What Do Professors Do?

More than teaching. More than research

One of the emergent themes of this newsletter has been simply describing what professors do. The popular image of academics is as far from reality as NCIS is from the reality of NCIS. Ivory towers? Brother, I work in a 1960s concrete-and-cinderblock tower named for a crooked politician. Faculty lounges? I budget my time in fifteen-minute increments.

One of the discordant notes in Kerry Howley’s excellent profile of professor-slash-podcaster Andrew Huberman was that he had time to do everything he said he was doing. Cutting a two-hour podcast episode takes a lot longer than two hours, and it’s simply not compatible with being an active researcher—especially one who claims to have a full-time lab. Profs in the lab sciences are less like the stereotypical lone genius and more like the CEO of a small or, God willing, medium-size business—preoccupied with revenue, strategic direction, the market, and hiring and firing decisions. If a head of a local construction firm started spending twenty or thirty hours a week on YouTube episodes, they would not do that job for much longer. And, indeed, so it was: the Huberman Lab was really Huberman Lab, the podcast.

Indeed, the single biggest misapprehension about professoring is that anyone has any time at all.¹ The generational shift is apparent. I do know of some more senior-in-years academics who seem to have the relaxed lifestyle that features now in television series and conservative critiques of the biz, but the vast majority of people I know in the profession under 50 are not just burned out but burned to a crisp. (I’ll speak mostly of professors in the research side of the universe, which is a small and comparatively privileged perch but also the part I know best.)

By now, it should be familiar that academics face severe constraints—the phrase “publish or perish” must be decades old. The pressures have accelerated since then. I should note that this isn’t about vanity or irrational zeal, and certainly not love of the game: every peer-reviewed publication in the world, every grant received, every book under contract is a way to get or keep a job—or to move into a better one. The tightening of the academic job market means that securing compensation that tracks inflation requires production of almost Stakhanovite dedication; moving up in the world means exceeding the quota every year. And like any business based on IP, the pressure to establish a franchise is big—once you have a hit article or book, you want to keep probing every corner of that cinematic universe until the audience is heartily sick of it.

Behind all of this is the fact that academics front-load their costs and then enjoy the fruits of their labor over time. Investing effort in developing a successful research program early means a lot more than a research trajectory that pays off only over the decades. For one thing, failure to thrive early means leaving the profession. For another, academics become less “mobile” (the term we use!) over time as they grow in their careers—there are many fewer jobs at the associate professor rank than the lower assistant professor rank, and still fewer jobs at the rank of full professor.

So much of this is common to other professions. Consultants and lawyers try to make partner, for instance. But the bundle of tasks that go into the occupation of “professor” is, perhaps, even more varied. Consider that being a successful researcher means being a hyper-focused specialist in particular topics—and that somewhere between twenty and sixty percent of your time, depending on skill, institution, and commitment, will be spent teaching the very basics of your field to students. (And, yes, even though teaching a class requires only about two to three hours of time in the classroom per week, you should double to quadruple that amount to find out what it takes to really teach a course—keeping up with the literature, updating lectures, designing assignments, grading, and so forth.)

Then there’s the varied cluster of roles known as “service”. In the past several years, this has included for me

• Being a part of workshops to help graduate and undergraduate students develop basic skills and career planning

• Being a source for the media about current events

• Advising student clubs (including fundraising, planning, event hosting, and so on)

• Serving as a peer reviewer (I have done something like 80 of these over the past several years, or about 15-20 per year—a rate that is okay but well below many of my senior colleagues)

• Reviewing grant applications

• Reviewing entire book manuscripts and proposals

• Evaluating candidates for open positions to hire in the department

• Thinking through our approach to online teaching (I don’t even recall what we ended up doing)

• Managing the honors program in our major

• Trying my best to answer students’ questions about careers in the real world, a subject about which I am less relevant to comment every year

• Joining panels to discuss hot topics in the news whenever something bad happens in the world

• Overseeing interns as they work through placements with host organizations

• Writing letters of recommendations (typically the gladdest part of the job)

And these are junior faculty roles that do not involve the more managerial/supervisory side of the business, like overseeing teaching assistant performance or adjunct hiring. The switching costs involved with moving from focused research to generalist teaching to particularized advice are enormous and draining. And, yes, eventually work piles up to the point where one picks and chooses what to be good at and what not to do—just as with everything.

This context is not only missing from our current round of campus wars—it’s all but denied. Aside from the professional and disciplinary defenses to be made (often, not always, on very good grounds), there’s an even more fundamental one, as Michael Rushton observes: many of those who are engaged in these battles either do not care or outright resist learning anything about what actually happens, as opposed to what lazy stereotypes suggest.

I don’t mean to exceptionalize academia. Everyone works hard, and most jobs have diverse responsibilities. Rather, I want to normalize academia—to have it seen as a job rather than a calling. In other words, I wish that folks in the public would realize that “everyone works hard” includes professors, as well. Although every profession has some slackers and laggards, the competitive pressures to get in and stay in academia mean that most of those folks are selected out early, leaving only the most workaholic and skilled (sometimes as disjoint categories, to be fair—I marvel at some of my colleagues’ ability to do in a week what would take me a year). To the extent that there’s a fair critique of academia to be made, it’s that much of our incentives point us away from what students and the public might want us to do—but the remedies typically proposed for those problems will only exacerbate other issues.

1. The irony that I’m writing this during a workday doesn’t escape me, but, first, I’m having a sad desk lunch and, second, as regular readers of this newsletter know, it’s not regularly produced—because I don’t have the time.