I teach.
And in more disciplines than one.
And the reason I teach is because;
1. I enjoy it.
2. It's fun
3. It's easy.
4. It's an ancillary source of revenue.
It is however, NOT DOING.
In other words, you are not "doing" what you are teaching. You are teaching what you are not doing.
Now of course, I do go and dance in the real world. And I do invest in the real world and I do research in economics in the real world. But teaching unto itself has no practical economic production or purpose until it is applied to doing.
Ergo, I've never looked at teaching as a real career. I look at it as a semi-professional hobby, in that inevitably we all can't be teachers, some of us have to go out and actually produce the GDP.
Ergo, you can understand the breakdown of academia's political affiliation.
Movers and shakers they aren't.
6 comments:
Your data set is from 2007. Anything more recent?
Even the conservative and libertarian professors are mostly clueless about the real world. It took me a month of working in the banking sector to figure out that REAL banking didn't resemble the Money & Banking classes I chewed, swallowed, and digested in college and grad school.
There's a reason they call it "The Ivory Tower". The wizards in the tower have a lot of knowledge and insights, but have absolutely no idea how the real world works and, worse, what's going on. They look at superficial data, make lofty conclusions, and are arrogant in their errors.
The stats you present are alarming. They present the results of an exclusive club which admits only like-minded people. The favoritism doesn't begin with job interviews. It extends to the cultivation of undergrads to go to grad school and then the quality of mentorship they receive when there. Self-selection is a small component of this, but how many conservatives and libertarians might have chosen academia as a career with a less hostile environment?
Note that those faculty ratios hide the fact that like-minded people are more concentrated. GMU, for example, has a high concentration of conservatives and libertarians. That means other schools are even more concentrated in liberals.
With this large preponderence of leftists, they also control university policy committees, tenure committees, faculty Senates, and feed the pipeline into administration.
This needs to be systematically dismantled.
A lot of real GDP can be created through teaching because a well educated person (in certain fields) can be dramatically more productive than an uneducated person; and depending on the field, the effort of these people you instruct can improve the productivity of everyone else.
The primary example of what I am talking about is my field, software development ...
Most professionally developed software is focused on increasing the productivity of an individual worker, resulting in greater production with less (time) invested; and over the past several decades software systems have been developed for countless companies, and have probably resulted in trillions of dollars of increased productivity.
While it is possible to develop software without formal education, and there are a handful of excellent developers who never received a formal education, the better the formal education a software developer receives the better of a developer they will become.
When you put this all together, the teachers who put their time towards teaching computer science in the 80s and 90s have had a dramatic impact on GDP; even though they may have never produced anything of value themselves.
Pep Panda:
I think your example is the exception which proves the rule.
Professors in computer science, engineering, architecture and other majors are or were ACTUAL PRACTITIONERS. Many of them remain active in their fields not merely in research but also in development. Many of them actively patent and copyright useful innovations.
The Google algorithm was invented by Brin and Page in graduate school. Netscape evolved from Mosaic at the University of Illinois. Research architects design some of the greatest structures on the planet. Professors of Finance began Long-Term Capital Management (with ultimately disastrous results).
Someone could argue that Fine Arts majors do actual performances, Sociologists often work with public policy, and Political Scientists advise campaigns. Some Economists do consulting work.
I'm not disputing that, but I would suggest the contribution to GDP of the endeavors of the arts and soft sciences is minuscule at best. Not surprisingly, the less the productive the external contribution of the professor, the more liberal they tend to be.
Music professors haven't invented any new notes lately and, if they did, it wouldn't change the world.
Shh, if you try to say teaching is easy, people might infer that you don't need years of highly specialized training to be a teacher, and the NEA won't have that.
Happy Birthday.. hope you have a good day.
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