I might have a somewhat unique perspective to add to this discussion, so I’ll throw my own two cents in.
Currently, I work as an administrative assistant to the Director in a University in Canada. I am also starting my master’s degree. My end point is a PhD, though in the social sciences not the humanities. I too would like to be a professor someday. However, working for a university has greatly removed the rosy coloured glasses I had as an undergrad.
First, I have a great deal of respect for the profs in my university. They have a single minded obsessiveness that gives them the fortitude to work ungodly hours with very little reward. Yes, the pay is decent, but I bet if you averaged it out hourly, it wouldn’t be much more than what I make now. When I’m on campus writing papers in my office at 12 am, it is not unusual to see one or two of my profs in their office working on research grants, marking, writing papers of their own, or banging their head against the wall in some strange misguided effort to shut off their brain. The untenured (tenure-track) profs work 14 hour days, seven days a week. The tenured profs who still give a shit about what they study compare pretty close. There are tenured profs nearing the end of their career who basically show up, teach and go home… but those are few and far between. If this is the path you chose, you should be prepared to sacrifice any semblance of a normal life, which is precisely why most profs are married to other profs imho.
Teaching, at a research university at least, is barely an afterthought in how profs allocate their time. While getting good teaching reviews is nice, it won’t play much of a role in tenure or merit increase post-tenure. Instead, the university will be looking at how much service you provide to the university (sitting on committees etc), how much you publish (in major publications and with non-vanity presses) and how much money you bring in. The amount of research funding you bring in seems to me to be the the single biggest factor in judging the worth of an academic, excepting the rare academic rockstar who doesn’t bring in funding but publishes like a mofo. Profs seem to spend their time writing grant after grant. Those who love to teach are certainly there, but they work quite a bit harder to stay above the frey. This comic from Phd Comics is a suitable summary:
Academia is mired in petty politics, much more so than any other job I’ve ever worked in. I’m no Kissinger fan, but I do love this quote: “Academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes so small.” It is not unusual for an entire two hour staff meeting to be overtaken with a heated emotional argument about the content of a sentence in the minutes of record. The singlemindedness of a professor also means that a great majority lack the requisite social skills to function in an administrative setting. The reward for being a star researcher is a high-level administrative position, which means that the university is run by Deans and others who have no corporate management experience. That we function as well as we do is purely the luck of getting star researchers who also pick up administrative skills well, but this is by no means a guarantee. Thus, it can be extremely frustrating for profs to do things like pay their research assistants and TA’s, file receipts for research accounts, order supplies, fill out sabbatical applications and other run of the mill tasks I can do with my eyes closed.
That being said, I want this job. I want it knowing all the warts it has, because I can think of nothing I would rather do with my life. In my time off, I’m thinking about how to get here. At work, I’m shadowing my boss to learn the in’s and out’s of academic administration precisely because I find it fulfilling and interesting. I love to help my profs figure out the weirdisms in a research grant application. Being on the outside has only further confirmed that I want into this world.
Best of luck!