That’s how many professors could be paid $50,000 annually for 20 years if we reallocated the money the Anaheim Angels used today to sign Albert Pujols. In other words, you could staff two small Midwestern liberal arts colleges with professors for the next 15-20 years based on Pujols contract—even when you apply a small rate of inflation to each professor’s pay. 254. Amazing. – TL
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Ray Haberski
April 19, 2013
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Sure, but historians don’t get on base and they rarely hit home runs.
True. And “franchise historians” are worth a lot more than $50,000 per year to their institutions. But hey, this is what “the market” says we should pay franchise baseball celebrity animal rescue advocates. – TL
The lesson I just delivered was most assuredly a home run!
My classroom sessions constitute station-to-station baseball. Lots of walks, singles, and the occasional double, with solid pitching. It’s not overwhelming, but I think I win the game by the end of the term. 🙂
Why can’t you get paid that well. Tuition may be one of the few items the price of which has risen as fast as major league ticket prices. For example, my undergraduate tuition at the University of Illinois during the early 1980s was $311.00 a semester and I could take the train up to Chicago and buy $4.00 bleacher tickets on the day of game. As a parent of a college student, I can safely state that it is no longer possible to buy either at those prices.
The irony is that there are probably no more professorial positions as there were 30 years ago and yet there is a much larger demand for the higher education “product.” We won’t even discuss how expensive humanities graduate students are to an institution. With the explosion of adjuncts, I guess the politicians, policymakers, and administrators must be reading Moneyball or How the University Works.
The number is especially sad when you consider that those UC-Davis is paying the most infamous campus police officer twice the rate to pepper spray history majors than it does to teach them the finer points of the research paper. So if you want to make the big bucks take a civil service test instead of the PhD.
Professor Hartman, Stay on your toes and stay alert. You might end up with another group of young scholars throwing bean balls.
A paid up academic career from freshman year to retirement looks to be something like 3 million dollars as long as the prof doesn’t become a high-paid superstar. So a ten billion dollar useless weapons program would equal 3000+ entire academic careers, or 30+ years of quite a number of small liberal arts colleges.
Sometimes when I’m doing this mental experiment I specify 3000+ Sanskrit scholars just to avoid biasing the comparison with considerations of utility.