This Professorial Life
The more I age, the greater the number of students who have passed through my classrooms, and the increasing word count of those books and articles that I have been able to write, the more such a life has begun to appear as a thing unto itself.
That is to say, what earlier had seemed to me to be a collection of disaggregated events: degrees; jobs; locations; interruptions; disappointments; satisfactions; stabilities; now, such a thing has become discrete. A career, yes, but really a whole life.
In making and marking this passage, however, I have never been inclined to adopt the sort of language that is often associated with a highly self-aware understanding of having been ‘called’ or ‘summoned’ to this life. Shying away from such terms perhaps is a leftover of having heard them used too often in my childhood and youth, employed then as words of power suggesting that those who uttered them were engaged necessarily in work of great importance – usually for God. In time, I came to recognize them as a form of cant, at least in my view, little more than terms used in order to inflate one’s position or status in relation to the more mundane jobs or careers engaged in by all those other people who either were properly reluctant to describe their working lives in such august terms, or never thought to aggrandize them in this way in the first place.
A quarter-century into the professorial life now leaves me feeling rather humbled, therefore, rather than feeling called. Humbled in the sense that professorial species-being is a funny thing both to discern and to describe. Intellectual mid-wifery comes to mind readily as being the primary task of the professor, at least in so far as it concerns the teaching of students. A whole lot of hyperbole is used these days to get at the act of teaching, the essentials of which have not really changed much in thousands of years, however, and whose outcome has always been pretty clear in its desire for the student ultimately to do it for themselves. Are professors the gatekeepers and purveyors of knowledge, dispensing such to students reaching up with strained necks and opened mouths like so many eaglets in the nest? No, but viewing them as such was always something of a caricature anyway, often used today as an excuse by some to belittle the professorial lecture, or the seminar, or the talk as being of little value because – as I have heard it said – ‘students can find everything they need online’. But such has never been the teaching task of the professor anyhow. The real task is to elucidate, to penetrate, to ask the right questions – indeed, there is such a thing as good and bad questions, just as there is good and bad science and good and bad religion – and it falls to those living the professorial life to get this elucidation right.
To be sure, life in the academy these days is fraught; although arguably no more fraught than when Socrates was forced to drink the cup of hemlock, or much later when some nineteenth-century Oxbridge dons began to resist religious tests, or later still when today’s professors began to reject being muzzled over charges of having violated some expression of identity politics. Too often, it seems to me, contemporary university professors have adopted ideology as their lodestar, replacing the timeless task of acquiring knowledge with perpetuating a given ideology as being at the core of what should comprise the professorial life. Hence the pied-piper approach to university teaching that has become common on most campuses, which has resulted in the gathering of student acolytes whose job it is to parrot the ideological views of their professor. To be sure, the inspiringly charismatic professor has been a staple of undergraduate life always, but that is not what I mean here. Instead, what I mean is the professor who has decided that the acquisition of knowledge per se is not the main task at hand but rather that it should be made subordinate to using such knowledge to forward a given ideological project.
Such a project can be political, or religious, or sociological, or sexual, or really anything at all. But what it isn’t, in my view, is professorial. Certainly, it is not professorial according to my definition of the professor being understood best as an intellectual mid-wife. Professors should give themselves over first and foremost to helping birth in their students a true love of the life of the mind, in the same way that a coach’s primary task in sports is to foster an athlete’s love of the game.
Photograph by Cal Agro
I once heard a radio interview of Wayne Gretzky recorded when he was thirteen years old. The interviewer was astounded to hear the young Gretzky say that on the weekend he would skate for eight hours a day! More astounding to me, however, was that the interviewer seemed incapable of understanding that Gretzky did so, not – as he answered after being questioned serially, because he wanted to be ‘famous’, or to ‘make a million dollars’ – but simply because it’s ‘what I like to do’. In other words, Gretzky skated for all those hours out of love, not out of some instrumentalist desire to achieve fame, money, and influence. The fact that he would go on to achieve a great deal of all three is to me beside the point. Having his love of the game nurtured came first and was the reason for everything else that followed. It was not merely a means to an end; rather, Gretzky’s love of skating and playing hockey was an end in itself, which is exactly what his jejeune self was suggesting that day on the radio.
The professorial life has taught me something similar: that my highest aspiration should be to act as a conduit for my students’ love of subject. I hope more than anything else that they delight in their studies, that reading and thinking and writing and conversing are all for the joy of the life of the mind. That in so doing there might come a recognition that these things are a form of good in and of themselves regardless of how the skills acquired in the practice of them might be commodified or monetized or otherwise made useful. In short, the professorial life has made me a member of the clerisy, a word not much heard of these days but which comes from the Greek word for heritage and in the nineteenth century came to denote a group (or even a class) of people in society who read for pleasure. Aggrandized later to mean intelligentsia or a learned elite – to use a term that today jars when applied to the life of the mind – at base the term clerisy denotes a way of life that is deeply humanizing, pushing back against the insistent demands and the careerist clamour that all we do and that all we are need be in the service of a given ideology, or to the marketplace practicalities of the economy.
The professorial life, to me, should stand in stark contrast to such pervasive instrumentalism. I am not very sanguine about espousing this position, however. As I look around the university world today a disinterested professoriate dedicated to intellectual mid-wifery is not what I see. Perhaps, therefore, it’s a lost cause. But lost causes have a way of never really being lost, however, so for whatever time I have left in this professorial life of mine I’ll try to stay this particular course, to tend this particular garden.
Brad Faught
Historian & Professor
Brad has written six books and is the recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for his work.
Photography by Cal Agro