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?”