind, and have never felt particularly oppressed by this…and while I’ve occasionally regretted the full, complete, absolute, unconditional, and beyond-question ban on sexual relationships with cow-orkers at every workplace I’ve ever had or am ever likely to have, it’s still not a valid comparison if the high school teachers have a similar rule.)
As a union card-carrying high school teacher, I rather enjoy watching PhDs fish through my rubbish for food and old newspapers. This I do from my mansion in Lincoln, which overlooks several acres of whitetrash-free conservation land.
One reason universities can get away with it is that they pay better than universities in India, Russia or China. It’s a global faculty job market and due to barriers such as the green card and teacher certification, it is separate from the K-12 teacher job market.
A teacher with tenure may still have a job but it may be possible that instead of teaching in valley at a nearby all white school, your next assignment may be in South Central. That could be as near as getting laid off as one can get without actually geting fired.
A HS teacher friend told his principal that he was gone if any kid pointed a gun at him. Well, the pricipal got the gun point experience before my friend. His HS had a two cell lockup on campus.
Great work if you can get it.
Just out of college teachers get the bad jobs and the experienced teachers get out of Dodge/Ft Apache as fast as possible.
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