Why I Hate Professors

OK - I don't. But Stanley Fish writes a very compelling piece about one of the most tiresome features of academia, and of the entitled attitude of the professorial class in particular.

I've been following - along with Fish it seems - the U of O prof Denis Rancourt who finally ran into problems, after awarding A-plus grades on a whim, turning classes into activism seminars and drawing persistent negative criticism. Rancourt is the icon of tenure gone awry.

Supporters of Rancourt (and there are many) cry foul at his forthcoming dismissal. The argument is that this represents fundamental academic freedom, freedom to the ideals of truth and justice and not to the "parochial rules of an institution in thrall to intellectual, economic and political orthodoxies."

Nonsense. Total, complete and utter adolescent nonsense. Fish argues this reasoning basically boils down to: "the university may pay my salary, provide me with a platform, benefits, students, an office, secretarial help and societal status, but I retain my right to act in disregard to its interests; indeed I am obliged by my academic freedom to do so."

Academics regularly claim a kind of privileged epistemological exceptionalism - a radical postie individualism which says I should not be constrained by any force outside my burgeoning ego and (most radically) this will somehow be for the good of all.

My visceral reaction to this is partly because I used to share this perspective. Moving into a think tank disabused me quickly - though not painlessly - that my cerebral might was both a) not God's singular gift to the world and, b) that this gift must be trained, apprenticed, put to use of the common good; love of God and of our neighbour. Sometimes this means you do less pleasant things (but what roofer wants to get up on the scorching roof on a summer day?), and sometimes it means you even do things that are outside of your "expertise" (a sacred sin in the academy - hence the consistent genuflection to "although I am not an economist/theologian/political scientist").

Wendell Berry argues that people would appreciate food, rest and land more if they became closer to the land, its rhythms and seasons. Maybe professors would be better professors if they became closer to society, to the folks that endow their chairs, to the businesses that contribute to their salaries, and the foundations that make their work possible.