Newsflash: college professors not overpaid

The attempt to blame the cost on the faculty is just another politically-motivated smear by people who hold grudges against the academy for failing to share their ideas of Proper Culture.

Chad Orzel provides some Actual Facts. Like, that the cost of *electricity alone* on a residential college campus is of the same order of magnitude as the cost of the *faculty*.

He doesn't challenge the implicit contention that faculty should be paid for teaching alone, but then he's just writing a short blog post. I want to point out, though, that valuing research at zero is also ideologically-motivated, and is completely of a piece with arguments that: the White Male Canon = Great Literature and those brown writers and white women writers are crap; science should be "balanced" with creationism; women studies and ethnic studies programs are worthless; professors "brainwash" students with "liberal bias," and so forth. One could also tie in hard-core far-right ideological bias against things like psychology (god forbid we try to understand why people do things we wish they wouldn't, or accept that behavior isn't easily categorized into "good" and "evil," or think of childrearing in any terms other than "spare the rod and spoil the child"); sociology (what, study marginalized groups? think of human welfare empirically? investigate the status quo?); anthropology (other groups are NOT as good as we are!)...

Feel free to add your own examples in the comments.