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People who haven't experienced academia assume that it's an easy job, with just a few hours a week in the classroom and summers off. Not so. Summers are easier, of course, but most professors spend that time catching up on research/scholarship.
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<p>(Tenured) Academia is clearly an easier job than industry because although some (tenured) academics may work comparable or even greater hours in academia than they would in industry, that's because they choose to do so. They could just as easily choose not to do so, or do the absolute bare minimum required to maintain their tenure status...and many tenured faculty (sadly) do exactly that. The department can't fire them because they have tenure. Granted, the department can assign them long teaching loads filled with courses that are unpleasant to teach, but they can simply respond by exerting minimal effort in teaching those courses, hence punishing the students as collateral damage. </p>
<p>It's not just me saying so. Here's a quote from Penn State's Don Hambrick, the former President of the Academy of Management, in his 2005 Journal of Management Inquiry commentary: </p>
<p>*...If tenure could be redecided 5 years after the initial decision, I would estimate that about 20% to 25% of professors at that point would be asked by their colleagues, not to mention by their deans, to pack their bags. I’m not talking about the natural tendency for scholars to decline in their productivity over a long career. Rather, I’m talking about a small but significant group of faculty who, once they get tenure, abruptly
behave in dysfunctional ways that weren’t foreseen beforehand.</p>
<p>...Some simply stop working as hard on their academic endeavors. Yes, qualifying for tenure at a top school like yours requires an enormous amount of effort. So I can imagine you feel drained. But your school is in the top leagues because the majority of its faculty at all levels—assistant, associate, and full professors—
work very, very hard. They engage in the
hard work of refereed scholarship, in the hard work of course development and teaching excellence, and in the hard, often thankless, work of service to their institution
and profession. Your colleagues have asked
you to exert yourself for these past 6 years partly as a test to see if you could do it for the long run. That’s what they need and expect of you. They can’t afford for you to start taking it easy. Once, a newly-tenured
colleague, steeped in the language of economics, told me—without a hint of sheepishness—that he was now going to do some “profit-taking.” He intended to enjoy the fruits of his prior hard work by greatly increasing his outside consulting and spending more time on his hobbies. Within 3 years, he was seen as a noncontributor, a bad joke, in his department and school...*</p>
<p>Nor is this sentiment particular to only management or social science academia, but regrettably seems to be a trait universal across all of academia. For example, I know one tenured computer science professor who has candidly admitted that around half of the tenured faculty in his own department aren't really doing much of anything. {He proudly declares that he belongs to the other half.} </p>
<p>Personally, I think the most pernicious aspect of minimally-productive tenured faculty is the cynicism it breeds amongst graduate students and junior faculty. When certain tenured faculty exert little effort into research, teaching, or administrative activities, junior scholars rightfully wonder why they must do so. The publication productivity of top journals in a department is ironically often times a stronger function of the percentage of junior as opposed to senior faculty in the department, as the junior faculty are all uniformly exerting great effort into research and publishing, whereas the average productivity of the senior faculty is gravely reduced by those who produce little, despite the greater research skills that the senior faculty (supposedly) possess. Many junior faculty sadly yet inevitably begin to see academia is little more than a cynical game where you publish, teach, and administer just to obtain tenure, not because you actually believe in the value of those tasks.</p>