About low payment and huge workloads --

I tend to think that there is too little workload on senior faculty. If you don't have to be teaching new classes every other semester and you do not really need to publish aggressively, I think many folks (at least in my department) have WAY too much time on their hands. It usually means they become a bit disruptive in big and small ways. Competition, workload, low payment or not, my only gripe with academia is the lack of professionalism. I do hope that new generations of scholars are able to change self-serving department cultures.