stéfan sinclair :: scribblings & musings

A discussion I had with my Teaching Assistants today made me curious about trying to determine my hourly rate of pay. Calculating the hourly rate of pay from an annual salary is no doubt fairly straightforward in some professions where hours of work are easy to define; but being a professor is not one of those professions (nor are most professions that involve teaching, I suspect).

What counts as work for me? Some things are obvious: writing a conference paper, preparing a seminar, participating in an administrative meeting, etc. But what about the borderline activities (or some nuance in the previous activities)? What about reading the newspaper in the morning when can’t help being on the lookout for current content that’s relevant to what I’m teaching? How about surfing around on the web for examples of a specific concept (and getting constantly side-tracked along the way)? Or having coffee with a colleague and discussing our most recent research interests? What about riding my bike to campus and working out in my head an algorithm for text analysis? And reading some science-fiction novel with a pencil nearby in case I find a quotation I might like to use in a paper I’m currently working on? The ambiguous line between work and leisure is one of the most appealing aspects of being a professor – and also one of the most challenging aspects if one wants to maintain a balanced life.

Even if I’m conservative in what I include as work, there’s no doubt that I work a lot: days, evenings, weekends. I’d probably be underestimating if I said that I work about 8 hours per weekday and about 5 hours per weekend day. That averages to about 7 hours per day, including weekends. Let’s say, to be optimistic, that I have the equivalent of about 3 weeks of down time during the year as vacation.

So what’s my hourly rate of pay? I won’t divulge that, but I’ll help you calculate yours. :-)

The US presidential debates are not quite as easy to witness for those of us who are (happily) deprived of TV (or cable?). Fortunately, there’s no lack of websites that are offering the video, though it does take some effort and patience to find better quality feeds that aren’t embedded in complex pop-up windows. This feed of the second presidential debate seems decent.

In an article entitled “How Would Jackson Pollock Cover this Campaign?” about perceived biases in the New York Times coverage of the 2004 US presidential elections, Daniel Okrent makes this comment that illustrates well the tension between a medium that encourages immediacy and a profession that values critical thought: And why the paper would ask a reporter to provide “real-time analysis” online during the debates is beyond me. The very phrase is an oxymoron. (October 10, 2004, Section 4, Page 2).