Professors don't get the summer off. If you have a heavy teaching load, summers are your one window to get research work done. If you don't, like me, the difference between the summer and the rest of the year is its easier to find parking.
Fine, 3-4 months to think about interesting things all day long with basically zero expectation that you’ll be anywhere or show up to anything. Call it what you will.
I mean, its not completely untrue. You do not have set hours. You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs, depending on how despotic you want to be.
I do not have set hours, but I do have obligations. When a program officer wants to talk to you, and it's 6 AM because you're on the west coast, you say yes.
"You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs" is just untrue - there's always more work than there are people to do it, and I'm pretty sure a number of committees I'm on would be more than a little annoyed if I sent a postdoc.
Is it a job that has some nice properties to it? Yes. But the idea that we have summers "off", or that it's all time to contemplate blue sky research ideas, rather than go to curriculum meetings and work on monthly grant reports is a fantasy.
> When a program officer wants to talk to you, and it's 6 AM because you're on the west coast, you say yes.
Why? What happens if you as a tenured PI say no?
> "You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs" is just untrue - there's always more work than there are people to do it, and I'm pretty sure a number of committees I'm on would be more than a little annoyed if I sent a postdoc.
No this part is definitely true and I have firsthand experience of it. Your graduate students are paid less than minimum wage and are often immigrants from poorer countries. Often they are even paid zero by the PI. So they can be effectively serfs and beholden to you for literal survival.
Use your imagination. What's to stop you from recruiting a bunch of students and offloading all your grant writing to them, hunger games style?
Look, I know there are idealistic professors who put in the work. If that's you, thank you. But the system incentivizes what is effectively feudalism and the professors who take advantage of that climb faster than you and become program chairs. Acknowledgement of this perverse system is not an attack on you.
Your setup sounds rather different than mine, though I am under the impression mine is typical. There are no “curriculum meetings” or any other sort of teaching or service work during the summer, for the simple reason that the university literally does not pay you in the summer. I meet with my group to talk about research, but that falls under “enjoyable” for me. Grant reports are due once a year, in the spring as it happens. I have never heard of monthly reporting grants, but I’m used to garden-variety NSF and R01 type stuff only.
If your job much of a grind as you are making it out to be, why not go make 3-10x in industry? Honest question.