Say, for instance, that you find yourself at a more-conservative-than-you-are school and you receive tenure. Then you publish a paper on the Christology of the Fourth Gospel and in it you struggle with the Gospel’s historicity. Your university could fire you or demote you, tenured or not, for not adhering to the theological commitments that the regents/board approved and that you agreed to when accepting a position there.

In this increasing polarized politco-religious environment we had all better take along our metal detectors because its a minefield out there!

I have been getting the doomsday warning from almost every professor I’ve talked to since I realized academia is where I feel I need to go. And yet I still go. I think it’d be great to get thoughts from blogging tenured professors on why they still do it, why they don’t go get more money for doing something else.

Hum. I don’t know how these stats are come by, but let me tell you about the profession from the trenches. Being on a tenure-track job means that you are on probation for six years, with no guarantee that you will be renewed for the seventh or any after that. In those six years, you are expected to teach 3 to 4 classes a semester, depending on where you land a job. Very few out of graduate school land jobs where you teach 2 and 2. In addition, you are required to advise students for general education requirements and majors, teach the courses that the senior faculty don’t want to teach themselves, serve on a number of committees to demonstrate your commitment to the university community, publish a book or two, regularly give papers at conferences. It is publish or perish. Even doing all of this does not guarantee tenure. The time it takes to prep. each class is more than it takes to teach the class. Grading can take over your life if you aren’t careful. So don’t believe the blissful business that these magazines espouse. It is nonsense.

As for salaries. Well I think you can expect an offer in the lower 40s from most universities today. You creep up slowly, and I mean slowly. When you advance to associate professor with tenure, universities usually give you a bump of $1000-2000. It’s not much. You continue along like this until you get full professor which is at least 10 years after you start the job – that’s probably the best case scenario. You get another bump. So it’s really at the end of your career that you see anything beyond the 70s.

The reason for the averages of 70 or 80 is because the fields are disparate. Professors in the sciences and business especially get HIGH salaries, because they are wanted by other professions who are willing to pay. Humanities professors get the lowest of all salaries. There are a few humanities scholars that rise up and get fairly competitive salaries because a couple of universities are willing to fight over them. But this is the exception, not the rule.

April

And thanks for finding my blog and interacting with several things today, Drew. It’s always good to have a new visitor

So it is an interesting predicament of when to pay your “dues” as it were. Probably the best thing is to do it as early as you can. After three years you will be up for promotion as most institutions. Just start publishing peer-reviewed articles as soon as you can to get a jump on publications. Use the papers you write for classes as starting points for that if possible! The more you do now, the easier it is to get that tenure portfolio together later. And get to know the chair of the promotion committee. It’s usually a very subjective process even though they always advertise otherwise…

Right or wrong, a pastor’s salary package is often more lucrative than the professor who educated him/her. But I guess this is true in many fields.