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Justice Morath: It’s time to put the tired old myths about professors to bed

College professors thrive in an atmosphere where uncomfortable questions are asked.

(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Salt Lake Community College Redwood Road campus is pictured Thursday, Dec. 12, 2019.

Along with numerous attacks on education, lately several old myths about professors have been floating around. As someone who is charged with representing faculty across Utah, it is important that I counter these misconceptions.

It is often thrown around that professors make ridiculous amounts of money for little work. Usually, this comes with a cherry-picked example from a professor at an Ivy league who’s pulling in over a quarter million a year.

That may be the case for a few, but that certainly isn’t in mine, nor most of us. My base salary without taking on overload comes in at just above $55,000, with the national average being around $80,000. As a state employee, I find that cost of living increases are sparse and don’t match onto actual inflation. This for a job that requires an advanced degree that has me cruising with $86,000 in student loan debt to this day.

We don’t see the same criticisms of lawyer, physician and MBA salaries, which require similar debt and training.

So far, I’ve only discussed full-time faculty, whereas around 60% of all college classes are taught by part-time labor via graduate students or adjunct faculty, who are paid poverty wages and blocked from teaching too much, so as not to require colleges to give them health insurance per the Affordable Care Act.

This is often bundled with a false representation of what tenure is. Which is interesting because, as an economist colleague of mine noted, tenure likely drives salaries down, not up. Gaining tenure makes it less likely that you’ll quit and move to another institution, so there is less pressure for institutions to increase compensation.

Tenure does not in any way mean a professor cannot be fired. It is an honor bestowed upon a faculty member who has shown brilliance in their work and loyalty to their academic institution. With it comes more responsibility to serve the college and community. Which means more working hours where faculty already average 50-hour work weeks. It does make it harder to fire someone without cause, but isn’t that something we’d want to see in all workplaces?

We are also considered lazy. People think that the only time we are working is when we are physically in our classrooms and that we don’t work over the summer. That would be like me saying Adele only works when she is on stage and ignore everything else required to be her amazing self.

Calling us divas doesn’t negate how much we work to be great at our craft. K-12 teachers deserve far more credit, but we, too, have been working tirelessly day and night to help our students and colleges survive the global pandemic. This even as the Utah Legislature required us to return to mostly face-to-face (even if that’s not what the students wanted) and prevented us from taking basic safety measures such as requiring masks.

We do this because we love teaching. It is truly our life’s work, and we know the importance of our jobs.

So why the constant criticism of professors? Many would have you think that it’s because we indoctrinate students with left wing and anti-American sentiment, and that we are intolerant of opposing views. That could not be further from the truth.

Go to any academic conference, or read one peer reviewer’s comments, and you’ll see we thrive on questioning ideas. What we are intolerant of are claims made without logic, reason or evidence. Tweets and empty soundbites from politicians and pundits on cable news don’t meet our standards of valuable discourse.

Students are supposed to be exposed to ideas and facts that make them uncomfortable. The indoctrination truly comes from our critics, who are unwilling to be exposed to uncomfortable facts about the world and our history. Not to mention sharing space with voices that are silenced elsewhere.

Throughout history, when totalitarian regimes come to power, destroying academia is a top priority. They can’t tolerate people freely questioning, reading, writing and speaking the truths they see. So, when you see those in power perpetuating these myths about professors ask yourself, what is their goal here?

Justice Morath Professor of psychology at SLCC Executive Director of STEAMpunk Academy

Justice Morath is an associate professor of psychology at Salt Lake Community College and chair of the Utah Council of Faculty Senate Leadership.