This article is in response to two different but related events: that I've started watching The Following on Netflix, and that someone recently broke out the old 'those who can, do; those who can't, teach' cliche in an effort to demean my livelihood.
First, The Following: we learn in the pilot episode that the villain is a charismatic and manipulative English professor/serial killer. This character possesses a few very curious details that reflect just how willfully ignorant the public is about the work that professors do. For example, his book, whose poor critical reception triggers a series of vengeful killings, is not a work of scholarship, but of fiction--of creative writing. But of course English professors--with the exception of the rare creative writing professor in an English or literature department--don't publish fiction or poetry, but analytical studies of other people's fiction and poetry. If you want to troll the profession, by all means argue for the irrelevance of scholarly studies of fiction and poetry; but at least demonstrate that you know the difference between a fiction writer and a professor.
We learn also that our English professor/serial killer is an Edgar Allan Poe scholar; an further that he's of British origin (not just the actor; the character speaks with a British accent). In the US we love attributing British accents to two extremes: highly desirable, sexualized men, and intellectuals. Now I love Poe; but the academy doesn't. In fact I don't know a single Poe scholar. Furthermore, I only know a handful of British scholars interested in American literature at all--and that's mainly because I did my PhD in Britain, where, understandably, most of the world's British scholars of American literature reside. I'm not trying to argue that there aren't British scholars of American literature out there, nor that no one is or should be interested in studying Poe, nor that it's not possible for all these things--British origins, scholarly interest in Poe and American literature, and an academic job in the US--to coincide, but rather that this is just a very odd and unlikely combination of traits. The reason for this is because the character in The Following is just a hodgepodge of English-professor stereotypes: charismatic and manipulative, a lover of Romantic poetry, an insecure writer of fiction, a posh British accent, a penchant for praying on naive, young female undergraduates. In other words, this is not simple ignorance, but willful misrepresentation that plays into all the sick fears and fantasies that the average person has about English professors.
Of course, I don't really mind all that much that we have these distortions in the name of fiction. Yes, they're harmful to the reputation of my profession; but it's ultimately the responsibility of people in my profession to correct misconceptions ourselves, rather than to censor or complain about those who create them (hence this bit I'm doing here).
Far more harmful and ignorant is the 'those who can, do; those who can't, teach' mentality (I also find it humorous and not at all ironic that those who typically write this phrase are too ignorant to write it with decent punctuation). The first part of this I should address is that it's insulting both to professors and to teachers when you call professors teachers. This is the case because the two jobs, despite having some overlap, demand very different skill sets, and involve very different kinds of labor. I don't like being called a 'teacher' not because I don't respect teachers--on the contrary, I respect them more than I think every profession there is--but because calling me a 'teacher' devalues my research, which is a very major part of my job. And if I were a teacher (I can only speak for me here), I'd be insulted by someone confusing me with a professor. After all, there's no way in hell I could walk into a K-12 classroom, of any year, with my experience, and teach effectively. I'm trained and experienced in teaching college students college material in a college classroom setting; I'm not trained to handle the needs, preferred modes of instruction, parental/home life concerns, and administrative and learning challenges of K-12 students.
One thing professors and teachers do have in common, though, is the 'doing' part of that stupid cliche. And this is something that even college-educated people, who have spent plenty of time in both high school and college classrooms, are nevertheless quite amazing and willfully ignorant of: in the strictest sense, a class is a product. That class that happens before your eyes every day or every week doesn't just magically appear there anymore than Betty Crocker snaps her fingers and a cherry pie appears out of thin air. Someone had to plan that class--nevermind execute it for you--and that takes a lot of time, effort, and logistical acumen. I'm not even talking about staying up late grading, or answering student e-mails at all hours of the day and night, or meeting with students in office hours or on your own time, or supervising theses and student research projects, or mentoring student clubs, interest groups, and sports teams--I'm just talking about making a class. That takes a lot of 'doing.' To be more precise, it takes about 60-80 hours/week of 'doing,' comparable to such prominent 'doers' as investment bankers, management consultants, code-junkies, and other model citizens of busyness and 'productivity.'
Of course, teaching is realistically only about 40% of my job as an English professor. So when you very kindly ask people like me 'how's teaching?' or 'how're the kiddos' or something like that, what I hear is 'how was your week, specifically on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12-6pm?' But I'd say I spend another 40% of my labor hours doing research under a lot of pressure to publish in a very competitive situation, and then the remaining 20% of my labor hours serving on administrative committees that design things like, say, the curriculum, or an entire graduate program, or faculty mentoring scheme, etc. So let me remind you, again, that this all takes many hours of 'doing.' You might say this 'doing' is at least as doingy as being in a 4-hour business meeting, going on a company retreat, answering 100 emails/day, giving a 20-minute Power-Point presentation, or networking with a client (although, of course, professors do all of this stuff--literally all of this stuff--as part of our jobs as well; it's just a little bit different). So now I begin to wonder: what exactly are all the 'doers' doing, and what makes your doing more doing than my doing? These are the sort of fucked-up questions you get when you troll a professor with a cliche.
Of course, I'm told that as an English professor my work is not only apparently not a kind of 'doing,' but definitely a kind of 'useless.' Yet again I wonder how we're computing use-value here. Is it useful to wake up at 7am, go to an office, read two-hours of Buzzfeed, start a memo in hackneyed prose, wander dead-eyed into a 2-hour meeting about 'cannibalizing business models,' eat cous-cous at your desk, frantically work your brains out for 2.5 hours in the late afternoon on a 'deliverable,' wait around for 2 more hours until everyone has decided that it's that time where it's socially and professionally acceptable to leave the office, and head home? Is it useful to teach the next generation of national and world leaders how to read carefully, construct evidence-based, reason-driven arguments, write persuasively, master rhetoric, speak publicly with articulacy; to generate new knowledge on a regular basis, sometimes only for itself? I guess it's all so, you know, sub-JECT-ive.
I don't mean to be so harsh, really; but the truth is that the world doesn't like a professor with bravado; and the professor doesn't like it either. But every so often, when you have so many forces manipulating public opinion of what you do, coinciding with such brash and at the same time specious defenses of the world's 'doers,' a scrupulous person must intervene. What a professor does can be very rewarding for the professor; but, even at private universities, it's a major public service. The same politicians who prattle on about the 'knowledge economy,' the same CEOs and business types who complain about how poor their young employees critical thinking and writing and speaking skills are, are also apt to use 'English professor' as a punchline to some joke about uselessness. But let's be honest with ourselves: if you're a biz-world kinda person, and you're standing next to me, that makes two of us who have worked in and maintain contacts in the biz-world. And that makes one of us who knows what it's like to work as a professor. And when I look around, I see many a friend and family member and acquaintance who works a white-collar office job, so I have plenty of examples in my life of both incredibly talented and thoughtful and incredibly shitty and shallow white-collar office employees. But when you look around there just aren't many professors in your life to tug your sleeve when you're watching The Following and let you know that The Following's Joe Carroll would never realistically expect his fiction book to count toward his tenure and promotion reviews.
One last thing, because I owe it to you now: a lot of professors can be really shitty people. Some (though few, in my experience) really are cut-off from mainstream life as we know it. And in the history of the academy, it's only a relatively recent development that professors have become professionalized. In the 18th century, going to college was something that a very few elites with a select few special interests did; and in many cases the children of the gentry went merely to gain social cachet and learn to get along as gentlemen (women not accepted). In the modern era, even in the 20th century, college was still something of an elite enterprise, with only those attending who were either wealthy and wanting to be more marriageable, or specifically interested in a profession that required a college education (in other words, you could be a Wall St. broker with no college degree; now Wall St. firms will barely take a glance at you if you don't know somebody's daddy or you don't have an Ivy League degree). But now college, at least in the US, is something that many people (whether this is good or not) aspire to, and something that is largely expected as a reasonable goal of non-elites and elites alike. Enrollments are huge now. And gone are the days of the gentleman scholar, who slides into a sinecure post at Harvard because he's one of 50 people with a PhD or a Master's in all of Massachusetts. Now there are 50 people with PhDs in one university department in Boston; and another 500 applying for one of those jobs. So it's time we drop the image of the easy-going, Ivory Tower, thinking-man posturing gentleman scholar, and get it right when we're talking and writing about professors. Once you get the basics right, I'm happy to have a civil and most certainly vigorous discussion with you about the value of my profession. But until then, as my students well know, you need to crawl before you can walk.
