Megan McArdle has a post up about depression (I don’t wish to give it the connotation of "bitterness") among professors and other academics. I’m interested in reading the comments when they appear.
…[R]elative to other professions, professors don’t seem to be having much fun. Everyone in any job has their list of jerks who don’t deserve the success they’ve had, jobs they wish they’d gotten, and amenities they wish their job had. But for many academics, those lists seem to be the bitter cornerstone of their professional lives. I’ve never seen a group of people–including investment bankers–more obsessed with status….What’s the explanation? I can think of several:
1) The money is so low relative to the professions they might have gone into. Journalists also suffer from this bitterness. Interestingly, the more lucrative their current options are, the less bitter the professors seem to be–economists and engineers seem relatively cheerful compared to English and History professors.
2) It’s so easy to tell exactly where you rank in the academic hierarchy….
3) It’s so hard to switch jobs. …
4) Academics have few alternative status hierarchies…
5) Academics have virtually no control over where they live …
I know some of my readers are immersed in academia of one sort or another. You may remember that until about two-thirds of the way through my own engineering doctorate, I was planning on an academic career myself; somewhere in there, my mind cleared and I saw a lot of the kinds of things Megan mentioned down the road, and realized it was not the kind of life I wanted. I know several academics personally that Megan’s post describes to a T.
I think Megan’s probably right that engineering profs are less depressed than, say, history professors, but I suspect that’s less because of the money and more because the nature of engineering means that results are more tangible; even if you’re unappreciated, you can point to something you built, found, or made happen, and know that it was a real accomplishment.
UPDATE: Oh wait, commenter RickM at Volokh Conspiracy found real data: 53 percent of full-time faculty members at universities responded to a survey that they were "very satisfied" with their jobs; another 43 percent, "somewhat satisfied." Now you just have to decide whether a survey is an accurate measure of job satisfaction.
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