Reader Will Wheeler points us to this Washington Post commentary by Dr. David C. Levy on the public leaches known as faculty at public teaching Universities, and Will throws down the gauntlet daring one of us to comment. Not being one to whither in the face of a dare, her you go Will...
An executive who works a 40-hour week for 50 weeks puts in a minimum of 2,000 hours yearly. But faculty members teaching 12 to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks spend only 360 to 450 hours per year in the classroom. Even in the unlikely event that they devote an equal amount of time to grading and class preparation, their workload is still only 36 to 45 percent of that of non-academic professionals. Yet they receive the same compensation.
As illustrated in the excerpt above, Dr Levy (who I will refer to from this point forward as Bozo) bases his argument on the unsubstantiated fact that faculty with 100% teaching appointments, spend 12 to 15 hours per week in the classroom during the academic year and in return receive compensation similar to non-academic suckers with comparable educations who are too stupid to realize that there are greener pastures in the academic world.
After all, who wouldn't want a job where you work 20-30 hours a week for 30 weeks for the equivalent of 40-50 hour, 52 week full-time pay?
No really, who wouldn't want that job?
You would have to be an idiot to work full time when you could just teach for a few hours a week for the same pay.
Now that Bozo has exposed the secret, I can't wait to see the flood of executives lining up at the HR offices of local community colleges and teaching Universities for these cushy jobs.
And just think, as this flood of new teaching faculty prospects hits the job market, the supply increase will drive wages down to the place where Bozo thinks they should be.
Problem solved.
And we won't even need the tacet employer collusion Bozo calls for in the next paragraph:
If the higher education community were to adjust its schedules and semester structure so that teaching faculty clocked a 40-hour week (roughly 20 hours of class time and equal time spent on grading, preparation and related duties) for 11 months, the enhanced efficiency could be the equivalent of a dramatic budget increase. Many colleges would not need tuition raises or adjustments to public budget priorities in the near future. The vacancies created by attrition would be filled by the existing faculty’s expanded teaching loads — from 12 to 15 hours a week to 20, and from 30 weeks to 48; increasing teachers’ overall classroom impact by 113 percent to 167 percent.
BRILLIANT! The solution to the problem of rising tuition is just make those lazy a$$ professors work more through collusion among the higher education community. Those unsuspecting greedy turds called teaching professors won't even suspect that raising the time cost of their jobs represents a relative pay cut and they won't even consider looking elsewhere for employment causing a decrease in the supply of teachers and raising the pay of existing teachers and lowering teacher/student ratios.
To be honest, Bozo's editorial is so ridiculously flawed and naive that it probably wasn't worth my time responding, but at least I was able to get my daily allotment of sarcasm out of the way all at once.
I feel a little better.
