Yeah, I agree that most faculty are underpaid, especially in the humanities. Also, I agree that universities should have more tenure-track Teaching Faculty (whose main job is being good teachers to undergraduates) rather than just having part-time adjuct faculty or research-focused professors who don’t really want to teach.

I didn’t mean to sound like I was defending the status quo. Just that there are a lot of career considerations that I didn’t learn “until it was too late” that I was hoping to communicate to younger generations.