My father is a senior, tenured professor of mechanical engineering. He's won a bunch of prizes and fellowships. He's probably one of the best in his field. I don't ever recall anything about substantial raises. In fact, all I ever hear out of him is that they're cutting staff, restricting bonuses and cutting raises.
This coming from a man who works on research and the related papers/books almost every waking hour of his life. I'm serious too, I grew up around it. Saturday and Sunday, absolutely. Friday night, definitely. Breaks only for PBS News Hour/CNN, meals, and the occasional friendly tennis match (when the rotator cuff isn't giving him trouble).
He teaches only one undergraduate class a semester. Sure, you might consider that a "light teaching load," but that would be insulting to the graduate, doctorate, and post-doc students who fought hard to spend 50+ hour weeks in the lab (those students probably spend more than 80 hour weeks there themselves). If he could, he'd opt out of that class too. Can't blame him either: most of those students aren't even interested in being an engineer, they're just in it for the degree.
His biggest complaint? Administrative overhead. The university and related agencies take sometimes up to half of his grant money. Hard to pay those students at those rates. Which means he has to spend more time there himself. Time that's getting scarcer due to increases in course and paper requirements.
If you ask him, he'll tell you that colleges serve their administration (in the same way that some say government only exists to serve itself). But maybe someone's just holding on to that 58% raise check for him.
It's been observed that once any organization reaches a certain size or age it acquires so many institutional rules and traditions, and has so many layers of staff, that it effectively lives more to serve itself than to serve the outside world. It also acts increasingly not to fight the problem it was meant to be a solution for, but to actually preserve and continue that problem, thereby maximizing the chance for future job security for the institution itself. It will increasingly not want to cure the problem, but to temporarily alleviate it -- alleviate it for only as long as the institution's services are purchased. Once that happens, the organization has become a bureaucracy.
This coming from a man who works on research and the related papers/books almost every waking hour of his life. I'm serious too, I grew up around it. Saturday and Sunday, absolutely. Friday night, definitely. Breaks only for PBS News Hour/CNN, meals, and the occasional friendly tennis match (when the rotator cuff isn't giving him trouble).
He teaches only one undergraduate class a semester. Sure, you might consider that a "light teaching load," but that would be insulting to the graduate, doctorate, and post-doc students who fought hard to spend 50+ hour weeks in the lab (those students probably spend more than 80 hour weeks there themselves). If he could, he'd opt out of that class too. Can't blame him either: most of those students aren't even interested in being an engineer, they're just in it for the degree.
His biggest complaint? Administrative overhead. The university and related agencies take sometimes up to half of his grant money. Hard to pay those students at those rates. Which means he has to spend more time there himself. Time that's getting scarcer due to increases in course and paper requirements.
If you ask him, he'll tell you that colleges serve their administration (in the same way that some say government only exists to serve itself). But maybe someone's just holding on to that 58% raise check for him.