In a Minding the Campus essay, Charlotte Allen weighs in on the battle over the David Levy op-ed that stirred up a hornets’ nest by saying that college professors don’t work very hard.
The life of a professor can entail a lot of work, but I have known some who admit that they treat it like a part-time job that pays quite nicely. It seems to me that the crucial question is how much of their work benefits the students. As Professor Murray Sperber noted in a Pope Center piece last year, many professors avoid one of the most difficult and time-consuming yet vital of tasks — careful editing of student papers.