I've noticed that there seem to be several college profs on here, and I was (a) curious to see how many, and (b) curious how we find the job in terms of MMM principles and ER. I also imagine that this may vary depending on the type of position one has and how far into it they are. Please, everyone feel free to chime in with comments,etc, regardless of your job (if you see parallels to your life, etc).
I work at a small undergrad liberal arts college as a tenure-track prof in a physical science. My degrees are in engineering, and I did FT research for 4 years after my PhD (making bank), but decided my life was empty. So, I took this job almost 4 years ago at a not prestigious small school. I considered more research-focused school instead, but felt like that was too close to the rat race I was trying to leave.
While it would be very taboo for me to say to anyone I work with, I consider myself semi-retired. Now that my classes are really put together, I don't work 40 hrs a week and have great flexibility with when I work. I do do research with undergrads, but this tends to be slow, doesn't occur over breaks (like xmas), unless I get a grant (with extra salary) to work for about 1/2 the summer if I choose to. Everyone where I work pretends they are doing scholarly work over the summer, but based on actual outputs, I doubt most aren't really pretty much taking the summer off. So, even working 1/2 every other summer or so for extra pay, I should be set for tenure.
The area is very low-cost and lends itself well to a MM lifestyle. The only major downside here is that my salary is not much over $50k. This would be hard to have a super high savings level with with a family (and sah spouse). But, as a semi-retired income, it's fine, imo. Overall, I think it's a job well-aligned with MM principles. As far as ER, I'm not sure if I will want to retire when I reach (FI); it'll probably depend on how much my colleagues are getting on my nerves.