Money Magazine has ranked the job of college professor as the second best job to have in the United States. The rankings are based both on salary and on letter grades awarded on various factors. Professor received a B for stress, A for flexibility, A for creativity and C for difficulty. Software engineer was the only job to rank higher.

To find the best jobs in America, MONEY Magazine and Salary.com, a leading provider of employee compensation data and software, began by assembling a list of positions that the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects will grow at an above-average rate over 10 years and that require at least a bachelor's degree.

Using Salary.com compensation data, we eliminated jobs with average pay below $50,000; total employment of less than 15,000; dangerous work environments; or fewer than 800 annual job openings, including both new and replacement positions.

Next we rated positions by stress levels, flexibility in hours and working environment, creativity, and how easy it is to enter and advance in the field.

We then ranked the jobs, giving double weight to compensation and percentage growth. Data for the top 50 appear here. Any job that fell in the bottom third of two job-satisfaction categories, or in the pay or growth category, was removed from consideration for the top 10.

UD next takes note of a short essay on a paradox dear to her heart - the notorious misery of tenured university professors who have everything to live for.

“Working under conditions of complete freedom, having to show up in the classroom an impressively small number of hours each week, with the remainder of one's time chiefly left to cultivate one's own intellectual garden, at a job from which one [can] never be fired and which (if one adds up the capacious vacation time) amount[s] to fewer than six months work a year for pay that is very far from miserable” -- this, notes Joseph Epstein, falls short of an airtight case for depression. And yet tenured American professors show “a strong and continuing propensity … to make the worst of what ought to be a perfectly delightful situation.”

“The university, as reflected in … academic novels … has increasingly become rather like a badly run hotel, with plenty of nuttiness to go round,” he continues. Are universities madhouses because of miserable professors, or are professors miserable because universities are madhouses? In the Kingsley Amis novel Lucky Jim, it’s professors making other professors unhappy: the “dominant spirit” is “pomposity, nicely reinforced by cheap-shot one-upmanship and intellectual fraudulence.”

The hypocrisy has deepened today. Epstein quotes from a 1999 novel about academia:

' Whenever I'm chatting at conferences with faculty members from other universities, the truth comes out after a drink or two: Hardly any academics are happy where they are, no matter how apt the students, how generous the salary or perks, how beautiful the setting, how light the teaching load, how lavish the research budget. I don't know if it's academia itself that attracts misfits and malcontents, or if the overwhelming hypocrisy of that world would have turned even the von Trapp family sullen. '

Contemporary academic novels describe a situation in which “everyone seem[s] to be in business for himself, looking for the best deal, which mean[s] the least teaching for the most money at the most snobbishly well-regarded schools.” I suppose the hypocrisy enters when everyone feels compelled to pretend that they’re not like this - that they’re committed primarily to the life of the mind, etc.

“And so let us leave them,” Epstein concludes, “overpaid and underworked, surly with alienation and unable to find any way out of the sweet racket into which they once so ardently longed to get.”



UD considers this too harsh; and as a happy academic for all the reasons Epstein says she should be happy, UD wants to suggest that the situation is more complicated.

Which leads to her third little chat in today’s comeback post, this one on the subject of liberalism. Surely part of the reason academics are so miserable is that they’re virtually all liberals, and liberalism is currently moribund.

“The liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them,” said Lenny Bruce. He correctly sensed that the fundamental problem with American liberals is that they can’t conceive why anyone other than an idiot would think differently about the world than they do.

Recently, Michael Walzer and Thomas Frank both puzzled over why most Americans regard liberals so negatively, and why most Americans reject liberal doctrines for conservative ones.

Why, Frank asks, do so many Americans regard liberals as (here Frank quotes the words of a talk radio guy) "pansy-ass, tea-sipping" elitists? Why do they think of “devitalized,” “deracinated upper-classness” as “the defining characteristic of liberalism”? Why do they persist in regarding liberals as an “elite, the know-it-alls of Manhattan and Malibu, sipping their lattes as they lord it over the peasantry with their fancy college degrees and their friends in the judiciary.”?

Here’s Frank’s answer:

“The reason conservatives are always thought to be tough and liberals to be effete milquetoasts (two favorite epithets from the early days of the backlash) even when they aren't is the same reason Americans believe the French to be a nation of sissies and the same reason the Dead End Kids found it both easy and satisfying to beat up the posh boy from the luxury apartment building: the cultural symbolism of class. If you relish chardonnay/lattes/ snowboarding, you will not fight. If you talk like a Texan, you are a two-fisted he-man who knows life's hardships and are ready to scrap at a moment's notice.”

This is a remarkably lame answer to an important question. Frank insists that hostility toward and electoral rejection of liberals is really just about surface, the “cultural symbolism of class.” But surely something real, and not merely symbolic, lies at the bottom of all those tea and latte cups. The very gesture of dismissal here - conservatives can’t have substantive reasons for their attitudes - goes to the heart of what heartlanders hate about liberals.

Michael Walzer displays a similar dismissiveness. “Why,” he asks, “isn't the moral character and the value-driven politics of the near-left more widely recognized? For right-wing intellectuals and activists, values seem to be about sex and almost nothing else…” For right-wing intellectuals and activists, as for liberals, values are about many things - religion, child-rearing, community, patriotism, law-abidingness, and so on. It’s as self-destructive for Walzer to dismiss conservatives as sex-addled hypocrites as it is for Frank to dismiss them as imperceptive resenters of class signals.

Walzer concludes that it's not the nature of the left’s morality that alienates so many Americans; it is the left’s failure to present a coherent picture of its morality. “No one on the left has succeeded in telling a story that brings together the different values to which we are committed and connects them to some general picture of what the modern world is like and what our country should be like. The right, by contrast, has a general picture. I don't think that its parts actually fit together in a coherent way, but they appear to do so.”

This situation is particularly frustrating to Walzer, because after all the right is just lazily resting on established, religiously-derived morality, while the left has been engaged in a heroic task to derive its morality from a secular world: “For the right today, the market takes care of such matters, or God takes care of them; the common good arises out of the competition for private goods - - In obedience, amazingly, to God's word. On the left, however, we have to take care of moral matters by ourselves, without the help of history, the invisible hand, or divine revelation. Hence the arguments we make are almost always moral arguments: in defense of human rights; against commodification, for communal values; against corporate corruption and greed, for ‘equal respect and concern,’ against unjust wars, in favor of humanitarian interventions; against environmental degradation, in defense of future generations.”

Again note the remarkably self-destructive trivialization of conservatives: they have nothing to contribute to moral thought, because, well, all you gotta do is look in that there Bible or do one of them cost/benefit analysis type things….



No, UD would like to suggest that a large part of the reason most Americans dislike liberals is that liberals are indeed an elite, and often a rather detestable one.

UD says this as an insider. She is an English professor in a deep blue department at a deep blue university in a deep blue city. She grew up in one of the bluest regions of the country (Bethesda, Maryland) with blue parents and blue relatives and blue friends. She married another professor. The son of a Harvard professor, he grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, two blocks from John Kenneth Galbraith’s house. Blue? UD and the Mr. don’t just travel to France a lot. They have on a number of occasions lived in France.

UD hopes she has established her deep-dyed blueness.

Despite having grown up in the heart of this territory, UD dislikes much of the landscape. She regrets to report to Mr. Frank that she has met many people along her azure highways and byways who are insufferable patronizing snobs, precisely as they are portrayed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh. She has met many people convinced they are moral paragons operating at an ethical level superior to everyone else, whereas these people in actuality represent moral primitives of the worst sort. She has met countless spiritual snoots -- people who think their transcendent ideology of the moment puts them in possession of deep truths about life that conventional religious people -- mindless little sheep -- can never hope to glimpse. She has met many rank materialists, shamelessly greedy consumers, who believe themselves to be extremely responsible and compassionate people. She has met many people who give lip service to egalitarian ideas and the rule of law but who are essentially aristocrats who don’t believe rules apply to themselves.

UD has also of course met people who are serious and committed moralists of the sort Walzer has in mind; but she has met many more who are cynics with no ideals at all. These people are close kin to Epstein’s “surly with alienation” types. Leon Wurmser captures their essence: They are people for whom “narcissistic grandiosity and contemptuousness defend against a fatal brittleness and woundedness.”