By Bixby (Pseudonym)
A common sentiment found here at Wooster that always catches me off guard is this intense vitriol towards professors. Students will casually and angrily speak about how they were given so much homework or an inconvenient office hours time, always with an anger that far outpaces my own towards professors. So, I wanted to try and figure out: what gives?
In my opinion, there are several reasons that students may feel entirely justified in unleashing intense frustrations at their professors. 1, Professors make a lot of money; 2, students are stressed in pretty much all interactions with professors; and 3, professors are authority figures.
The first can be a difficult question. How much money do professors make at Wooster?
According to univstats.com, professors at COW made an average of $74,902 in 2022 (increasing 3.92 percent from 2021). This was higher than the national average of four-year colleges, the national average, and the Ohio average. However, this actual salary varies by type of professor. Across 4 ranks – Professor, Associate, Assistant, and Instructor – the range was $94,329 to $53,686. According to this same site, in 2022 Wooster had the least Instructors (5), followed by Professors (52), then Associate Professors (48, and the most Assistant Professors at 71. .You’ve probably noticed by the rapidly shifting staff, including one-year partnerships, in many departments. According to Forbes, the average annual salary in the U.S. for 2022 was $59,428, which is higher than the instructor salary and almost level with the Assistant Professor average salary of $62,031. So it sounds like most of the faculty should be doing just fine.
The other thing to discuss, though, is the scam of salaries. Essentially salaries pay you a fixed amount per pay period, regardless of your hours or your overtime. As such, salaried employees can be subject to and fully expected to engage in massive workloads and work hours, and in the current internet age, also be expected to reply to work communications around the clock outside of work. Understandably, though, professors’ work hours differ highly based on their institution, their students, and their environment. For example, a 2018 Atlantic article drew anecdotal data from professors’ responses to a tweet saying professors worked over 60 hours a week on average. Many professors disagreed, saying they worked the U.S. standard of 40 hours, while others concurred with the original. One tweet where a professor implied to graduate students that working less than 60 hours a week was not enough reveals that institutions and academia culture in general can exert a strong pressure to work ludicrous hours. Others discussed if enjoying their work made it “work” (a discussion for another day…).
However, workload also varies based on one’s identity. A 2016 paper by Dave A. Louis and five others details the plight that Black faculty often face at white-dominated institutions, where their personal resources are sapped with abandon by the institution as they are expected to serve on cultural committees, provide informal mentoring and support to Black students and their peers, and cope with microaggressions. This all increases their workload and decreases the relative value of their salary.
While the question of if professors’ salaries are proportionate to their work doesn’t have a conclusive answer, due to the vast differences in experiences across institutions and personhoods, there is certainly evidence that your professor could be under this kind of pressure.
Secondly, students are stressed in nearly every interaction they have with professors. Even ignoring the constant, underlying stress that many of us feel at college while school is in session, interactions with professors typically involve questions about assignments, deadlines, requests for extensions, the announcement of a new assignment, and just general work that directly increases our stress levels. Interlocking with the fact that teachers are authority figures who hold vast power over students with GPAs, referral power, etc., and students are forced to pay disproportionate attention to those things, it can make perfect sense to want to rail against them for the power they hold
Under capitalism, though, many people both have and do not have power. Professors do have considerable power over students and there are many instances where they have exercised that power to continue students’ oppression under the school system. Before college, many students have faced trauma through the school system, and may already have a justified anger or wariness towards them. But professors are also governed by stringent regulations on content and time, intense overwork pressure from academia, general institutional rules, and tricky regulations around unionization access – for example, professors above a certain rank not being allowed to unionize due to being classified as “administrative staff” (insidehighered.com…). And some professors have been leftist allies throughout history and around us now, supporting students in the fight against oppression, either directly such as through protest or indirectly (such as supporting a student who is struggling with things beyond their control, and teaching students information they need to know despite numerous attempts by the state to obscure that information).
In my opinion, professors function similarly to many positions of power in workplaces, where they have the chance to protect their workers (students) as much as they can within their binds, or they can simply turn the other way. It really depends on the individual professor (including of course if they spew violent rhetoric). Now that you have this extra context… it’s up to you to decide what you feel are the ethics of it.
Sources
https://www.univstats.com/salary/the-college-of-wooster/faculty/
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/average-salary-by-state/
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/02/how-hard-do-professors-actually-work/552698/
Louis et. al, 2016, Journal of Black Studies: “Listening to Our Voices: Experiences of Black Faculty at Predominantly White Research Universities With Microaggression.” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0021934716632983 .