Apparently not according to one opinion piece found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/do-college-professors-work-hard-enough/2012/02/15/gIQAn058VS_story.html.
Apparently, professors have the reputation of working a few hours a day, leaving as they please, getting time of for spring, winter, and summer, and still getting paid above their non-academic peers. While some of this isn’t a terrible stretch of imagination, we all know what happens when we are “off.” Our inboxes are flooded with emails, we have to write the grant proposal while on vacations, and there’s a few papers to review after dinner.
But, I think there are some tenured, unproductive members of the college community that do get paid too much. In academia, I think the trend is that a few individuals give the profession a bad name, and then its tarnished forever.
If you are going to compare research faculty with teaching faculty, then you’ll also have to include the source funds and the related duties of the research faculty. Grants and other sources are supposed to pay for those activities. At the same time, if you take someone who’s primary duty is not to teach and you have them teach, then you will not get the best quality for your dollar.