Professor at Dartmouth: A Bad Job?
By Marisa Smith | Sunday, April 6, 2008
When I was first asked to write about what’s bad about being a Dartmouth professor, I laughed and said that’s an impossible assignment. What could conceivably be bad about being a Dartmouth professor? What other profession allows you to frequent the River Valley Club on a regular basis, take two or three naps a day, recycle lectures from the 1980’s, have conferences at local coffee haunts with adorable co-eds, and get paid to vacation (Dartmouth likes to call it a sabbatical)?
And don’t start writing letters telling me that professors don’t get it on with students anymore. Please, we all know that’s not true. And the extracurricular shenanigans aren’t confined to the English and Theater departments; those guys with pen protectors in Engineering aren’t as innocent as they look…
 — Not afraid to cozy up to the co-eds — One: A professor never has to grow up.
They live and work in a bubble and the Big Green Tit basically takes care of their every material need. Unless they commit murder, refer to Ronald Reagan as “my hero,” or admit to being an evangelical Christian they are virtually guaranteed a place on the faculty for life. They can even whine, as one tenured faculty member did recently, that despite her advanced degrees she felt unable to teach freshman writing. Whoa. Or, they can spend a hot afternoon running around campus with a video camera trying to fry an egg on a sidewalk; I witnessed a professor pal of mine orchestrate this little vaudeville a few years ago. Unfortunately I can’t remember if he was able to actually cook the egg…Seriously, do these sound like the activities of grown ups? Teaching Freshman English, how hard can that be? Just throw Hamlet and Catcher in the Rye at all those 4.0ers and ask them to write about how Hamlet and Holden are alike/different. Or Hamlet and Sponge Bob. Or Sponge Bob and baby Stewie on Family Guy. The possibilities are endless! Just ask “writer” Eve Ensler, whom Dartmouth professors adore: I can almost here the Department of Women and Gender’s Studies chanting, “give Eve Ensler another award!” (On February 12 the Roth Center for Jewish Life awarded Ms.Ensler the Visionary-In-Residence Award. Eve was the first person—funny—to discover her vagina could perform a monologue.)
Two: A professor can’t be conservative.
A professor will never admit to being a conservative, which is a bad thing, if indeed they are. In other words, if tenure is not in their life plan, and they never want to be invited to any faculty parties again, then they can go ahead and tell the world that they are a proud member of the GOP. But, if they think that Newt Gingrich and Charles Krauthammer are voices of reason and they want to stay in Hanover forever (they’ve already purchased their plot at Pine Knoll), then they’d better go back in the political closet. Chances are that the majority of their colleagues don’t share their political or intellectual bent and they are in enemy territory. I think I can safely say that it’s difficult at best to be a public Republican at Dartmouth without experiencing some form of ostracism. Recently I heard one professor describe another known conservative professor as a “fiscal Republican.” (Which probably means that the professor thinks his conservative friend is pro-abortion and therefore they can be friends.)
Some surveys indicate that between 85 and 95 percent of American professors consistently vote Democrat. The 1994 study by David Horowitz, Eli Lehrer and Andrew Jones, “ Political Bias in the Administration and Faculties of 32 Elite Colleges and Universities,” could only find three, that’s right, three, self-proclaimed Republican administrators in the whole Ivy League! In 1999 the NAASS study (North American Academic Study Survey) questioned 1643 American faculty members and not one of the sociologists in the survey admitted to being a Republican. That’s right, not one in the whole bunch! A 2001 Brookings Institution survey of professional associations backed up this data and reported Democrat to Republican ratios of four to one in economics and history, five to one in political science, and 47 to one in sociology. Oh, those pesky sociologists!
Three: A professor will always be an intellectual snob.
This can’t be helped; it’s an occupational hazard. This is definitely a bad thing especially coming from a group of people that, 1.) consistently vote Democrat and have contempt for those elitist Republicans, 2.) have members who once lived on a commune and, 3.) teach Marxist theory. Professors don’t practice what they preach in the area of their social comings and goings. When you become a professor you trade in your personhood for professorhood. You are no longer Joe Smith, you are Professor Joseph Smith-Jones (you’ve taken on your wife’s last name so you can never be accused of being sexist) and you’re in Math or History or Chemistry. When I was busy passing those cheese and crackers, my parents would always introduce me to new faculty members like this—“Honey, this is Professor Harvey Gerverstraminer and he’s in Classics.” “Oh,” I’d reply, “nice to meet you, Professor, I hope you get tenure soon.” No, they didn’t call us faculty brats for nothing.
In all fairness this intellectual snobbery is foisted upon academics by the very nature of the cloistered environment that they live in: it’s a culture within a culture that has a rigidly stratified caste system where everyone involved knows exactly where everybody stands. True, they worked hard for those degrees and naturally want to hang out with people who have the same degrees so they can all feel good about themselves and congratulate themselves for being superior intellectual beings. That’s why you will rarely find “civilians” at a party thrown by a professor, just a lot of interdisciplinary socializing. I know this to be true because sometimes I’m invited to these parties. I assume that the reason I’ve gained entry is because I’m a publisher, which seems to most academics to be a noble and somewhat intellectual pursuit. However, my entry isn’t free; I still have to prove myself. When the host introduces me I’m stared at rather quizzically, like you’d look at a strange new animal in the zoo. The professors are momentarily confused—at this point I feel like Dolly Parton at Hogwarts—but one of them always manages to ask me the same question every time without fail: “Did you go to Dartmouth?” And then—“Where did you go to college?” It’s like clockwork. To date I haven’t had the courage to say Keene State and see what their reaction would be.
So, what’s bad about being a Dartmouth professor? Well, nothing of course. It’s a great gig. Are you more prone to being an adolescent, liberal, intellectual snob? Well, maybe, but it’s still the best job around if you ask me. Did I say job? Professors don’t consider it a job; it’s a calling. A vocation, you know, like the priesthood.
Professor Prayer
Dear God (if there is a God),
Grant me the serenity and peace of tenure,
No large lecture courses,
No committee assignments,
A really cute academic assistant,
A really smart teaching assistant,
And scads of research money.
But most of all, please God, please, don’t let me appear in the Worst Professors article piece that the hateful Dartmouth Review publishes every year. Please, I beg you.
Vox clamantis in deserto.
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