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The professorial personality
In an IHE column about his first tenure-track job, blogger and University of Hawaii anthropologist Alex Golub makes some revealing remarks about the professorial personality:
People give professors respect. It's amazing. As a graduate student you get no respect. People consider you locked in a state of arrested development, a sort of career limbo. There are many reasons for this, the foremost being, of course, that graduate students are locked in a state of arrested development that forms a sort of career limbo. Moving from this lowly state to that of a professor can be mind-blowing.Professors are respected and--most amazingly--believed. They can opine on topics about which they know absolutely nothing and people will believe it hook, line, or sinker. Or at least they will appear to, since the other feelings associated with professors are fear and boredom. The first inclines students to please professors who have control of their grades, while the second leads everyone to avoid disagreement that may force them to extend a conversation they would prefer to skip.
The intoxicating feeling of being taken seriously is something that the new professor has to take into account. It takes a lot of self-discipline to be modest in one's claims after years and years of not being taken seriously. Are we ever successful? Probably not. And yet it seems to me that we can't do anything else but try.
Golub is writing with his tongue slightly in cheek--but he's also pointing to some of the defining aspects of how the professorial personality is formed and why it's such a problematic formation for so many people.
Academe is intensely hierarchical at the same time that it is populated by enormously self-involved individuals (Golub mentions elsewhere in his article that the dissertation, the means by which graduate students prove that they are worthy of the doctorate degree, is "an intensely narcissistic document"). Academic egos are tortuously dependent on status--either crushed by the "lowly state" of being a graduate student or inflated by the "mind-blowing," "intoxicating" experience of being a professor. Golub identifies assistant professorship almost as a kind of egoistic expansion period, a time during which new professors are immensely tempted to bloviate on anything and everything, and when they must try--and must, it seems, inevitably fail--to keep their egos in check.
Golub is kidding, sort of. But only insofar as he is jokingly describing a real pattern that isn't very funny at all when you stop to think about it. It's a problem--for academe, and for public discourse in this country--that so many academics do think they are qualified to pontificate on issues far beyond their areas of expertise. It's a problem, too, that entire academic organizations encourage and promote a sort of arrogance that is ultimately as disrespectful to scholarly professionalism as it is to the public it condescends to "inform."
The recent meeting of the American Historical Association, which featured a misguided resolution against the Iraq war, is a case in point. The professionalism and scholarly integrity of historians who think it is their work to attempt to dictate foreign policy are on the line--and judging by Tim Burke's description of the debate surrounding the resolution, most historians don't seem to realize that.
But overweening pride does not become intellectuals any more than it does anyone else. And scholars are not exempt from the truth contained within the old adage, "Pride goeth before a fall."
Posted by acta online at January 12, 2007 07:48 AM
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Comments
Academics arrogant? Probably. But no more so than journalists who think they know how to run the country's affairs. Or a lot less than guys born with silver spoons in their mouths who think they're qualified to be President of the United States.
Posted by: Mike at January 14, 2007 12:56 PM