Posted on 02/13/2007 1:36:04 PM PST by Locomotive Breath
That was a good read. Thanks for the link.
I love this line:
Moderator - Latinos are penalized for being Spanish only.
Um, not if they're in Mexico City!
I saw the coverage last night on TV. Even the reporting was slanted for the benefit of the "Academic Victims". lol. Poor babies. "They'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony...."
If you are a young conservative academic, the trick is to keep quiet about politics (don't be provocative or outspoken) until you get tenure. Then speak your mind. (The real trick to getting tenure is to make sure your students like you, publish enough—and get along well with your colleagues.)
As my department head used to say tenure guarantees a job but not an office or salary.
If you somehow manage to slip through the system and get tenure, being a conservative means a lifetime of biting your tongue or ostracism.
Tell me of one time that a faculty member was repressed from expressing an opinion.
Star faculty at big schools get $100K+ a year. But the average prof at the average school ("North by Northwest State") gets more like $45-75K/year (depending on rank). Business faculty (who tend to be the most conservative on campus) get $80-120K. Engineers also get paid more. But old radicals tend not to get high salaries, because they tend to be in subjects like sociology that get paid poorly. There's nothing like a Marxist philosophy prof complaining that the business profs get paid twice as much even though they do the same work.
Ya know...go back in time 50 years ...change the color of the woman involved to white...the students to black and ...it becomes apparent that with some people things really never change...the same racist Democrats whose words and actions perpetuated the ancient bigoted southern myths...have simply, quite literally, changed their appearances...but not their minds and words. and even more amazing, is that the contemporary MSM is just as complicit in these issues today, as in pretending what came before never existed then. The bigots are better paid, have better press, and are just as powerful.
You have a point. Fortunately, I'm at enough of a backwater of a school that faculty who are conservative are treated with respect. We have openly religious faculty, and openly conservative faculty, not just in the School of Business, but in the Natural Sciences and even the Social Sciences.
University of Poland? Moscow?
But as the charts show, assistant and associate profs are in the high 40s to low 50s range. Only a fraction (a third to a half?) of all profs are full profs, and what the chart doesn't show is that the salary at promotion to full is well below the $80K range in the chart (it takes years after promotion to make to that level). That is, you might be in the mid 50s just before promotion to full, and end up in the low 60s just after promotion to full. (I just got promoted to full, and I get about 60K not counting any summer teaching. If I teach the allowed two summer courses, that would up my salary to about 70K.)
Salaries by the way vary substantially by type of institution. It's lower at undergraduate-only schools and it's lower in fly-over land (e.g. the Ohio River valley, which is where I am).
One thing to bear in mind: it is often difficult to become a college prof, and it can be tough to get tenure too. This is a real cost of an academic career, to be balanced against salaries and tenure: People are often in their early 30s upon clearing a PhD, and they often have to go through one or more postdocs before landing a tenure-track position. Mid 30s or older. Then add 7 years to get tenure. So you're an assistant prof in your late 30s or early 40s. A software engineer may well have been programming (at 60K+ a year) for 15 or 20 years by that point in time. An academic career can actually be a massive opportunity cost.
In light of Duke's betrayal of the presumption of innocence and of numerous inflamatory statements by Duke professors and by Duke University's willingness to throw the recently accused under the bus, what can any reasonable person conclude? Yes, there is nothing bad enough that can happen to Duke University!
It's more like $140k
The abuses I see do not involve politics (yes, there's some indoctrination going on where I teach, but probably not a huge amount). Instead, the abuses I see focus on watering down the curriculum and coddling students—and giving high grades. (A good account of this is the book Generation X Goes To College.)
There are three reasons why students are treated this way.
One is political, there's pressure to admit poor students and make them succeed. Universities are of course heavily into "diversity," and often unqualified students are recruited. (There's a trend now to strengthen community colleges that would better serve such students. They've done that in my state.)
The second reason why students are coddled is because the university itself is under pressure to keep enrollments high—because the funding formula for the university is (typically) tied to enrollment. So faculty at such a school find themselves being constantly reminded to worry about "retention," and never reminded about academic standards, etc.
But the primary reason students are coddled is because if students are unhappy (as when a professor tries to set high standards), they will give the professor bad marks on the student evaluations of teaching. At a teaching institution, this is poison to a professor's career. (Typically, when a professor fails as a teacher, it is the intro courses that cause the problem. Many faculty went to ivy league or selective colleges in their own undergraduate days, and they have trouble adapting to schools with weak academic standards, particularly at the 100-level, where many students are unprepared due to open enrollment. The result is student complaints, and they lose their careers. I've seen this happen to several colleagues where I teach.)
Where this sort of thing happens the most is in the social sciences and in education. (It happens in the arts and letters too, but it turns out writing courses, which all students must take, are a primary reason why students drop out of college—many students cannot write to save their lives.) This is a matter of concern if not resentment in the natural sciences, whose faculty are well aware that they lose students to the the other discplines that grade easier.
The presence of Marxist politics and other substitutes for actual rigorous learning I view as more a symptom of a deeper problem, the collapse of intellectual standards.
Another symptom is the demise of the western civilization course. There is practically no college left in the US that makes its students take a simple, basic survey course of western civilization. Students instead end up taking odd hodgepodges of courses, with no unifying themes. They are required to "take two courses in 'historical investigation'," which can be a History of Feminism course plus a History of Popular Music course. Once I had a distinctly unsettling experience: I asked an undergraduate at my school if she knew when World War II happened. He had no idea (she didn't know it was [mostly] in the 1940s). This was an upper classman in biology. This is the real problem in universities today. Left-wing politics is only a symptom.
Well, this post has pretty much gotten out of control. Oh well.
You miss the point - they are sticking to the curriculum, the Marxist one. Why do you think there is a "magical" curriculum to which they should stick, and to which we all would agree is "proper" ?
I don't think Duke charges $80k a year for tuition, room and board. It's close to $40k, as I said.
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