(Sarcastic) Comment of the day on university faculty

Faculty are the citizens that Oregon can least afford to lose.
Randy Blazak is an associate professor of sociology at PSU.
Sociology professors are the the citizens that Oregon can least afford to lose!

That was one of the many comments in response to this op-ed in the Oregonian on why faculty salaries are important.

There are many wrongs in that op-ed.  The worst of all is this:

Portland State does a poor job holding onto tenured scholars because of salary. The salary increase that comes with tenure on the nine month school year contract is about $240/month after taxes. That's not much of a reward after a lifetime in school and enormous student debt, and most earn less than experienced high school teachers in Portland Public Schools.

It is a remarkably stupid argument that high school teachers earn more than PSU faculty.  It is a fact of life that different occupations earn differently.  There is nothing in the US Constitution that mandates that university faculty shall earn a lot of money, or at least more than what high school teachers earn.  If higher salaries are what the op-ed authors are looking for, then whatever prevented them from becoming high school teachers, or garbage truck drivers or Wall Street investment bankers?  This is a free country, right?

The claim that the university does a poor job holding onto tenured scholars because of salary is, I am willing to bet, a bogus claim.  If it were anywhere close to being real, then the authors would have provided the data--the number of faculty who left the university because they were "underpaid."

A "reward after a lifetime in school and enormous student debt" is ridiculous a statement to make.  I cannot imagine how the authors can be models for "critical thinking" that higher education is all about.  Clearly they do not suggest that salaries ought to be proportional to the years spent in school, and the debts added up in the process, do they?

The op-ed authors are clearly caught up in their own delusional logic that university faculty deserve to get paid a lot of money because they are university faculty.  If they don't work out their delusions on their own, well, reality will then soon knock some sense into them.

As another reader comments:

Does higher education teach anything but elitist entitlement philosophy anymore? I thought education was it’s own reward?

A quick note to the commenter: beware the difference between "it's" and "its." :)