The Professor Parody
JIM’S
FAVORITE
BITS
FROM
THE
PROFESSOR
I Of Types of Professorships
“A professor should have no other object or thought, nor acquire skill in anything, except campus politics, its organization, and its discipline.”
II Of Assistant Professorships
“The tenure-track position is called an assistant professorship. The ‘assistant’ part of the title is a relic from a heroic age. No one knows who is being assisted. Perhaps the sun in his rising.”
III Of Research
“Research is a lame word. Having no personality, it is bandied about by everyone, doing all the work and no work at all. It designates the intellectual activity of an age whose ideal is indiscriminate hoarding. Research is what we call reading and thinking when we wish to sound expensive.”
IV Of Language
“Language is like a coral reef. The dead bits form the scaffold. The fresh bits shimmer in a spectacle of light and motion. Except that language is made of metaphors, not corals. Every word is a metaphor. The literal is a dead metaphor.”
“We no longer call a spade a spade. It’s a soil-turning-implement. STI.”
“… militant professors … want to smash the idols, and they want the idols not to understand what hit them. They themselves probably do not understand what they hit the idols with.”
V Of Teaching
“I wonder whether even toddlers couldn’t use an ear pinch every now and then, whether the carrot must not be balanced by the stick. But now there are only carrots—and they’ve grown so absurdly large, in another context they might pass for sticks. Quincy would be flabbergasted.”
“Infantilization, no matter how thorough—and it is thorough—still meets with a natural revulsion. Even Quincy would balk at such a treatment. She was born for the saddle, not the ribbon.”
VI Of Workshops
“Under the cover of novelty, Small Bureaucrats rotate through pedagogical fads already retired when Cicero had his severed head pinned through the tongue by Fulvia’s decorated hairpins. Innovation for them is the adoption of the latest tech hack.”
VII Of Course Offerings
“Attracting students to courses is the academic equivalent of cattle rustling. Professors scour the undergraduate herd for prospects, branding them early with cross-listed tags and catchy titles. They issue calls—‘New Course,’ ‘No Prerequisites,’ ‘Counts Towards Major’—as one might rattle a feed bucket at the fence. And they stand at the ready—lasso in one hand, whip in the other—waiting for the herd to stir.”
VIII Of the Adjunct Pool
“Charm is useful, but reprisal is remembered. A professor who acts virtuously will soon come to grief among so many who are not virtuous. It is better to be feared than loved. Or better still: loved by students, feared by peers.”
IX Of Villainy
“Moonshine will always make his move if a potential victim is in sight. He will give the impression of someone too helpless to stop a kitten from stealing his lunch—indeed, of someone who’d rather starve for the kitty to eat. That kitten invariably becomes his dessert. The poor little waif was only being fattened. Do not be his kitten.”
X Of Hereditary Professorships
“If Figg is the Pied Piper, Falley is the alpha rat and Moonshine the rodent who organizes traffic and loots the drowned.”
XI Of Old Professorships
“You can think of Tracy Casagrande as equal parts Emerson and Thoreau—with hints at times of the Big Lebowsky, the Dude. He is articulate, irreverent, oracular—and not, it has been said, perfectly hinged. He does not speak—he ricochets.”
XII Of New Professorships
“Zuleika Bustan Zaman (Zuli) and Julia Rowan Littlefield (Julie) are, for all intents and purposes, twins. One gets the impression that The University acquired two for the price of one. They were certainly stamped from the same mold: the single surviving template for New Professors. (Keeping more than one proved fiscally irresponsible.)”
XIII Of Identity Politics
“The rhetoric of inclusion does not include you. It is reserved for the American underprivileged, whose neighborhoods they are quick to label unsafe—and just as quick to warn you against frequenting in a show of affected concern.”
XIV Of Hiring Committees
“We were this close to having a triplet instead of a twin. Elise von Wunderland (they/them), our near-miss, identifies as African African—to avoid confusion with African American.”
XV Of Endowed Chairs
“Many a professor would sell their parents to be called The Erica and Hans-Martin van den Klooster-Brüggen Professor of Trans-disciplinary Gobbledygook. One does not pay top dollar to be interred at the Zbigniew Kołakowski Department of the Dearly Departed—previously the cemetery—to have a plaque with their Christian name in 24-point Helvetica. That would be unbecoming.”
XVI Of Appointments
“Cesare Borgia helped create pope the man who would imprison him. Snowball made Napoleon commissar and was sold for meat. Marie Moses brought Mortimer Moonshine to Cadbury.”
XVII Of Curricula
“Luck, they say, is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow. But how you position yourself is up to you; why stand in the path of the arrow? Why mess with the diversity racket or the efficiency hustle? Stay above the ideological carnage when you can. Take sides when you must.”
XVIII Of Reviews
“As an assistant professor, you should approach review with strategic deference—it is not yet completely yours to wield. You may now submit the occasional review praising the work of those who praise your own. After tenure, however, you will be able to use it more deliberately to establish authority, extend influence, and settle old scores. Review is a dish best served cold.”
XIX Of Patronage
“The world is a village indeed—there is no shortage of bumpkins.”
“But it is the Ivy League that best equips its graduates to scale the walls of the citadel. Little wonder it is named after a poisonous vine.”
XX Of Counsel and Grantsmanship
“Always be applying for grants. Do not be dissuaded by rejection; there are always others to pursue. It is true that the number of innocent initiatives sincerely devoted to progress and development is vanishingly small—but this is more than offset by private interests eager to launder money or image. That universities can accept such funding while remaining authentic and independent is surely the highest testimony to their integrity.”
XXI Of Departmental Review
“The typical academic of today is a bundle of insecurities, with an unquenchable thirst for ignorance.”
XXII Of the Tenure File
“Bureaucracy is the crocodile in the children’s song that ate the sun. For it had invented the lantern. And now we search for our keys beneath its light—though we lost them somewhere else. The logic, then, is to vindicate the lantern and chastise those who want their sun back.”
XXIII Of Perks
“Perk is a word that could only have currency in a culture thoroughly infantilized. It suggests a treat, a sweet, a reward for being good—like a sticker for not biting your classmates.”
XXIV Of Visibility
“Respect your audience, not their intelligence.”
XXV Of Intelligence
“Sapiens is a blind behemoth. It has no purpose. It neither progresses nor regresses. It tumbles along. It burns its few seers to keep the rest warm. It is the rest who determine the direction of the tumbling. But the rest are creatures of the immediate. The latest gadget tantalizes them. The waxen feathers, the gift of the seers—reduced to TikTok trophies for the rest—are already melting. They have taken us closer to the sun—which is to say, deeper into the belly of The Bureaucrat… And the latest gadget, artificial intelligence, might just be the tumbler’s tumbler.”
XXVI Exhortation
“The idea of the university still moves us. It still moves me. I love the university from the bottom of my heart—the university as an idea, not as it stands. (That, I love from the heart of my bottom—or, as Casagrande would say, from the bottom of my bottom.)”