Don't throw away the old bucket
until you know whether
the new one holds water.
Swedish Proverb
James Buchanan, Nobel Laureate: RIP
Chart of the Day (HT Carpe Diem)
Mark Perry also quotes the Canada Free Press:
Against the backdrop of stagnant national employment, wages and economic growth, the Bakken and other areas where oil and gas development are creating new wealth should be a “teachable moment” for federal policymakers.
- The unemployment rate is 1.8 percent in the Bakken area compared to 3.5 percent in rest of North Dakota, 6.4 percent in the rest of Montana, and 7.8 percent nationwide.
- New businesses have grown by almost 50 percent in the Bakken area since 2009,
- Average weekly wages increased 19 percent in the Bakken area during the 4-quarter period ending in the first quarter of 2012, compared to no growth nationwide during that one-year period. In fact, workers in the Bakken make about $200 more per week than the average wage for the United States. The poverty rate is dropping faster in the Bakken than in the United States
You might think that Obama, with one of the poorest job creation records in American history, would welcome mushrooming Bakken and Eagle Fore Shale success stories across the US, but you would be wrong. Obama puts his ideology over prosperity, good-paying jobs using today's technology, and an improved trade balance.
University Professor: One of the LEAST Stressful Jobs?
Thumbs DOWN!
Not a former professor herself, Forbes' contributor Susan Adams started a kerfuffle by suggesting that being a professor was a laid back lifestyle: light workload, job security, summers off, etc.
As a former tenure track and visiting full-time professor for 5 years, I do not claim my experiences are representative. I never got tenure (typically decided by the sixth year of employment, although I've heard of faculty going up in their fourth year). But then I taught at 3 different universities (4 if you count my UH teaching fellow experience), the last in a one-year nonrenewable contract, not tenure-track. Just looking for a new faculty appointment (which typically requires relocation) can be a sinkhole of time which I had to do 3 years running, the last time unsuccessfully during the GHW Bush recession.
I'm in an interdisciplinary field where a key reference discipline, computing, rapidly changes. I don't think I used the same textbook twice, I often assembled custom article bundles which I would leave at Kinko's. I had a number of students whose prerequisite courses had been incompetently taught, with unrealistic expectations, poor work/study habits, abysmal communication skills, and bad attitudes. Dr. Kroll has an interesting response post, and I think his sixth point is worth excerpting here:
Many US universities operate under a customer service model while accepting students unprepared for college-level coursework
“The customer is always right,” didn’t always apply to universities. Many places still require that students assume substantial personal responsibility for success. But I’ve seen some state universities kowtowing to student demands that undermine academic integrity. We’re even seeing helicopter parents contacting professors directly about their kids’ grades (disclosure is against federal law) and complaining to department chair and deans. The default reaction from administration is that the professor is at fault. Professors are also penalized if their course grades have too high of a percentage of D’s and F’s. At the same time, some of the same universities are allowing students to enroll in college with SAT scores of 800 or below — for combined math and verbal components. Even among populations that might not have the luxury of taking standardized test prep scores, that doesn’t account for the 300 or so more points that may of us establish as the minimum (I scored an 1120, by the way, so I was no genius). Too many professors are being expected to make up for the deficiencies of public high school education.I've mentioned in the blog, no lie, that I averaged over 70 hours a week and had no social life: I didn't go out on a single date while I was a professor. I had posted office hours, but in fact I was almost always on campus (I used to come back after dinner while at UWM, even if I was not teaching) and was expected to make myself available to students if I was on campus. I often gave computer assignments, many of my own design, and personally debugged countless student programs. I usually came to class with typewritten lecture notes. (mostly to ensure I hit all my points). In terms of empirical research, I used all the big statistics programs (BMDP, SAS, SPSS) and other more specialized programs like LISREL. I was in publish-or-perish mode; I had a member of my dissertation committee whom was a very bright guy from Indiana University. In fact, I gave a guest graduate school lecture, my first ever, in his graduate DSS class. (He knew that I was an expert APL programmer.) He was trying to hit a home run article, say in CACM or Management Science. He took a leave of absence shortly after I graduated and eventually ended up at IBM (which I didn't know when I worked at an IBM business unit). It's not easy to get published in a peer-reviewed journal and you have to have a thick skin to deal with rejection.
Unlike Dr. Kroll, I didn't have to deal with grants, but if I expected any funding to go to an academic conference, I had to get a paper accepted there (easier said than done, not automatic). And then there's university politics...
I do know tenured faculty who "owned" courses and had lucrative consulting opportunities on the side. Some of those probably met Adams' stereotype. But I never got tenure; it was one stress after another.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Carpenters, "Beachwood 45789". This Motown hit remake, reportedly Karen's initiative, was the last single released before Karen's untimely passing.
