Since I’m one of the fat cat professors whose bloated salary is fleecing the undergraduate students who are simultaneously being crushed under my heel, I feel like I ought to say something.

So here’s what I’ll say:

I teach at a public, land-grant university where tuition — especially for in-state students — is remarkably low and where — in my not-very-humble opinion — the quality of the education is very high. In other words, the administration and board members take seriously the land-grant mission of this institution. The same is true of the university where I did my undergraduate degree.

What’s more, I really bristle at the suggestion that my colleagues and I are being paid to work six months out of the year. This is a tragic misunderstanding of what we do and, more broadly, of what it means to be part of an academic community. While it might be the case that some of us are in the classroom for only eight or nine months, it’s most certainly not the case that we stop working during those other months. Indeed, it’s in those months where I get a great deal of my work done because it’s then that I have uninterrupted periods of time to conduct research and to write. This cartoon — and the mindset behind it — suggests that professors pontificate for a few months and then watch movies, or take their dogs to the park, or paint their mansions (or, better yet, hire people to do these things for them).

Professors’ research — so discounted by this cartoon — impacts their teaching by keeping them as up-to-date as possible on the current state of their disciplines. And their ability to publish their work also impacts the value of students’ degrees by raising the profile of the university.

In short, we’re teaching and we’re doing research and we’re advising undergraduate and graduate students and we’re attending countless meetings to keep running smoothly a bunch of things you wouldn’t even think about until they stopped running smoothly … and we’re actually doing it year-round.