Vocation

This afternoon, a couple of undergraduates sitting near me were discussing the academic life.  Both wanted to be professors, and they shared an understanding of what "being an academic" meant: it was a commitment to poverty (explicitly understood as a positive moral choice), isolation (no family life, apparently), and scholarly production.  A true academic was, apparently, an ascetic.  Eventually, one of them remembered that professors had to teach, too, which amused me no end.

There was nothing unusual about this stereotype of faculty life per se, but what fascinated me about the conversation was the sheer disconnect between the students' monastic ideal, on the one hand, and the lives of their own professors, on the other.  Or, to think about it in a different way, how their belief in faculty-as-monks relied on what they either failed to observe or were prevented from observing.  To begin with, they only belatedly remembered themselves--and yet, they attend a teaching-oriented institution.  The faculty are all supposedly single, and yet, as far as I can tell, unwed or unpartnered faculty are a minority on the campus. We have all taken a vow of poverty, and yet the tenured and tenure-track faculty here are all indisputably middle- and upper middle-class.*  If none of us are enjoying the $200K salaries that some pundits imagine we do (here, faculty earning $100K or above either are in upper admin and business, or are at the very end of their careers), we're not exactly deprived of comforts.**     At the same time, one notes that the truly impoverished faculty are many of the adjuncts, who, as Marc no doubt would have pointed out, are neither enjoying an intellectual life of leisure nor voluntarily remaining poor for moral/religious reasons!

*--Although I cannot help wondering if the students would be so quick to believe in our poverty if we were at a bigger (and wealthier) institution. 
**--Apparently, the stereotypical academic is either rolling in dough or condemned to a life of, well, bread and water.