When I was an economics RA literally half of the econ professors didn't work Fridays and barely worked summers. It was incredible you get paid 150k with that kind of schedule.
Interesting. In my experience professors might not be on campus teaching one or two days a week or in summer, but that's only because they are working their ass off from home, writing grant proposals, reviewing papers, doing basically anything to get funding, and trying to find time to manage their own research.
I used to think it was a great gig too, since most professors had one or more small businesses on the side. Then I realized they have those businesses and consulting companies because that means they can also apply for small business grants (which they use to subcontract the research out to the university) in addition to the normal academic research grants. If you also count teaching, then that means those professors are working three jobs for one salary.
I made the decision that I'd rather make 50% more working in industry doing easier (if boring) work.
I'd guess that's pretty field dependent. What you're saying matches my experience with biology profs - technically once they get tenure they could chill out, but then they wouldn't have any funding for research anymore, so they wouldn't be able to do much of anything in their field.
In CS I saw more of a mix though. It's feasible to fund a small research group without busting your ass, and it also seemed to me that putting time into coursework, writing books, etc. was culturally a more acceptable use of time in that department than it was in biology.
I knew a few CS PIs that actually purposely scaled back their research once they got tenure because they were more excited about teaching and some of the educational initiatives the school was working on. That's not the norm of course, but I literally can't imagine that ever happening in a bio department lol.
Agreed, you can definitely work from home, but you're being quite charitable -- 'let's assume their behind closed doors with no accountability and do everything we expect'.
This is basically how we ended up in the replication crisis to begin with. There's little to no accountability and people assume they're working hard and being honest.
5% of all degree granting universities are R1 or R2 research universities, e.g. Harvard, Stanford, etc. The vast majority of professors aren't obligated the conduct research or apply for grants.
I agree there needs to be more accountability, but IME some of the worst offenders with bad studies were the people putting the most hours in the lab. So I wouldn't conflate hard work and honesty here - most of the dishonesty isn't about avoiding work, it's about misrepresenting negative results, which everyone gets. The people most obsessed with their academic status are the ones to be wary of.
That’s surprising to hear. All the professors I’ve known (a bunch, mostly in Math and Engineering), while they all have some problem at some level, are all very hard working. They definitively work every work day, and often much more.
When I was an economics RA literally half of the econ professors didn't work Fridays and barely worked summers. It was incredible you get paid 150k with that kind of schedule.