Today’s ponder

Academic science does everything it can to exploit the shit out of jr scientists / profs and somehow I am the problem for pointing it out.

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) December 19, 2016

Today’s version of this was me pointing out that if you are on a “9 month appointment” of Salary X but every workplace expectation is that you will be doing University related work for 12 months, that in fact Salary X is your base 12-mo salary. The “9 month” thing is a dodge the Universities pull to turn your job into a contingency plan like selling cars.

If you sell a grant idea, you get to bonus your Salary X to the tune of those three extra summer months.

I’m sure there are a lot of fancy accounting reasons Universities pull this. There is certainly a whiff of distasteful “sing for your supper” in the underlying expectation that such Profs must acquire extramural funding to pay for themselves that I’m sure is being whisked aside with this dodge.

What I don’t understand is why so many of the victims of such schemes are so amped to defend them and call me terrible for pointing this out.

Look, if there is genuinely a situation where your Professor career is a-okay from start to finish if you only work 9 months out of the year than sure. I buy it. This person’s 9-month salary is plausibly a 9-month salary. I’m going to raise an eyebrow if they don’t cut off your card key access and VPN over the summer but….okay, fine.

But, the second you have a situation where you are expected to work those extra three months on University related business in order to retain your job or to advance normally (see: tenure) then this is a base salary for a 12-month job.