Why are Texas college professors so damn happy this year?

This is amazing. I recently saw 2 different rankings from surveys about best colleges / universities to work for.

 One was in the Chronicle, and it had 11 Texas schools,  including 3 of the top 4!*

The other was in Forbes, and of 25 schools, 6 were from Texas including 2 OF THE TOP 3!

The first list had Abilene Christian, Angelo State and Baylor at the top, the second had Texas Tech and Texas.

Did the State of Texas give out huge across the board raises this year? Is Texas just a happy happy state? Have higher ed employees in Texas fallen victim to the Stockholm Syndrome?

OU made the Forbes list at number 16.

I have to say of all the universities I've worked at or visited, the best was CALTECH (which is number 18 in the Forbes survey), and OU is tied for second with CIDE in Mexico City.

The CALTECH experience was awesome. They paid me more than I asked for. They leased a car for me (I made the payments, but they handled all the details). They would give you money to go to a conference IN ADVANCE (I mean meal money and such). I was only a visitor but got to pick my classes and teaching times. They were tremendously generous with entertaining speakers and picking up the tab for large parties to go to dinner. There were seminars all the time, interesting people visiting, or in residence, always someone around to argue / discuss ideas with. I got a ton of work done, learned a lot, and just generally had an amazing year.

Robin and I also had a fun and productive time during our year visiting at Duke (thanks again, super-Mungo!) But CALTECH was Shangri-la.

What was your favorite workplace and why? And please also share any thoughts about what could be in the water in Texas!


*thanks to loyal KPC reader Gerardo for pointing out that the first list is alphabetical!