It appears that many people have more flexible schedules than I do, so I am going to leave it to them to protest on the steps of their respective state capitol buildings to point out that what we do is work.
One of the reasons I have a less flexible schedule than some of you is that I am on two or three committees charged, precisely, with convincing the Legislature that what you do, and what I also do is work.
That is why I am not willing to go on about it on this blog, where I say we are not working at all, we are enjoying ourselves. Have you ever worked in a factory, or seen a gang of agricultural or construction workers go at work? If you have, you will notice that they do not sit around talking about how hard it might be, they put their shoulders into it.
When they are finished, they don’t say a lot either; there is something about focusing on the difficulty, emphasizing it, that increases the fatigue. When you work, you have to sing; you cannot afford to discourage yourself; you have to say you really can pick that bale today.
I am teaching five classes and it is exhausting; I work through headache pain and muscle pain every day; I only really feel well on Saturdays because it is my long standing tradition to sleep on Friday nights and Saturday mornings as long as I want. Y nos levantaremos cuando se nos dé la gana….
I want to say that when we are relieved of teaching five classes it will not be because we strike, since only I would; it will be because of someone’s administrative talent. One thing professors like to say to prove they are intelligent is that they have no administrative talent and that they dislike administrators; what I have to say to that is who do they think gets their check signed?
I have administrative talent and vision; I can turn failing programs into brilliant ones; I can demonstrate to scientists and engineers the economic value to our region of your precise subfield; I pull down tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in institutional grant funding every time I try.
You may look down on that work because it is administrative but I point out that to do it successfully you must do research. You have to be up on things, yes; you have to have a credible vita, yes; you have to know what to cite, yes; you have to know who in field to talk to, yes. So you must be engaged in research and informed about current research, yes.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I’d much rather the administrative duties were fulfilled by talented scholars who know how academia works than by some overpaid person straight out of the corporate world who has no idea what education even is.
Yes, definitely. And that is the thing: when I was a “child” (i.e. a student) it was still much more the case that smart scholars did the things now done by weird consultants – much worse, and for a lot of money as opposed to as part of their regular job or in exchange for a course release.