What work do you think that professors do? They aren't just teachers, they carry out research and are considered experts in their fields. Post docs only do research as they are working to get a qualification - all the teaching is carried out by the professor here in the UK. When I was a doing my masters, my professor had 6 others to supervise as well as 3 pHD students as well as multiple undergraduate classes to teach, as well as scientific papers to publish and the corresponding lecture tour. I really respect people like that - their spare time is spent on people like me who most of the time only saw them when things are going wrong.
my own professor does a few classes a week, he's doing his own research (with separate funding, it aint his "job") with a small team of post grads who do all of the admin work, and its quite the same for most of the others. He gets fantastic holidays, rolls in around afternoon for classes.. he aint an ideologue though, no room for politics in physics How long ago did you do your masters? Professors weren't always this way and it is not ALL professors having to compete for jobs, and not having tenure, and being responsible for failed work\research, is not something professors do. Tenure is a real problem, anyone who cant be fired no matter how bad they do their job, is insane, especially when it comes to imparting knowledge or providing academic works Professors are the caretakers of knowledge for future generations, we should expect better from them than anyone else.
I went to university 10 years ago - I studied chemistry and the professors I worked with were all workhorses as I described. I remember turning up for lectures at 8.30am with my masters professor then going and seeing him at 7pm for a catch up meeting as that was the only time he had free that week. I must have been really fortunate as I never encountered any **** teachers or professors - worst one was a Swede who had a really high pitch voice to go with his accent and I sometimes missed what he was saying as he really made me laugh. Every job has its own version of tenure - where I currently work we have 4 guys that don't do bugger all, can barely use their computers but because they have been there for donkeys years, don't ever get fired. Good luck mate with your uni course mate - only suggestion I can give is do as much CV padding as you can as experience counts more then qualifications. Also careful are you don't become influenced into becoming a marxist
