From time to time, people ask me what I am. This is usually a mistake, and I would warn them against it if I knew it was coming.
They might mean, after all: what ethnicity am I? Minnesotan. Or; what is my religious affiliation? Dubious mackerel-snapper. Or: what are my political opinions? Reality-based.
All of these can cause trouble, especially my self-identification as a Minnesotan.
There’s much blatant prejudice against expatriate Minnesotans on display these days – especially mockery of those who say their “o’s” with the musical Scandihoovian intonation of the pure and undefiled Minnesota dialect.
But in America, you are what you do at work, so that’s what they usually are asking about. That can cause trouble in the conversation, too, especially if someone has incautiously introduced me as “Dr. Pfundstein.”
The person I’m talking to will sometimes ask what my specialty is, or go straight into describing their symptoms and taking off their clothes to show me the scar from their latest operation.
I try to nip this in the bud, as a rule, but some buds are pretty hard to nip (We’ve all been there, I guess.) Eventually I have to say something like, “I’m a Ph.D., not an M.D.”
Then the person I’m talking about will start putting their clothes back on with an irritated air and say something like, “Oh. I thought you were a real doctor.”
This is where the mask of Minnesota Nice may slip, and I start to see red and maybe scream or bite people a bit. Because, as it happens, I am a real doctor.
Doctor: a Latin agent noun, from the verb “docere” – “to teach.” That’s what I do – and I teach Latin, as a matter of fact (among other things).
It’s those other guys in the white coats with the stethoscopes – they’re the ones who mostly are not real doctors.
If we get this far uninterrupted by conversation-chilling felonies, the other person might say, “Oh. So you’re a professor.” I usually say “yes” to that, but the real answer is “no.” I teach college for a living, have done so for a couple of decades, and see no likelihood that I’ll switch careers before I retire, but I’m not a professor.
“Professor” is an academic rank that usually implies one has tenure or is on the road to getting it.
You may think of your college teachers as professors but many of them, perhaps most or all of them, are not. In recent decades the number of NTTF (non-tenured or tenure-track faculty) has grown explosively (See some gory details at the PDF here, at the American Association of University Professors site: http://www.aaup.org/NR/rdonlyres/7C3039DD-EF79-4E75-A20D-6F75BA01BE84/0/Trends.pdf).
Some say this is a bad thing and must be stopped (sometimes as they look balefully in my direction).
Some say it’s a necessary evil.
Some say it’s good, giving academic institutions the flexibility they need in hard times.
“Flexibility” means, by the way, the ability to fire a bunch of people with minimal trouble.
It’s something that NTTF faculty have to live with (particularly after the Draconian revisions to the Academic Charter under the previous and current administrations). It’s Campus Equity Week this week across the nation (Maybe you saw the news stories? No? Me neither).
I’m not sure what one does to celebrate Campus Equity Week. I guess you could (today or next week – why isn’t equity an everyday issue?) ask your teachers whether they have tenure or not.
The number of untenured teachers you have may surprise you.
It’s one of the reasons NTTF tend to be strongly in support of collective bargaining rights, currently under threat from Governor Kasich and his merry band of anti-Robin-Hoods in Columbus with their Issue 2 (formerly Senate Bill 5).
There are a lot of things we could do to promote Campus Equity, I guess. But none of them will matter if we don’t defeat Issue 2 in November.
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