Oh, wow. I got a lot of comments on my last post responding to David McMullin, a professor at Acadia University, where the faculty are in their second week of a strike.
You’ll notice that I approved only one of them to be shown on this blog. The others were, shall we say, offensive. And personal. We’ll just delete those, if it’s okay with you. I’m not trying to get into a cat fight here. I’m an Acadia parent, education researcher, and someone who is writing a book on great ways to get a college education. So, I do have my reasons for wanting to understand this issue and I do have a right to express my views.
I’d like to respond to the one comment that I did publish.
The big complaint is regarding what is perceived as my characterization of professors as not working as hard as someone who has a typical 9-5 job. And so I stirred up a bit of defensiveness among profs who work more than that. Sure, they teach only two or three courses a term, but they have a lot of prep stuff and other work related to their courses and if they want to do research, that’s on their own time. I get that. Really, I do. I used to be a part-time teacher at a private university in the US, so I know how much time is invested in each hour of class time. I have no argument with this.
Let me be clear: My husband and I have been self-employed for most of our lives. We understand what it’s like to have work that doesn’t have set hours–and how that is both liberating and exhausting. Ask any storefront business owner if they work nine to five, and they will laugh out loud. Ask any freelancer if they work more than 40 hours a week and they will howl.
Because here’s the reality–if you choose to work for yourself, you tend to work longer hours. Not everyone, sure, but most people. It’s not as easy as some would believe. I certainly know what it’s like to be on the “you’ve got it made” side of the argument and to have someone think that a self-employed person has it so much better than a person with a Real Job. I can understand how it might make one defensive to be accused of working fewer hours than you actually do.
Okay, so you work long hours. Point taken.
But remember this: YOU ARE CHOOSING THIS PROFESSION. And it’s not like it’s not at all what people told you it’d be like. If you are a professor, then at some point, you got to know professors and started to get more degrees, and surrounded by professors, you had a pretty good idea of what the lifestyle was going to be for you. Working on weekends should not come as a surprise, just as every business owner knows that they’re the ones who will end up staying late to take care of those accounting tasks or attend all kinds of conferences and meetings after work and on weekends in order to network and increase business. That’s the way it works.
So, I’m not trying to say that professors have it made because they don’t have a nine-to-five job. I’m saying that having a nine-to-five job is not what you WANTED when you signed up for this. If you’d wanted that, you’d be out working in a corporate job or something else that didn’t allow you to follow your passion and do your own projects.
Personally, I don’t want to work a nine-to-five job that I turn off at night. I love having my own projects, my own choice about the way I arrange my time to work on them, and that’s why I’ve chosen this path. I LIKE spending my weekends thinking about the things I am doing. I LIKE knowing that work and play are blended in my life and I can’t tell one from the other. I LIKE that I am excited about the work I do and I enjoy doing it.
I still maintain that profs have a relatively sweet life. They have the safety net of a regular paycheck and benefits (okay, some). They have some stress, sure, but they don’t have to sweat each month wondering if they’re gonna get a paycheck. They have a fair amount of freedom in their daily routine–for the most part, they can teach what they want to teach in the way they want to teach it. Those who live in nice little towns like Wolfville have a pretty good quality of life.
I guess for some people, it always seems like the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. I know I’m fortunate to have the freedom to choose the way I work–even if I have no guaranteed income whatsoever–and so I’m willing to forego the perks of being an employee in exchange for that freedom.
I guess I still want to believe that profs teach because they love to teach, and they’ve chosen the academic life intentionally because it allows them to do what they love–no matter how long the hours are or how frustrating it might be at times.
And if that isn’t true, well, I guess it’s time to look for another way to make a living.
BOTTOM LINE: For every prof who complains about the hours they’re putting in, I’ll show you a nine-to-fiver who is working weekends for free or a small business owner who hasn’t paid herself in months. This is not a perfect world.
But let’s not make this a debate about hours. It cheapens the discussion. We AGREE here. Let’s stay focused on what matters most.
I hope you find a way to do your very best work, give your very best talents, show your dedication and provide a valuable “product”–education–to those who are paying you for it.
I hope you all–faculty, Board of Governors, staff, students–figure out a way to get what you need and forge stronger bonds in the process.
You’ve got your work cut out for you.
A special tip of the hat to the main strike site for sending visitors my way. I don’t pretend to be an expert on this strike. These are simply my opinions. You’re entitled to your own, and I invite you to share comments as long as you refrain from calling me names. 
1 Comment
October 24, 2007 at 1:29 am
First of all, thanks for keeping a thoughtful and informative blog. As a faculty member at Acadia – someone on the inside of the strike – it is really useful to have this kind of detailed insight into the view of someone from “outside the bubble.”
I think most of us would agree that we go into the profession with our eyes (more or less) open about what the job entails. Yes, we work long hours, and we spend a lot more time in school before earning a “real-world” income. But on the other hand, it is a job that comes with more freedom than most, and other rewards such as teaching bright young people. Personally, I love it. Though I have friends who have told me they couldn’t imagine doing it. Different strokes for different folks, right?
But I think “what matters most” (as you say) to most faculty members in this dispute is not a comparison between the life of an Acadia faculty member and the life of, say, a small business owner. Acadia’s capacity to recruit and retain the best possible faculty depends on having a contract that compares favourably to the institutions that are our real competition for those people who are interested in an academic career: other universities.
And that’s where the problem lies. Acadia faculty salaries are now 6% below the average in Atlantic Canada, and 20% below the average across the country. If we accepted the administration’s offer, that gap would, at best, be about the same at the end of the contract. We might well fall even further behind. The market for recruiting faculty has become increasingly competitive (as David’s comment about “failed searches” suggests), not only at the entry level, but also as more faculty adopt a free-agent attitude and jump (or are enticed) to other universities mid-career. So the longer and further our compensation package lags behind that of other universities, the harder it will be to get and keep good faculty here, the more the quality of education at Acadia will suffer, and finally, the less value an Acadia degree will hold.
As the growth in administrative spending over the last few years suggests, it really is a question of priorities. Is the administration willing to commit the resources that would allow us to sustain Acadia’s tradition of academic excellence? So far (in spite of the President’s written promise to do so at the end of the last strike in 2004), there hasn’t been much indication that they are. That, in a nutshell, is why we are on strike now.
Finally, I should say that I think we all sympathize with the students and their families who are caught in the middle of this. I went through two TA (teaching assistants) strikes during my undergraduate degree and a faculty strike while I was in graduate school, so I have some sense of what it is like. I think I speak for all of our members (and as the faculty association spokesperson, I am actually allowed to say that!) when I say that we wish it hadn’t come to this. But if we didn’t stand up for the quality of education at Acadia now, we would be facing the same situation, or more likely a worse one, three years down the line.