Anon: No problem with being "negative." I like being disagreed with. You raise two distinct and great points for discussion, although I'm so far behind on numerous fronts right now I can't really take up either.
The first is whether academics are overpaid, underpaid, or paid just right. That I would love to write a whole separate post about sometime. I disagree that academics are underpaid because I disagree both that we should be looking for what we could be making at Microsoft for comparison and we should view the time we spent in graduate school--hellish as it might have been--as being a 'sacrifice' compared to what we would have been doing in the private sector during those years. My general belief is that professors, on average, are more than fairly compensated for what their profession offers in terms of lifestyle advantages, but I think the truth of that statement varies considerably across institutions, fields, and even within departments.
The second is about productivity and working at home. I would love to see a systematic study of this overall, especially since what gets done "working at home" is a major mystery and my intuitions about it mainly reflect my own observation of the correlation between office presence and indirect measures of productivity. (That said, it also reflects some particular observations that I'm sure don't apply to your case.)
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Posted by Scarlet to academicsecret at 9/03/2006 11:56:29 PM
