University Diaries rambles on life in academia and points us to a little known fact:
Being a College Professor is the second best job in America, narrowly beating out financial advisor...
strangely, they rank software engineer number one, despite worse average pay and lower grade (BBAC vs BAAC for profs).
'course they put "real estate appraiser" at number eight, so what do they know.
The strange thing is the title of the entry on UD is "Bitch PhD", after the eponymous academic blogger, who, may I say, lost her edge when she quit her mid-america academic post and moved to SoCal... she should have listened to Mary Schmich, though I expect she does wear sunscreen.
see that is the nice thing about being a college professor, it keeps you edgy enough to do some serious snarky blogging, and what could be more important?
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Second best job? Sure, if you wear rose-colored eyeglasses, have no enemies, have a Chairman capable of and appreciative of publishing, and get promoted before getting canned.
My professorial paranoia comes from:
(1) having my PhD itself listed for a third of a century as an "incomplete" -- having neither been voted as accepted nor as rejected ["Molecular Cybernetics" as a dissertation title was somewhat premature, as the fields of Nanotechnology and Artificial Life did not exist];
(2) Having my Adjunct Professorship in Astronomy end after one semester, because the equivalence committee rejected as "one man's opinion" the VP and Provost of Caltech certifying that I had more than the equivalent of anyone in the world who ONLY had a M.S. in Astronomy or Physics [also, they thought that my 20 years in the Aerospace industry meant that my knoweldge was obsolete; and that my 210 publications, presentations, and broadcasts in the field meant that I was doing too many things at once; and also, the Equivalence Committee was required by their own rules to have 2 subject matter experts present, but only my Chairman advocated for me, the other Astronomy prof from the other school in the district was a no show, so the science-challenged bureacrats overwhelmed the supportive professor];
(3) Having my Adjunct Professorship in Mathematics end after 5 semesters at the request of an alcoholic psychopath Dean, who was later demoted from deanship, but not in time to me any good [that Dean was making a preemptive strike against my wife, who was Physics professor in the same department where I was Math adjunct; the ass-kissing Chairman, who has only one publication (1989) findable by Google Scholar, yet was promoted to Full Professor, makes life a living hell for my wife, who has 10 publications (1989) findable by Google Scholar, has not been so promoted.
So this summer I taught Algebra 1 to failing impoveshed inner city highschoolers. The summer school was 42 physically and psychologically grueling days, and was nothing like my highschool Stuyvesant (NYC), but was quite like my JHS#294 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a slum nasty enough that neither the Mafia nor the fire department would visit without police escort.
The hell of in-and-out professoring leads to other problems.
Had a court appearance this morning, as my wife is suing our former attorney Lloyd C. Ownbey, Jr., for malpractice, and he's got another legal mal case against him, stemming from his botched Congressional testimony, a missing million bucks, and a jockey paralyzed for life.
We stopped at Pasadena City Hall to see what the City Prosecutor was doing in the Criminal case People v. Charles Rodman Martin, where the City Manager and City Attorney of nearby Temple City had totalled our legally parked car in the middle of the Caltech campus. My wife and I are subpoenaed as eyewitnesses/victims for
trial Monday morning, for the event that occurred 23 Jan 2006 (a year and a half ago).
Flexible schedule? Dream on.
The only question is are we paranoid ENOUGH?
Jesus F. Christ, Jonathan, at least you have time to piss and moan. See? A silver lining!