explaining the profession

One view of how it looks from the inside, at least among the tracked and tenured...

"College professors take a lot of heat from the general public, and we deserve much of what we get; and humanities professors get the worst of it. And arguably, English professors the worst of that: we represent, apparently, the absolute nadir of contemporary culture.

I said that to some degree we deserve it; what I did not say, you’ll notice, is that it’s true. Untrue, but we deserve it? Well, yes: I think that college professors as a group, and English professors as a high-visibility (and high-risibility) subset, have done a terrible job of explaining just what it is that we do, and actively countering the most pernicious caricatures of our work that circulate in the larger culture."

Read the rest of The Tender-Hearted Professor at the fake chinese rubber plant blog

Do Professors Matter?

Also bookmarked under Whither-U .... relevant to our mission, which is also about teaching and the quality of higher education

Do Professors Matter? from Inside Higher Ed, 10/30/09

The movement to minimize the faculty role in higher education needs to be resisted, in part by explaining to the public why the role is crucial, writes Peter Katopes.