Want a job that pays $463 an hour plus excellent benefits

The average tenured professor, reports Prof. X, teaches now at this Texas university just “two three-hour classes, or six hours per week, per semester in classes with small enrollment numbers.”

Now for the bombshell: These professors make around $100,000, plus one-third more in fringe benefits for a two-semester, nine-month teaching load. This amounts to approximately $33,250 per class. No wonder they do not want the public to know about this and claim nebulous duty to research.

Though it is a bit apples to oranges, I make $1,814 per semester, with no fringe benefits, at Lone Star community college for my one comp class with 24 students. Hence, it’s $33,250 v. $1,814 per class. There is something wrong with this picture. Are the big dogs some 30 times more valuable to students than the unheralded dogs in the trenches?

Well, of course, the defense is—the research, the research. So let’s look at that. I worked as an instructor at the University of Michigan, then as a tenured professor at Eastern Michigan University—for a total of 18 years. I know how sausage is made.

To be sure, much research is valuable to society, but much is not. Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College, reveals in Excellence Without a Soul, that “professors have become specialized in their interests, which are ever more distant from what ordinary citizens understand or care about.” This leads, he reports, “to the production of much more nonsense.” Do we need the 500th essay on Hamlet?

Nor do professors publish as much as they let on. Former Harvard president Derek Bok reveals in Our Underachieving Colleges that “fewer than half of all professors publish as much as one article per year.”

The American public should be outraged by these findings, especially given the staggering increase in college costs. Do not write university administrators: they will defend the status quo, lest they are scathingly attacked by professors. Write, instead, trustees. Often they are, as Harry Lewis reported, only “cheerleaders.” But some will take their fiduciary responsibilities seriously and do the right thing.

In the university, "profs are indistinguishable from students," "most are disgruntled," focus is on feminism, gay studies etc.

WASHINGTON -- What is your vision of a university?

Is it the classic vision with profs walking the ivy clad pathways, their books under their arms? Perhaps they wear tweed coats and smoke pipes -- not the lady profs but the men. The ladies dress accordingly, and maybe they smoke pipes. All pore over their books for hours and impart their knowledge to a select body of students. Not the mob that today is forced -- rather cruelly -- to attend classes in remedial education to make up for what they missed in high school, very elementary things such as reading and the rudiments of writing.

No, not at all -- the profs are indistinguishable from the students today. Most are disgruntled. Some are furious. In years gone by they felt superior because of their learning. Today they feel superior because of their ontological existence and because they are tabernacles of certain mysteries. The mysteries are to be found in feminism, African-American Studies, gay studies, and matters too obscure and tedious for ordinary Americanos to grasp.

As for a vision of the university most Americans hold, think of a football team or a basketball team. The athletes are uncommonly large. They attend classes but mostly they attend practice. Some fight criminal charges for fracases they have involved themselves. I am told that the football coach and the basketball coach have an informal budget for criminal lawyers just to keep the athletes out of jail. Or the athletes are fighting drug charges or are in rehab. To be really expert, the coach of the football team or the basketball team on most campuses has to be versed in pharmacology and possibly in mental health. For all intents and purposes the athletes are preparing themselves for a tryout with a professional team. Those that fail to make the pros disappear. Tom Wolfe drew a vivid portrait of what goes on in college in his masterful book, I Am Charlotte Simmons.

Yet that is only one vision of the university. The other is ceaseless demonstrations on behalf of radical politics.

Where professors rule, life is cruel...

Where professors rule, life is cruel.

That is the bottom line for the average American in this, the transformative age of the president the New York Times and Washington Post has called "Professor" Obama, who "schools" the ignorant at home and abroad. Never before have so many with so little humility gathered together in our government, each believing he "is the smartest guy in the room."

This is an administration stuffed with academics. And not just any academic: These are educators from elite universities, the kind of experts prized by a political and media elite seeking confirmation of a worldview that expects, notes the Washington Examiner, "the rest of us ... to shut up and do as we are told."

Inside the Beltway, "Harvard know-it-allness" is a prized commodity; outside, its practitioners are largely regarded as "obnoxious and arrogant" in the classroom and "jaw-droppingly incompetent" out of it. Small wonder trust in government has hit a fifty-year low.

Welcome to government by professor.

My take: As William F. Buckley said in 1963, "I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."