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Why do professors hate markets?
January 28th, 2010 Posted in Policy and PoliticsWriting in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Laurie Fendrich attempts to divine from her own experience why college professors tend to be left-wing. She reaches the puzzling conclusion that her parents’ emphasis on education and culture over wealth accumulation somehow steered her toward the professorate and leftism. This is puzzling both because professors have higher than average compensation (especially adjusted for workload), and because there’s no evidence that conservatives value wealth accumulation more than do liberals. They certainly tend to be betterat accumulating wealth, but for all we know this leads to a bitter focus by leftists on their lack of income, and a concomitant focus by conservatives on objectives beyond income — the exact opposite of Fendrich’s implicit hypothesis.
The jumping off point for Fendrich’s rumination is a just-released study claiming that the cause for professorial leftism is, among other things, that leftists tend to want — much more than conservatives — to become professors in the first place. It’s certainly an interesting theory, though the methodology underlying the guts of the paper are shaky (finding that professors are more liberal than non-professors because they are educated, atheistic, and enjoy controversy is like determining that more Southerners have a drawl because they drink sweet tea, like NASCAR, and own a Bible — all you’ve done is find some variables highly correlated with the variable of interest).
All the same, I prefer Robert Nozick’s explanation for why intellectuals hate markets.
on 
Leftist ideas don’t work in the free market. So, they tend to cluster in institutions like government and academia, where ideas don’t have to work in order to survive.
Unless you are one of those bean-counters who think a professor’s “workload” is the number of hours spent inside the classroom, professors do not have higher than average compensation for their work. Professors do most of their work outside the classroom–things like reading books, preparing for classes, writing assignments and examinations, reading, editing and grading submitted essays, helping students revise submitted essays so that they eventually become better writers, grading exams, and meeting with students outside of class whenever they need additional help understanding the material. P.S. I did not “divine” anything. As any lefty professor knows, “divine” is an adjective, not a verb.
Dear Laurie,
A simple comparison of the average individual income in the U.S. with the average compensation paid to professors reveals that I am correct, that professors have above average income. Not even the AAUP disputes this.
And I don’t know what dictionaries they use at Hofstra, but “divine” is a verb as well as an adjective. It’s also a noun. Some words serve double and triple duty that way.
Thanks for the grammar lesson. You’re right, of course. Atheist lefty that I am, however, the dictionary be damned. I’d never dream of using “divine” as a verb unless insulting someone–which, come to think of it, I suppose you were doing. As to the average individual income and all of that, instead of addressing my main point (the extra hours of work put in by professors that are not included in figuring the amount of work we do), you stuck with the bean-counting approach, backed up by the (wow!) AAUP. A relatively few number of full and associate professors in schools of law, engineering or medicine radically skew the numbers on “average compensation” for faculty at any given university. You are clearly in the dark about what a full professor in the humanities (like me) at a university that is not Yale or Harvard (like Hofstra) makes. Hint: My income is less than that of New York City high school teachers with the same number of years of experience.
Thanks for the grammar lesson. You’re right, of course. Atheist lefty that I am, however, the dictionary be damned. I’d never dream of using “divine” as a verb unless insulting someone–which, come to think of it, I suppose you were doing. As to the average individual income and all of that, instead of addressing my main point (the extra hours of work put in by professors that are not included in figuring the amount of work we do), you stuck with the bean-counting approach, backed up by the (wow!) AAUP. A relatively few number of full and associate professors in schools of law, engineering or medicine radically skew the numbers on “average compensation” for faculty at any given university. You are clearly in the dark about what a full professor in the humanities (like me) at a university that is not Yale or Harvard (like Hofstra) makes. Hint: My income is less than that of New York City high school teachers with the same number of years of experience.
Laurie, that’s a curious position, given that Chaucer, Emerson, and Jefferson, among other notables, have managed over the course of human history to use “divine” as a verb without insulting anyone. I didn’t intend it as insult, but to point out that you are attempting to determine something (the source of widespread liberalism among professors) by use of some means other than direct information (in this case, your personal experience), which is the proper use of the word.
Now, to income. The Census Bureau reports that per capita earnings in New York City in 1999 (last Census year available at the city level) were $22,402. The median (that’s how we control for those lucrative Harvard and Yale positions) annual earnings for all postsecondary educators in 2008 was $58,830. Understand that this doesn’t include honoraria and above-average benefits and release-time from teaching, by the way.
But your point seems to be that the average professor works so many more hours than other employees that in reality her wage is below average. Assuming the average 2008 per capita earnings in NYC were $29,000 (to make up for the lower 1999 vs. 2008 figure), this would mean that the average professor is working more than twice as many hours as other employees in the city.
Which is nonsense. It’s arrogant nonsense at that. Even when we compare just with salaried employees, do you really think the average accounts payable clerk or fab shop draftsman or sous chef — all of them with salaries lower than the median professor’s salary — works considerably fewer hours than you? I’ve worked in academia and non-profits and the corporate sector, and I’m here to tell you that there are plenty of people outside the university who work 50, 60, and 70 hours a week for a lower salary than you, and precious few professors I’ve ever met who know what it means to put in a full ten hours per day, for months on end, of serious work.
Beyond that, there’s the non-financial benefits of jobs to consider. A supply-chain manager in a retail operation works long days, and the only studying he can afford to do is on topics that may bore him to tears, but which is essential in order to keep up with the market and maintain his salary. A professor, on the other hand, studies what interests her. She reads hours and hours on topics that engage her aesthetically and intellectually. To then chalk up all those hours and hold them equivalent to the work of an HR manager who spends his day handling personnel disputes is pretty disingenuous.
Look, no one here is begrudging you your career choice or lifestyle. But try to peer outside your world a bit and understand that you are, compared to the average American, extremely privileged economically. And a great many of your colleagues, who are fortunate to make more than you while living in lower-cost parts of the country, are even more so. Just keep that in mind when you want to push the argument that the lot of you are leftists because you simply aren’t as materialistic as the rest of us.
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