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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It really depends.

I am a tenure track professor (I should get tenure next year, it's not difficult at my university). I love my work. Genuinely love what I do, my students, my colleagues, the way my work is conducted, the creativity and research, and the flexibility of my schedule (not a straight 9-5, I've generally always been able to avoid aftercare for my kids especially now with a spouse who WFH, slower summers and breaks, etc...). My school is not a top school by any means but I feel proud and accomplished and purposeful and mostly appreciated.

The things that get me down are:
- how little I'm paid (I couldn't afford to do this without a high earning spouse)
- the trend toward professors providing a service rather than being educators and the nasty students and sometimes parents that you rarely encounter
- the drudgery and slowness and inability to get things done in academia (administration mostly)
- the [b]weird butt kissing in academia[/b]
- I hate to say this but the quality of students I teach has gone way downhill and each year the number of students I have who do not seem cut out for college increases, which feels icky and is challenging in a way that is not fun or motivating

I'm not old, but I would say my retirement-age colleagues are over it, mostly. Their morale has declined, sometimes precipitously, since I began teaching about 10 years ago.

If you are not on a tenure track (and trying to be) I would imagine your morale is very low.

[/quote]

Is this because you are not tenured yet?
I thought that one benefit of being a professor is that you don’t need to do butt kissing (or much less compared to other jobs). Butt kissing to whom? Department chair, dean?[/quote]

I don't do it but I hate the culture of it. Different institutions probably have different degrees of admin worship, depending on who the leaders are, but no it's not because I'm not tenured. Some people have to suck up to their chairs and deans, but I don't feel the need to. Also getting tenure doesn't mean you're at the highest level at most schools. To become a full professor you need to be promoted after tenure which can take 5-10 years. Butt kissing occurs because in academia there are a lot of rotations and details and fellowships and committees and chair positions that people love to position themselves for. This is likely true of any workplace, but in a place with lots of lifers and old-timers it has a special flavor. People love to be close to the top brass. [/quote]

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