Thanks for your comment. I left a good career to go back for the PhD and obtain my dream of becoming a professor. It was hard work but I completed the PhD and got a tenure track job on the first try.
Most people have no idea that professorships are national job searches. In some fields 200-400 people apply for every job. The competition can be intense and then when you get a job, your day doesn’t end at 5 o’clock or just because it’s a holiday or weekend. I’m not complaining; I choose the work, I’m just saying that most people have no idea what is involved in a PhD or becoming a professor.
I drive an SUV. I’m not a commie or socialist and work hard for myself and my students. I am the only conservative in my dept and I catch ‘good-natured’ (whose opinion?) flack about it all the time, but I try to fight the good fight. People have issues with black conservatives, as if I cause too much cognitive dissonance in their little minds. Unlike the libs, I try to keep politics out of my classroom - except when I’ve had to defend McCain as a disabled war hero, or the ‘evils’ of capitalism, or the fact that not everyone who is against same sex marriage or abortion is a knuckle-dragging moron.
I know FReepers like to make jibes at lawyers (used to be one), professors, school teachers, doctors, and just about anyone else in the professions, but it gets tiring sometimes.
Hear, hear....not all of my professors were liberals, and the ones that were were easily discredited. Sometimes the willfully uneducated have a problem with those who actually went to college.