Page:Engineering as a vocation (IA cu31924004245605).pdf/100

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
86
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION

when they prove their ability. Many teachers resent very strongly the idea that their work should be measured by results. The college to a teacher is a home, and sometimes a graduate, smarting under insult, injustice and incompetency, has to wait twenty years before he can get on the governing board of his Alma Mater and attend personaly to the discharge of a teacher he knows to be unfit.

Practical men frequently state that in no line of work can a man make a living with less real effort and smaller results than as a member of a teaching force in a college, engineering schools not excepted. The same trouble is found in public offices and in the offices of all large corporations where there are enough good, earnest, hard workers to enable a lot of lazy incompetents to hold down jobs without detection. The pay of a professor lags about ten years behind the average of the pay of engineers in active practice. At the start there is scarcely any difference, but the teaching engineer has an advantage in that he holds practically a life position, where he may, if he wishes, work with all the enthusiasm and energy of the clock-watching clerk. The pay of a good professor never rises above the average the first-class, successful engineer may figure confidently on securing after fifteen years' work. A good professor however, often makes a great deal of money as a consulting engineer, his work