professors in the family

A week or so ago, Ann Althouse had a post where she quoted - and asked about the comment - that someone else made, observing that professors tend to have children who become professors.

And one of the questions asked was, was that necessarily a good thing? With the implication being vaguely that it's somehow classist and that a "nerdy" class that's "out of touch" with regular folks is being set up.

There's also the implication that only the Fortunate Few can go into a career where you have to take five or more years "off" to get a Ph.D. or equivalent.

And I don't know - yeah, I can kind of see how if you were the sole caretaker for your disabled dad (or whatever) it would be a lot harder to manage. But should we really be going in the direction of saying it's a Fortunate Few and that's a problem? Because then, what's next? Tracking people into careers and saying, "Oh, I'm sorry - you cannot become a math professor. There are too many people of your gender/race/socioeconomic class. Why not go to truck driving school instead?" Or, relaxing standards so that not so much is expected of the "hard case" people - that they can get a Ph.D. without a dissertation (Well, if I'm to believe the spam I receive every day, you can already do that), or that they don't need to publish for tenure, or they don't need to have a stellar record of being present to teach/holding office hours/basically having their shit together like is expected of other professors.

I tend to fight against any lowering of standards. I fight against it for my students and I would fight against it in the academy. Because, then why should ANYBODY strive for excellence if Joe Blow gets the same things by offering a hard-luck story. Life isn't fair and it's best we all got over that idea.

(I suppose I should also add: My mom was the first person in her family to go to COLLEGE, let alone become a professor. She did it by scrimping and saving and by her hardworking [manual labor] dad giving her his life savings so his "little girl" could do something "good" with her life [instead of becoming a waitress or something, that was the subtext]. My dad's parents had more opportunites but his mom was a former socialite and his dad a newspaperman, so they weren't professors - and his dad probably was no elitist - either)

But there is also the question of nature and nurture and whether having professors for parents makes you weird.

And I suppose that brings out a lot of people's Weird Professor Stories, or the particular I-Think-They're-Treasonous Professor Stories (that tend to come from a particular subset of the right).

And okay, the Weird, I will own up to. I have my very own personal brand of freak-flag that I fly. But I'm not dangerous in my weirdness and I try not to let it creep into the classroom. But the Treasonous thing, or the Lazy stereotype, or the Parasite image - that I do take exception to.

I have parents who are professors. Granted, they're pretty old-line, my dad's a rock-ribbed Republican and while my mom would probably vote Democrat if she felt the candidate in question was trustworthy and represented what she wanted to see represented, she's pretty conservative too. But. When they taught, they NEVER injected politics into classes. (They are both in the natural sciences; I actually took one of my dad's classes one summer as a "cognate science" towards my undergraduate degree. [I did opt out of doing the faculty evaluation; I did not think I could be fair]).

I do hate it - and cringe like crazy - when there's someone who spouts a 9/11 conspiracy theory on campus. Especially if they do it in, like, an economics class, where discussion of the topic is AT BEST marginally related to the discipline at hand. (And I wonder: when do they find the time to rant in class? I'm so hard up to get the course material - the stuff I want my students to come out of my class having expertise in - done that I wonder where I'd find time to inject politics.)

Unfortunately, those are the people who form the whole stereotype for us as a class these days. It's no longer Mr. Chips or the guy who invented Flubber or whatever as the common-man's imagination of the professor. No, it's someone who's seen as working 12 hours a week and spending the rest of the time dreaming up ways to undermine America.

And that makes me mad on two points: first, the "12 hours a week" thing. Yes, some of us are in class only 12 hours a week. I happen to be in class 14 hours a week. But it's the time outside class - the many hours spent grading (I probably spend 2 to 7 hours a week grading, depending on if I'm giving a big exam. And that can rise to 12 hours in the weeks when I collect research papers). The hours spent in prep - I spend roughly one hour in prep for each hour of class time, and I spent more - like maybe 3 hours - when I was a new prof. And there's time spent advising students, holding office hours, helping people, writing and giving make up exams for people who have emergencies (or who don't have their stuff together and can bull a good line). And there are the hours devoted to meetings and committee-fu and dealing with administratrivia (and seriously: this year they are going to make us write reports detailing how we Benefitted the Community in the past year. My question was this: if it takes us 3 to 5 hours at a minimum to write these and document our Good Works, would it not better serve society to say bag the report and have us go spend that 5 hours doing Good Works? But the administration is not always logical, and it seems to run on professor-generated reports).

And that's even BEFORE research. I try to spend an hour a day, minimum, on research.

So I don't know how many hours a week that is. I know some weeks it can be as little as 40 - maybe even less. But there are also weeks where I put in 14 hour days (multiple) and when I'm in most of the weekend and when my free time is all spent grading.

And so, it frustrates me when people say, "We need to get these lazy professors into the classrooms more!" because it demonstrates a fundamental lack-of-understanding of the job.

And the Undermining America part - I've already touched on that, but I will say most of the profs I know - regardless of their political leanings - are pretty devoted to seeing America succeed. Otherwise, we wouldn't be agonizing over teaching the next generation of Americans. Or we wouldn't go out and volunteer time on the weekends to pick trash off the highway. Or serve on director's boards for private park organizations. Or any of the other Good Works that we are now going to be required to write up and document. Professors like that jerk at Madison - the 9/11 conspiracy guy - are less than 1% of the professorate, and yet, he's the one who gets the press.

But anyway. I'm inclined to think it's a non-issue - or maybe even a positive thing - that professor's kids go into academia. (And please, can we kill off the unfortunate word "proffspring"? It's ugly and clunky and "faculty brat" - with its whiff of the 50s - seems to work much better in my estimation). Because - if you want to do what your parents did - especially in a household where education was valued, and so you probably had more options - it must be a pretty decent job, no?

And, for all the complaints I make about clueless, time-wasting administrators, or self-entitled-mindset students, or the crushing pressure of getting research out, it's a good life. I understand academia. I more or less understand and enjoy how it works. There's a particular joy in coming up with a good explanation for something to the class and seeing the eyes light up, or in having a student who REALLY CARES a whole lot about a subject. Or going out and doing field research. Or walking in the stacks of the library and being surrounded by all these books that you MUST read someday because they look so interesting.

And it's fun to go into general bio and tell my old stories about starfish arm regeneration or give my funny example of a food chain and have the students REMEMBER it and bring it up on exams or even after the class is done with and they see me on campus somewhere.

I had a student email me the other day and he prefaced it with the greeting, "Hi Doc!" and that makes me smile. I worked hard for the doctorate and it makes me happy when students choose to recognize its existence, rather than calling me "Miss/Ms./Mrs." (and I am not a Mrs. but I don't generally correct them. I don't want to be one of those people who's always shoving, "It's actually DOCTOR" down people's throats)

There's even a joy in coming in on a fall Saturday morning and setting up in my office with my research -reading or my data entry.

And there's a special joy in having a publication come out, or having a student get accepted to a good grad school, or hear a student you helped give their first professional presentation.

And so, it makes me sad when I see someone run down a life in academia as either a life of laziness or extended adolescence or a hideout for subversives. Because there are so many of us out there who I do not think fit that mold - it's kind of like saying that all cops are dishonest because you knew of one once who took a bribe.

But it's good being a professor. And in the fall - it's the best time of year. There's the feeling of back-to-schoolness in everything, there's the lovely golden fall light, the sound of the marching band practicing on campus. There are the students finally dressing "like students" again in jeans and college sweatshirts (instead of the short-shorts and halter tops of a few weeks ago; I am frequently embarrassed on the part of my female students who dress like hoochie-mamas rather than people who are on their way to serious jobs in medicine or conservation or bioinformatics). There's the rhythm of the academic year - the boom-and-bust cycles, where some weeks you're busy you almost lack the time to breathe (but you're happy because you're getting so much done) and the slack times when you can hang out, leaning against a colleague's office doorframe, and shoot the bull with them - or come up with new research projects - or solve the world's problems.

All in all, it's a good life, and it hurts me to see someone think of it as a classist/elitist/somehow dishonest way to make a living.