The American Philosophical Association (to which I still belong) publication Jobs for Philosophers is advertising a tenure track position at U-C Riverside with a starting salary of $42K a year, substantially less than the median income and in a n area where the median house price in $2005 was $369K.
Estimated median household income in 2005: $50,416 (it was $41,646 in 2000)
Riverside $50,416 California: $53,629
Estimated median house/condo value in 2005: $369,900 (it was $138,500 in 2000) Riverside $369,900 California: $477,700
Median gross rent in 2005: $902. Percentage of residents living in poverty in 2005: 14.1% (7.2% for White Non-Hispanic residents, 15.5% for Hispanic or Latino residents, 18.9% for other race residents)
http://www.city-data.com/city/Riverside-California.html
When I left humanities academics in 1995 I was being paid $35K a year in central Ohio, where a dollar goes a lot further. But I guarantee you that the UCR job will get at least 300 applications even at this very late stage of the game.
>From a narrowly self-interested point of view,
aspiring humanities scholars should go to a top law
school and become a law prof. They can still get their
PhDs and publish in history, philosophy, etc. But the
little-known truth of the matter is that law
professors are paid far more than most other sorts.
See College & University Professional Association for
Human Resources (CUPA-HR) compensation guide 2005-06:
http://www.academickeys.com/all/salary.php
Full professors: law, $136.6K, philosophy, $82K Assoc. professors: law $98,5K, philosophy, $59.4 Asst. professors: law, $81K, philosophy, $48K
And as the compensation guide listed indicates, this is pretty representative. Law beats business, where full profs make around $102K -- I have a friend whose husband is a full prof at Kellogg, the top-ranked B-school, his salary is about $75K, (He makes lots more doing consulting gigs).
The single worst piece of advice I ever took was from a then dissertation adviser at Michigan who dissuaded me from going to law school back in 1982. A friend some classes after mine got his law degree from U-M, got a law professorship, finished his PhD, and is now a star at a top 20 law school, on his way to being a star at a top 5 law school, and you don't even want to ask what he's getting paid -- to write about German philosophy!
Law adjunct professors don't get paid well, but most of them are practicing lawyers who have medium to very high nonacademic income.
Why doesn't the professoriate radicalize and organize against the low salaries, job insecurity, terrible working conditions? Well, why doesn't any group of workers do that? But factors playing into academics' apathy include, it seems to me the highly individualistic conditions of work and criteria for success and failure, where the (self-)perception is that it a matter of individual merit, the virtually complete historical absence of unionization, the mobility of the national market, the extreme emphasis on productivity, and the perceived need to be a team player and not to rock the boat. I would not expect the professoriate to organize unless other sectors of the work force were already doing so in large numbers.
--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> Joseph Catron wrote:
>
>
>http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2002/0210/0210aha3.cfm
> >
> >59% of them earned less than $15,000, and only 18%
> earned more than
> >$25,000 (which was my first full-time salary after
> college). Only 16%
> >and 17% of them had sick leave and health care,
> respectively. If
> >you're at a point in life when you want to raise a
> family, or if you
> >face any significant personal challenges (health
> conditions, etc.),
> >those are problems.
> >
> Yes, it's pretty awful. I remember someone telling
> me, some twenty years
> ago, that in Italy, only the children of the rich
> could afford to be
> professors. And I thought, oh, well, that's Italy.
>
> Then, I had a boyfriend who was offered a
> professorship at Harvard in
> electrical engineering -- in 1987 -- for a starting
> salary of
> 16,000/year AND he had to bring in an equal amount
> in grant money.
> Another guy, my bridge partner each year at family
> camp, was a physics
> prof at U.C. Berkeley, but he had to switch to U.
> Penn, because he could
> not raise four kids in the Bay area on his salary.
>
> My tenure track job at SUNY in 1987 was
> $25,000/year. Virginia offered
> me a tenure track job, teaching 4 classes a semester
> at 20,000/year.
> These were the "good" jobs. The part time faculty
> was making less and
> could be let go at will. Their numbers are growing.
>
> Starting in the nineties, there were some
> superstars, like Fish, who
> could pull in 200,000/year. But most of the money
> goes to hi-ranking
> administrators. Most profs get almost nothing.
>
> I keep hoping that this is a trend that will
> radicalize the
> professoriate, but I have yet to see any evidence.
>
> Joanna
>
> ___________________________________
>
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