{"id":98,"date":"2013-10-18T14:57:39","date_gmt":"2013-10-18T14:57:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/?p=98"},"modified":"2013-10-18T15:13:58","modified_gmt":"2013-10-18T15:13:58","slug":"the-variable-professoriate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/2013\/10\/the-variable-professoriate\/","title":{"rendered":"The Variable Professoriate"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent article in the Economist<\/a>\u00a0there is\u00a0a bit of cherry-picked data, which highlights one of my biggest pet peeves: \u00a0painting all faculty with the same brush. \u00a0Here’s \u00a0a quote:<\/p>\n

Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012\u2014more than judges did.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, if you read the AAUP Salary Report<\/a>\u00a0(in particular, Table 4<\/a>), you’ll see that yes indeed, full professors at R1 (Category 1, Doctoral institutions) make ~$135,000\/year. \u00a0However, you need to keep reading. \u00a0At Cat IIA and IIB (Master’s and Bachelor’s institutions), full professors make ~$92,000\/year. \u00a0That’s about a $40K or 43.7% (quickly approaching 50%) difference.<\/p>\n

The variance in what it\u00a0means to be a faculty member<\/em>, both in responsibilities and compensation,\u00a0is very high.<\/p>\n

Now, two other points:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. What about distribution of faculty? \u00a0Glad you asked. \u00a0See Table 13<\/a>. \u00a0I was surprised, at first, that ~50% of faculty are at Cat I schools. \u00a0I thought that given the relatively few Cat I schools compared to many more Cat II, Cat III (and I don’t have those percentages – there may be a much higher percent of Cat I than I imagined), that there would be more Cat II\/III faculty. \u00a0However, if you consider the size of each department (e.g., many smaller schools have 5-10 Math and CS faculty combined, while many Cat I schools will have 30-50 Math & CS faculty … plus Engineering, etc.).<\/li>\n
  2. To the main point of the original article (which is a critique of modern scientific practice and its incentive structure), the overwhelming majority of scientific publication is done by Cat I faculty. \u00a0So, while the statement made was false, the true statement “Full professors [at primarily research institutions] in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012\u2014more than judges did” is both true and relevant to the article.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In a recent article in the Economist\u00a0there is\u00a0a bit of cherry-picked data, which highlights one of my biggest pet peeves: \u00a0painting all faculty with the same brush. \u00a0Here’s \u00a0a quote: Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012\u2014more than judges did. Now, if you read the AAUP Salary Report\u00a0(in particular, Table 4), you’ll […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-mrdr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106,"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions\/106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsfenner.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}