[BeetleB]

>When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

If you're in a decently good school, this is not true.

>The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all.

In both universities I went to, the only way to reduce teaching loads was to pay your way out of it. And the only way professors would do that would be to get grant money to supplement the lost income.

As for the history professor making $100K, what is the COL in that area? In my university, I just looked it up, and they average about $75K (which, to be frank, is decent for the little work they do).

In any case, most of the 80 hour/week work is in engineering and science...