Professor Memes

I like professor memes. Depending on where they're coming from—students, other professors, or the general public—they sometimes share truths about our profession that we may find difficult to express in other ways.

Take this Indiana Jones meme, for example. For starters, you need to know a little about the character himself to understand this meme. Dr. Jones, who apparently took the moniker "Indiana" from the family dog, is an archaeology professor who goes on dangerous adventures to obtain valuable artifacts.

Now, I don't know for sure who created this meme, but my guess is it was either a student or a professor. And while I don't see an explicit reference to the creator's attitude about this assumption, I'm reading this as a criticism of the practice.

Mind you, I have colleagues who don't want to retire. They love what they do, they make a decent living, and they don't see why they should stop just because everyone else their age is retiring.

I, however, am not one of those folks.

Do I love what I do? Yes, I do. I get a lot of satisfaction out of teaching. Do I want to still be grading papers when I am 80? Hell, no.

When I say professors make a decent living, I mean exactly that. We are far from wealthy. For those of us who have managed to find the increasingly elusive tenure-track job, starting salaries can be lower than shift manager positions in fast food. A private university in North Carolina offered me $42,000 per year to accept a full-time, tenure-track position—and I wasn't your average newly minted Ph.D., but one with 10 years of teaching experience under her belt. It didn't matter. Universities know that academia is a seller's market, so to speak. The buyers—highly educated academics looking for full-time work with benefits—outnumber the available positions by far. As demographics in this country shift, retirees are not being replaced, but new graduates keep on coming.

The fact that several states now seem to be moving to limit academic freedom (I see you, Texas) in insidious ways further reduces the available places for us to work—that is, if we value academic and political freedoms.

So, the pay is okay but not what you might think for someone with the highest academic degree available to human beings on this planet. I could easily make more money if I took my degree into the private sector. I wouldn't have to grade essays all the time, teach summer classes to help pay the bills, serve on a bunch of committees, and publish research to keep my job or get promotions. But I value my soul. I've worked in the private sector—I spent about 15 years there before returning to work on my Ph.D. No thank you.

However, that doesn't mean I want to work until I am in my 70s or 80s. Also no thank you.

The point this meme makes, without explicitly stating it (thanks to visual rhetoric and cultural endoxa), is that many professors have to keep working well into their twilight years to stay afloat. It may be that some of us do continue working because we love teaching that much, but, anecdotally from personal experience, I don't know anyone who loves the nonsense that comes along with academia enough to put up with it that long.

If your professor is still at it when they're 80 years old, chances are they need the money. Maybe that's because their life circumstances changed for the worse: their retirement savings fell apart, they lost a partner (and that partner's income), they're raising grandchildren or caring for an ailing spouse or other loved one, or they were retrenched in a university's downsizing and are now adjuncting to make ends meet. Maybe they need the health benefits due to pre-existing conditions, and they can't afford to switch to ACA or Medicare because they might lose existing benefits.

Look, I don't pretend to speak for everyone, or even most. However, my sense from personal experience in 20 years of academia is that most of us, while we do love teaching, don't necessarily like all the other bullsh!t that comes with it. I'm one of the lucky ones: I have a spouse who works in the private sector and makes probably three times my teaching salary. When the time comes for me to retire, I will bid academia adieu and make up for lost time in Canada.