Says Who?

"This talk about the hard life of the college professor and the customary feeling of condescension toward him because of his financial situation is unwarranted and unjustifiable," writes an anonymous contributor to the current issue of the Alumni Weekly.

Everything in this world is comparative, and in considering whether a man is well off financially one must compare his lot with that of other members of the social community." The professor accordingly stacks himself up against his $25,000 a year classmate in business and considers himself poor. "The two are not to be compared, however, and efforts to make them financially congruous are entirely misdirected," says the writer. From a money standpoint the teacher is poor, but what of it? "He enters the profession with his eyes open."

There are disadvantages, of course, to the teaching profession, which the writer makes plain. Professors almost invariably, he says, are inflicted with a kind of inferiority complex due to the fact that a great majority of their students, or their students families are richer than they. Also many young men are eliminated from the teaching game at the beginning whey they discover that there is not the idealistic glamor to it that they expected. On the other hand, however "the man in business, though he has the chance to earn big money has the chance of losing it too while the professor is troubled with no such nightmare and in addition experiences none of the fierce and continuous competition of the business world." Furthermore, due to discounts of one kind or another, the teacher "actually gets considerably more for his money than the man in business. And consider the lawyers, doctors, architects, painters, sculptors, and musicians do they earn more on the average than the college professor? I doubt it. And certainly they cannot be their own bosses and do as they please to the extent that professors can.' The Daily Princetonian