Issues of authority

I asked my students to write something in their blogs about “the worst boss they ever had.”  A surprising number of them wrote about professors they had worked for.  Thinking that professors, on the whole, are pretty friendly chaps, I was surprised.  “It’s obvious,” said the students with one voice.  “Professors never had a proper job in their lives and they don’t know what it’s like to handle people.  They push us around just to make a point.”

Since I moved to Taiwan I have, for the first time, money to employ research and teaching assistants.  I could have a whole slew of them if I wanted.  But I’m useless as a boss. I feel strange asking someone to do something for me that I easily could do myself.  It takes too long to explain what I have in mind and half of the time I don’t have anything much in mind at all.

Or perhaps it’s rather that I have a problem with authority.  I’m instinctively disrespectful of people who have authority over me, but I find it equally impossible to push others around.  Thank god I’m only a professor and not in charge of something important.

I sometimes run into my research assistants on campus and I don’t know what to tell them.  “Yeah, I’ll get back to you next week … Meanwhile, are you being paid? … Just collect the money for now, OK?”