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Proyecto Visión 21

How much a thinker should be paid for thinking and teaching?

Francisco Miraval

I recently read a book, written by Robert Davidson, about history of philosophy and in that book I found a piece of information I simply didn’t know and, to be honest, it never occurred to me it could be known: how much philosophy and humanities professors were paid in classical Greece 2,500 years ago.

According to Davidson, those Greek professors, known as sophists, were paid the equivalent in 2014 dollars of almost $10,000 per lecture and almost $100,000 per course.

In our time, the best professors of philosophy at the best universities earn around $100,000 per year, while most of the professors in the area of humanities earn between $20,000 and $40,000 a year.

In other words, if those numbers are correct, professors in ancient Greece earned per course as much as the best professors now earn in a whole year.

I don’t know how many weeks per year ancient professors did work, so let’s assume they taught classes during 40 weeks every year, which means they taught 20 courses and the rest of the time they traveled. Teaching 20 courses in a year meant an income of $2 million (in today’s dollars.)

Let’s put it this way: ancient professors earned in two to four days what most modern professors earn in a year. And the best modern professors of philosophy will have to work for 20 years to earn what their classical Greek predecessors earned in one year.

(It is important to note that in ancient Greece, as it also happens today, the best athletes were frequently compensated, in some cases with salaries and benefits for life. But that’s another story.)

I wonder how much different our modern education would be if we decide to pay our professors a salary similar to what classical Greek professors used to earn. Obviously, an exact comparison between our time and their time is almost impossible, because many changes have happened during the past two and a half millennia. Regardless, I hope the point of my question is clear.

At the same time, the devaluation the work of educators (especially at college level) is easy to see not only when you compare current professors with past ones, but also when you compare college professors with college staff. For example, the average income of administrative assistants doubles the income of a college professor. And the salary of college directors is up to ten times higher than the salary of the professors.

In our time of constant transformation, when science fiction is now reality (cyborgs are closer to become a reality, the announcement of the finding of extraterrestrial intelligent life is near, trans-humanism is happening, the end of religion has been announced), we need thinkers more than ever. Yet, the value of thinking is very low now.

According to a study published by Dr. Gerald Cabtree in early 2013, people in early Greece were notably more intelligent and emotionally more stable than people in modern times. Perhaps that’s why they paid their thinkers very well.

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