I think we see nonsense like this precisely because more and more women are tenured, and hired onto the tenure track. When the doors open to women, it seems that the profession then invites scrutiny and criticism missing when its men only. When women enter professions that were previously a male domain, salaries drop, privileges dry up, and the profession”s esteem drops.

But as to the question of service – it’s interesting because on one hand we have the fact that service is totally unrewarded and uncompensated, feminized as Historiann rightly says. Try getting a promotion to associate professor on the strength of your SERVICE RECORD! Ha ha ha ha. Even the provost would deny your case. I say “even” here because the university administration itself devalues service, while simultaneously expecting faculty to engage in more and more of it. My theory is because all university administrators seem to subscribe to the same views put forward by the authors of that atrocious book – ie that faculty don’t really WORK, we aren’t *doing* anything unless every second of our time is accounted for. And while research is the #1 road to success at the majority of our universities, these same universities don’t seem to believe that research is real work. Or rather they seem to think that this chunk of our job is something we should do *on our own time*, whereas the 50 hr work week should be full of teaching and service responsibilities. They seem to think that they don’t *benefit* from our research. And it’s true there isn’t the more obvious correlation between effort and reward as one finds in teaching (each seat filled = $$) or service (running the university for administrators for free). I don’t mind service work generally, but I am more and more troubled by the trend I see among administrators that research *doesn’t count* somehow – unless of course we’re talking about denying someone tenure or a full professorship, then everyone’s shrieking about publications. It’s a weird tangle.

Worrying about whether the lack of fair compensation is based in service, teaching, or research is not nearly as important.

There’s a reason I resemble that post, at least everything except the MA students as our MA students are all teachers, perhaps the only degreed profession paid worse than humanities professors.

But the same is just not true for everyone, not even at my own institution. I know a half dozen other administrators – all of them women, most of them women of color – stuck, for different reasons, at a lower rank and a lesser wage. Their service is just as important – and perhaps moreso, since they administer programs that disproportionately enroll students of color.

I’m having a very hard time here, because I know exactly how important service (sometimes) is – and I know that compensation isn’t fairly distributed. I see the justice of Historiann’s rant. Maybe this is a big fucking problem precisely *because* it can’t be so easily resolved.

Do we want these people – my underpaid colleagues – to say no to service? I don’t know. Isn’t it better that they serve, and better that we lobby for their appropriate compensation, than that they give up the job?

Service is the responsibility of self-government. The question for all self-governing bodies is, how much government do we really need?