Lazy professors

The Chronicle writes today about the myth of the lazy professor in an attempt to debunk it, and the responses are interesting in that they tend to simply reinforce it.

Much of the counter arguments against the lazy professor focus on how busy professors feel their jobs to be (not something I'm arguing with, though I find it interesting that this was the dominant form of evidence produced). In response, one commenter suggests that professors feel overworked because they have no idea what life is like in the "real" world. Another suggests that the only way to not feel overwhelmed as a professor is to learn to let unimportant deadlines lapse and to accept doing a "mediocre" job in most things, while yet another suggests that the myth arises because people who have bosses imagine what they would do if their boss wasn't watching all the time and then suppose that professors slack off the same way they would.

The first one, of course, makes me laugh. I've worked in the "real" world at a similarly high-motivation job, and although I always had way too much work to do there, I still felt much less compulsion to work evenings or weekends to compensate. I just prioritized and kept going, which meant that things got done when they got done. As a professor, I am far more invested in the job because I see it as an extension of myself, it's my identity, and so I am far more inclined to put in extra hours because it reflects back on me. (Interestingly, adjusted for inflation between that job and my current one, my compensation was roughly the same...)

The second one about doing a mediocre job is a bit disturbing, but only because it sounds like "mediocre" is less than excellent. When one understands that the "mediocre" mentioned is probably what a perfectionist means by mediocre (since in my experience, as a profession, academics tend toward perfectionism), then a perfectionist's "mediocre" might be pretty damn good. Then again, the writer may be one of those "deadwood" professors we always hear about. But giving the benefit of the doubt, it's possible that the writer feels like his/her output is mediocre, but those looking at the product probably think it's pretty stellar.

The last observation struck home with me though because from an outsider's perspective, the life does look pretty easy. First, there's little direct oversight (or at least very little that's directly observable from outside the institution). What little performance evaluation the public might see is on sites like RMP, in which even professors identified as "bad" by students remain in a job for years. Of course, the evaluations of students on RMP are problematic, which is why they aren't always a good indicator of effectiveness.

Second, even when oversight seems to be in place, the visible portions of a professor's job - the time spent in the classroom - seem minimal. Six hours a week? Doesn't seem like much, does it. Even the 13 hours a week I'm in the classroom sounds pretty small. But of course imagining that's all there is to the job is similar to imagining that the time spent on stage by any performer is all the time spent on the job. So U2 make millions for a few hours work three or four days a week while they're on tour? Not really. Then again, maybe a rock group like U2 isn't a good example since what they make for all they do is proportionally still much larger than a professor. But even an actor in the local playhouse, who makes much less, puts in many, many more hours than those spent on the stage. The job involves much more than just the performance itself.

Third, if indeed the myth is believed by people who imagine what little work they'd be able to get away with doing if they didn't have a boss, then we're talking apples and oranges when it comes to mindset. If you can imagine you'd do much less work without a boss, then you don't have the same mindset as a professor, who tend as a group to be highly self-motivated. In fact, I would suspect that if as professors we had bosses looking over our shoulders every day, we'd actually do less work. The work I do, I do because I'm motivated to do it, not because I know someone else is watching. If someone else was watching, I might not do as much because I'd probably resent the implication that I was not the best judge of what I should be doing with my time. That's what years and years of post-secondary education will do for you. There's so little structure in place to monitor professorial output because they don't need it, not because they are lazy and are avoiding it.

Personally, I don't know that the myth of the lazy professor is that prevalent, though perhaps the people I meet just are too polite to express it to my face. But it nevertheless serves as excellent fodder for Chronicle articles so that those both from within and without can reinforce as well as counter it.