I think her work probably does benefit others. Maybe the benefits of teaching the history and situation of a defeated indigenous culture are not all that tangible, but I suggest that that is in part due to a weakness in our social mechanism of assigning value.

The implication (probably unintentional) of your suggestion is that we'd be better off as a society if this subject weren't even available for study (since people wouldn't be wasting their productivity on learning to teach it), giving rise to a curious paradox wherein ignorance is considered more valuable than knowledge. This concept only works as long as you assume a number of people with a surplus of economic assets who are willing to work at a net loss because they love teaching. Really, I don't think this is a sustainable path over the long term.

Her work does not benefit others very much as demonstrated by their revealed preferences: no one is willing to pay her much for her teaching.

I'm saying that we'd be better off as a society if most people who want to become scholars in Native American Studies don't do it, and become nurses instead. Less fun for them, but great for those of us who want the services of a nurse more than the services of a professor. We compensate them for the lack of fun with money.

Again, your syllogism is faulty. You assume her work is fairly valued in exact proportion to the income it generates. But what of the possibility that her department's revenues subsidize the high cost of other departments, such as physics labs or in-demand business speakers?

It's not cheap to participate in a program like this, especially not at a decent school. If there was very low demand, you would expect this to be cheaper, no? http://www.stateuniversity.com/program/05-0202/American-Indi...

I can't get with your thesis that she's being poorly paid because she's choosing to have more fun. It sounds as if she's worked extremely hard to get to the academic level she is at. And if you sample people, I imagine that most would expect that a professorship at an ivy-league university would pay well, since you have to be at or near the top of your field to land such a job.

In general, at research universities, it's physics which subsidizes humanities. The university takes about half of every grant as overhead - i.e., science pays for the rest of the university.

As for my thesis that she's paid poorly because she is having fun, that's the situation for all academics (including myself). If she is truly underpaid relative to the fun of her job, why doesn't she quit and find higher paying work elsewhere? In fact, why do so many people apply for such jobs, when so few actually are accepted?

Hint: she likes her 3 months summer vacation, flexible work hours, relaxed environment, complete freedom to work on whatever she likes, and the possibility of never-get-fired-ever job security.

There's also the notion that people pick up in grad school that any job outside of research is somehow failure.