Saturday, January 5, 2013

Professor is low stress?

Wow.  Just wow.  James Joyner has a great response to this article on how low stress University Professor is as a job.  I especially liked:

The other thing most of the least stressful jobs have in common: At the end of the day, people in these professions can leave their work behind, and their hours tend to be the traditional nine to five.
 
Really?  That is a rare state of affairs for a professor and is mostly experienced by senior faculty on the verge of retirement.  But developing classes, doing research, and writing grants is not a time limited activity that can be trivially executed in a nine to five sort of way.  Living withy constant uncertainty about funding and whether you will still have a job next year (dependent on successful of grant applications) is also not a low stress lifestyle. 

I don't want to say that there are no professors like this . . . but there are members of any profession who manage to get a very cushy position.  But it seems very unlike the lifestyle I see for the median member of the profession. 

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