Slackers

I just read three interesting posts over at Female Science Professor that incited a constant annoyance that I (and most academics) feel regularly. It has to do with professors (and specifically tenured professors) being lazy and getting paid a ton to basically do nothing, with no fear of losing one's job.

I can't do justice to the posts, so I have the links and quick summaries below. What I will say is that there is a belief that seems to be prevalent (I've seen it a lot, even from friends) that being a faculty member is not a real job, and that all we do is teach ("Must be nice to get summers off!"). I know that some of this comes from the fact that people don't really understand what research is (I'll admit that I don't quite understand how research takes place in the non-sciences, and I'm married to someone who is actively researching in the humanities), and from the myth that if one gets tenure he or she can never be fired. So I will now turn the floor over to FSP:

Do Not Reply
The first of the posts, in which FSP recieves an email from an author of a book that she criticizes in another article (last fall). This book, called "Higher Education?" is what sparks the issue here. It is what makes the argument of tenured professors essential being lazy money-sucking fiends.

Dear Andrew Hacker?:
This is her public response to the author's email.

What Would John Stuart Mill Do?:
A mention of a strange anecdote from the book in question. Actually, here I will copy the last part because this is something that really bugged me. She discusses that the strangest story in the book (and I have not read the book, but this is more irritating than strange to me) as:

My vote for the strangest part of the book is the paragraph in which the authors describe a "workingman" who "jumped on a subway track to rescue a child who tripped and fell." The workingman didn't think; he just did it. The authors posit that professors on that same platform would not have jumped on the track to save the child:

"We wonder if, had some professors been on the platform, would they have paused to ponder how John Stuart Mill might have parsed the choices?"

This is again a common problem nowadays: You are a bad person if you think, but if you don't think, then you are clearly a hero. This is a symptom of a larger problem, as we have a society that villifies intellectualism and forethought. Gut reactions here are considered always superior to well thought out reactions. It bugs me.

Plus, I didn't even know who John Stuart Mill was (thanks Wikipedia!).