God Almighty, but I am sick of hearing academics sniveling about how hard their jobs are. Sure, there are occasional frustrations, but this bitter, hard-done-by whining, moaning and kvetching about being exploited is just totally incommensurate with any considered, measured view of reality. Now, having said that, I will admit straight off that my own view, having been a professor for fifteen years, is that it is the best job in the world. I love it at least 95% of the time, and I earnestly wish that those who disagree would move on and let just one of the many, many people who would like to replace them do so---because it is a job for those who are inspired and driven from within, not for those who arrive at work sullen and resentful, feeling the lash of the administration upon their backs. But before anyone accuses me of being a Pollyanna, let me describe what I think is the realistic view I alluded to above which should temper all of our opinions. Before I earned my PhD (but, in some cases, after I earned my M.A.), I worked at some truly horrific jobs. I did these jobs for the same reason that the vast majority of the world works: because I needed the money, and these were the best jobs I could get in the moment. In my case, I was struggling to pay off my tuition and just stay alive while not deviating from other goals I had set myself, but the point is that I did the jobs because I felt I did not have a better choice available.
Three jobs which were certainly among the worst were: (1) cleaning up the site of a burnt building---prying valuable hardware away from charred remains and, over the course of a couple of weeks, gradually filling several large dumpsters with burnt junk, and a couple of oil drums with valuable stuff; (2) working for several weekends in the laundry room of an enormous hotel, where the piles of often disgustingly filthy sheets and towels were filled with all manner of imaginable refuse, including vermin and insects, and were, I assure you as a fit and even somewhat burly man, unimaginably heavy once they had been put in the laundry bags which had to be hoisted onto hooks to go in the automatic washers; (3) playing a "leprechaun" at a local zoo for several days, in a totally ridiculous costume and make-up, without any script, and without any specific instructions but to entertain people, though with plenty of abuse from both officials of the zoo and from the customers.
Now, truly, these are conditions in which many people, perhaps most people, work: filth, physical trauma and humiliation. So the fact that there is some occasional unpleasantness in academia to do with tedium or lack of appreciation hardly seems so much to bear. Moreover, even if marking or teaching or attending committee meetings could be compared in any way, it has to be said that the hours at which we are actually responsible for being a certain place and doing a certain thing are minuscule compared to other jobs: the rest of the time, we drive ourselves to fulfill our responsibilities in the way which seems most appropriate. Still, I imagine that some people will object that the jobs I mentioned were merely temporary and not careers and that, given the sort of extremity I have described, no one would last more than a couple of weeks---although that would deny the reality of the indefatigably cheerful Colombian immigrant I worked with in the hotel laundry, who had been there eight years by that time, and from I learned the true meaning of philosophical stoicism.
But even were that so, let me offer you what remains the more poignant touchstone of moral correction for me: the thought of my father, a steel-worker who, for the decade and a half that I knew him, would rise at 5:30 am at least five and more usually six days a week and not return home until after 6:00 pm, often with cuts and burns on his hands and legs, and always with parts of his body still a little blackened with soot and filth, despite the shower he had taken. And that went on day after day for years on end. To complain of my job would, to him, be completely absurd and even inconceivable.
Finally, I just want to add that the thing that really maddens me is how many people will complain about the lack of time they have to do their jobs, and yet will waste a good half hour on exactly that complaint. There are many outside the university who think of academics as being lazy, unrealistic, self-indulgent, carping, pretentious flakes. Let's try not to prove them right.
