Re: Sabbatical replacement and Dollars

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca>]

> I feel that university professors should be getting paid much more
> that the high school teachers that they often have to teach.
> Am I wrong???

This is a philosophical argument which has no objectively correct
answer. I am a university professor. My teaching and research duties
are year-round, and I work more than the time I'm here at school. I
could probably teach high school physics if I wanted to, and well if
I worked as heard at it as I do at teaching university physics
classes. I make ca. C$75,000 p.a. (US$52,500). A high school teacher
here in BC makes less, but I made less than a teacher until about
ten years ago. If market forces determine the value of the service I
perform, then my service is less valuable than that of a school
teacher. Of course pure money doesn't motivate me. I would rather
teach the material I teach to the sorts of students I get than teach
more elementary material to poorer students under compulsion to
attend my teaching. By how much? well that would depend upon how
much it costs me to put beans on the table and keep the rain off
them. Since I have a working wife earning about the same amount
(she teaches chemistry here at SFU) I'm not worried about the basics.
Under those circumstances I'd prefer to teach in university by about
a factor of ten or more (though I couldn't live on a tenth of a
teacher's salary).

I would rather you compare me to the premeds I often teach. They will
be paid two to ten times as much as I, and I would still prefer my
job to theirs by a factor of ten or more. Same goes for dentists, and
my dentist is a university professor (and former Dean of the Dental
School at UBC) as well!

There is no rational way to justify compensation. If there were, if
compensation were related closely to the value of the services
rendered by the individual (or to the value of the individual *per
se*), then I would have to acknowledge that I have not nearly reached
my own potential. What would be even more galling would be the
necessity to recognize that so many nebbishes and outright frauds had
outperformed their potentials (and mine) by astonishingly large
factors.

The bottom line is this: if you are paid too little you should pull
up stakes and go elsewhere (or do otherwise) so that you can make
more money. I'm sure everyone on this list can identify folks who are
making much less than a teacher gets and surviving on it with dignity
if not luxury. For my part I choose to accept my role in society and
try to perform my functions the best way I know how. Sure, I'll bitch
about many related things (e.g. we have a 54% marginal income tax
rate here in BC, and sales taxes on almost everything but food amount
to 14% on what we spend, and my property taxes are about $6,000, and
....) but I'm getting along OK, and I hope to live a long time,
perhaps longer than my father whom I just visited in California. At
85, with savings much more meager than my own, he is getting along
fine in his own home with a new car. I've got his genes, too.

Find something else to bitch about or, for your own mental health's
sake, forget about bitching altogether. It's not worthwhile to do so.
Teaching, even at the high school level, has many rewards never
experienced by Joe Sixpack, MD. Enjoy your good luck being a teacher.

Leigh