i am a college professor (and i am not ashamed)

by Kenneth Morefield
Barack Obama, so I am told, pals around with terrorists.

The reason he does so, I am told implicitly, is that he sees America as "imperfect." Another reason, one that is only implied, but is clearly implied to anyone, like me, who has spent significant portions of his personal or professional life in pockets of American socially and politically conservative thought, is that he’s lived and worked where godless, anti-American terrorists live and work. Obama, you should remember, was a law professor, and American colleges and universities are cultural bastions of and propaganda machines for extreme left-wing, God-denying, (unborn) baby killing culture.

Bullshit.

Oh, I’m sorry. I know that is neither the most academically rigorous nor most socially polite form of discourse with which to address this issue. But just as Joe Biden is “tired, tired, tired” of the stereotype that people from states that vote Democrat are unpatriotic or un-American, so too I am fed up with the constant caricaturization of my profession (and by implication, me) as the source of all that’s allegedly wrong with our country.

Darn right, I’m angry. Barack Obama, you see, has been called someone who pals around with terrorists. I’ve been called the terrorist.

Think I’m exaggerating? A few years ago, in 2006, gearing up for the last election (funny, how as I get older I begin to recognize arguments as being not new but very, very old), I got an e-mail from someone I didn’t know named David Horowitz. I got it, probably, because I had voted in a Republican primary a few years before or volunteered at a crisis pregnancy center, or donated money to some cause that showed I must be a Republican because I was (for the moment) on the “right” side of some issue. “They’re convicts, terrorists, and WORSE” the tag line of my email read, “they’re…” wait for it, “…COLLEGE PROFESSORS!”

I kept that e-mail (it’s on my office door), though I put a flap on the last two words that reads, “Lift to see what’s worse than a terrorist.” Some might object, perhaps have already objected, that Horowitz wasn’t calling ME a terrorist; he was only saying that there is some terrorist amongst the group that comprises my profession.

I’m skeptical, though.

In the decade or so since I’ve joined the profession, I have taught predominantly at private, faith-based institutions, and I’ve found no stereotype more prevalent than the one that holds that, except for small bastions in Lynchburg, Va., or Greenville, S.C., the landscape of higher education was run by rouge faculty members who held tyrannical, monarchical power over their fiefdoms (I mean classes) and punitively and capriciously punished students by means of bad grades if they confessed to having heard the word “creationism” without tittering, admitted to admiring Ronald Reagan, or confessed to ever having pledged allegiance to the flag.

Even the media, that allegedly biased and monolithic entity, seems to have bought into and perpetuated these stereotypes. Dustin Hoffman’s character in Stranger Than Fiction is supposed to be a not particularly accomplished nor successful liberal arts teacher at a middle-tier college. Yet his office looks like something that would make the CEO of a Fortune 500 company blush. Kevin Spacey’s character (Professor Micky Rosa) in the recent movie 21, calls a colleague and tells him to give a student an “A” so that he can go to Las Vegas to play black-jack and, later, tells the same professor to fail the student on his say so. The Squid and the Whale, Disgrace, and Away from Her all depict the college professor as a sexually promiscuous libertine who is having or has had affairs with students.

I’ve known a handful of professors who have had affairs with students, but the percentage was certainly no higher than those from any other profession or walk of life. Most that I know of have been fired (or non-renewed); all have borne stigmas. Walter Vale in The Visitor is a burnt out a college professor who is “phoning it in,” a portrayal that director Tom McCarthy admitted was a cliché.

Even when college professors aren’t lecherous or vindictive or spiritually empty, they are often presented as privileged, pampered, elitists, who show up for class only when they feel like it (and all have grad assistants who do the work of grading or advisement), never have to publish, and have some unlimited amount of university funds at their disposal to go chase the lost ark or take an all-expense paid trip to a foreign resort for conferences consisting of sparsely attended lectures (or poetry readings) followed by sophomoric shenanigans and sudsy sexual hook ups.

It is hard to descry media stereotypes, though, because doing so is itself cliché. And I can’t really say it is surprising or singular that the average Hollywood writer has no idea what the life of a college professor is actually like. Police officers, reporters, heck prostitutes, are all engaged in professions that are widely depicted in the media and whose practitioners have been known to bemoan the fact that the reality of their job is much different from what is portrayed on the silver screen.

What does seem singular (or at least more pronounced) to me is the extent to which the stereotype of college professors has entered into (parts of) the public consciousness and been (too) largely accepted as approximating reality.

When I was teaching at a Bible college students polled traditionally gave “to avoid the secular bias of the state university” as the number one reason why they chose to attend a faith-based university. Worse (at least to me) when the college was doing a candidate search, a member of the Board of Trustees chastised the faculty for putting “earned doctorate” ahead of “godly” in the candidate profile listing attributes that we would like the new president to have. When I opined to another senior member of the administration that I found it odd that being qualified was considered bad, he gave me a bemused, “you’re not from around here” chuckle and explained that the only place to get an “earned” doctorate was in a secular school, and the fact that one went to a secular school meant he was automatically suspect in motivation and tainted by association. (Cue Mark Knoll and The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.)

What makes this cultural stereotype so exasperating to me is that it in no way conforms to, well, reality. At least not as I’ve experienced it. Sure, I had the occasional sociology teacher who refused to let me do a book report on crime because the book I chose was from Inter-Varsity Press and was about Biblical theories of restorative justice. But I also had an English teacher who let me do a course project on prayer as an example of a creative process. Yes, I had the religion professor who ran the class strictly as a lecture and did not allow students to cite the Bible as evidence that some other religious belief was wrong because he cared more about students knowing the alternative material than he did about whether they believed it (and because he knew students will sometimes, like all of us, jump to premature conclusions about things because they haven’t really ever considered alternatives). But I also had another religion professor that shared about his participation in an academic debate questioning how a loving God could allow suffering and evil—a lecture that stays with me to this very day.

Part of what these contrasting examples are meant to convey is that there is a value in critical inquiry and respectful academic debate, that we can learn from those with whom we disagree, and that participating in such a dialog makes us stronger, not weaker. One of my academic heroes in school was (and still is) Jacques Ellul, a sociologist and historian who is sometimes called both Christian and Anarchist. According to his biography, Ellul became a Christian in his early twenties, yet he still was able to engage with a whole range of philosophies. Ellul wrote:

"Basically—and perhaps most significantly—every time I have acquired a belief, in any domain, the first thing I have done is to conduct a criticism of this belief" (In Season and Out of Season).

That quote has been in my commonplace book for over a decade, and it has stood as a challenge and an inspiration to me to try to achieve the sort of rigorous intellectual and spiritual honesty called for by the apostle Paul who says: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15).

Another of my professional role models was Dr. David Gorman. While in graduate school, after taking a class in Literary Theory with Gorman, I approached him and asked him to be my faculty sponsor for an independent study in Christian writers of fiction so that I could hammer out some ideas that had been floating around in my head and explore whether they could be a suitable foundation for my upcoming dissertation. Before agreeing, he asked me frankly and respectfully if I was harboring any false impressions that he largely shared or believed my faith assumptions and whether I was sure I wanted him and not someone whose beliefs I could be sure more closely approximated my own.

Years later he shared with me that he might also have had some doubts that someone of my strong religious persuasions would be willing to accept instruction and even criticism from a teacher who didn’t believe all the same things he did. To his credit, Gorman took me at my word that I would be okay with him as an instructor and gave me the benefit of the doubt that he would be okay with me as a student.

In the semesters that followed (he did, eventually, also become the chair of my dissertation committee), Gorman directed me towards many important philosophical, critical, and literary texts that have helped shape and challenge my beliefs. He introduced me to the works of Frank Kermode, Stanley Fish, Jonathan Culler, Eric Auerbach, George A. Kennedy, Northrup Frye, Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bahktin, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. More importantly, he helped me to understand them and to think critically about them. In some of these writers I found clearer and stronger articulations of things I already believed but could not yet say by or for myself. Through others, I discovered problems with my logic and challenges to my assumptions.

Gorman never pushed me to accept his beliefs nor even his interpretation of others’. It was when my work was lazy or sloppy that he challenged me to articulate my own ideas better. When it was time for me to transition from the role of student to teacher, he was supportive in my efforts (in recommendations) and generous with his advice. I credit him in larger part for helping to instill in me the belief that my job is not to make students like me (in either sense of the phrase) but to help students make themselves into the best manifestations of themselves that they can be.

That transition was over a decade ago, and while I don’t live in that mythical ivory tower where professors only have to teach one class a year for exorbitant amounts of money, I do love my job. Students keep me young and honest, and if department meetings are a bit of a bore and assessment visits make me want to scream, rare is the week that I don’t learn something about myself or the world through preparing to teach.

Perhaps one of my most cherished memories of being a college professor came early in my teaching career, when I was teaching at a Bible college (not my current place of employment) in a very fundamentalist environment. One of my students took a dislike to some of the stories we read in class and wrote an anonymous letter to the academic dean making false claims about things I had said and done in class. Because I was one of those liberals who palled around with the godless and read the radical thinkers in graduate school, I guess it was easier to believe the accusations than investigate them and for a week or so things were pretty dicey for me. Once additional information came to light and it was clear I was not going to be fired, many of the students were waiting to see how I was going to “get back” at the class or at the student who it was generally known had sent the letter.

I spoke honestly and openly to that class about my anger, hurt, and frustration—about the Biblical principles for honesty and mutual respect that I thought should govern relationships not just in the academic classroom but in the Christian community.

I explained to the students that I wanted to equip them to be the strongest, best, most mature people they could be for their jobs and in their lives but that doing so sometimes required me to push them outside of their comfort zones. I don’t remember the exact words that I said, but I do remember later that day being approached by one of my students from that class, and I remember his words pretty vividly. He was a Pastoral Studies major, and he was retaking my class because he got a “D” the first time and needed to improve his GPA to graduate.

“A lot of people here talk about Christian character,” he told me, “but you are one of the few I see trying to live it. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve learned more about what it means to be a good pastor from taking this class and watching you than I have from all my Bible classes combined.”

That encounter was one of those “if I can just get through to one student” moments that teachers live for—that sustain us through weeks of correcting comma splices, circling subject-verb disagreements, and insisting to the skeptical Business or Political Science majors that Shakespeare, Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison really do have something to teach them and I’m not just making them read these authors to try to brainwash them. It was an educational moment in all the best senses of the word, and one about which I have been thinking a lot recently for two reasons.

First, it came not because that student and I had the same view of America, or the Bible, or the world (though we largely did), but rather because I had modeled for me by those who didn’t have the same view as I of America, or the Bible, or the world the importance of treating with respect those whose beliefs differ from your own.

The second is that I’m pretty sure that student had the makings of a great pastor, and it saddens me that I know there were (and probably still are) certain circles where he might be looked at as suspect because while he was in college he palled around with a radical, leftist, feminist, gay tolerating, Marxist appreciating, America hating, postmodernist loving, deconstructionist, pornographer professor like me.

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Kenneth R. Morefield is proud to be an Assistant Professor of English at Campbell University where our mission statement says, “This University sees the human vocation as living by faith under grace, with no conflict between the life of faith and the life of inquiry,” and affirms that, “truth is never one-dimensional but in wholeness is revelatory, subjective, and transcendent as well as empirical, objective, and rational, and that all truth finds its unity in the mind of Christ.”