5 Prerequisites for Being a College Professor
Professors. Sometimes you love them, sometimes you hate them, and sometimes you’re absolutely horrified by their lack of judgment in allowing a woman to be fucksawed in an after-class demonstration. But regardless of how we feel about our professors, the inevitable truth is that we spend an average of 15-20 hours a week listening to them speak (except for Comm majors, who rarely scratch the double-digits). With all this time we spend with these educational overlords, we begin to pick up on their habits pretty quickly. These are the five things that, judging from experience, are crucial characteristics of anyone aspiring to be a college professor.
5. A Complete Inability to Use Basic Technology
It’s quite astounding that someone can be intelligent and driven enough to be a leader in their field of study, but never learn how to operate a fucking projector. If one were to tally up every minute of lecture lost because a professor was trying to figure out how to play a 30-second video clip, it very well might eclipse the number of minutes spent trying desperately to set a high score on Tetris during lecture. The funniest part is when the professor, frantically trying to remedy the situation, starts mindlessly changing settings on his/her computer, which – more often that not – already has Mandarin as the default language.
4. An Irreconcilable Misunderstanding of Appropriate E-mail Length
Picture this: It’s a warm, sunny Friday afternoon. You’ve just gone for a lengthy walk around campus, or perhaps you’ve already started day-drinking in preparation for a Disney Channel Original Movie Marathon. You quickly check your e-mail before dinner, when suddenly – BAM! It’s a 3,000-word juggernaut from a professor, providing your 200-person lecture with a detailed explanation of necessary background information for the next week’s readings. This distasteful offense is especially common among professors of history or political science classes. Instead of listing a very simply who-what-where-when-why-how, professors generally prefer to word-vomit an incoherent score of paragraphs explaining every detail of 11th century Indian Ocean trade that you could ever imagine.
3. Being Indian
This is fairly self-explanatory.
2. A Devastating Lack of Visual Coherence
I’ll be honest – I am by no means a fashionista. In fact, I’d go so far to say I rarely give fucks about whether or not what I’m wearing would give a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy cast member a deadly heart attack. But sometimes professors take it too far. For example, consider something I call the “4-inch buffer” – the area within 4 inches above and below the belt buckle, where a male professor’s tie never manages to reside. Typically, it’s either scraping their knees or hovering at their ribcage.
There are several other notable styles of a professor’s failure to comply with basic fashion norms; the “shirt-so-wrinkled-that-you-can’t-actually-comprehend-how-many-times-they’ve-worn-it”, the “pants-they’ve-worn-seven-lectures-in-a-row,” and the “sweater vest” are among the most common infractions.
1. A Tendency to Namedrop at Every Possible Opportunity
Here’s a peculiar difference between college students and professors. College students like to ascribe a specific title to each relationship; instead of merely saying “she’s my friend,” we prefer to say “she’s my PoliSci 385 Study Buddy!” or “she was Halloween hook-up #4!” or “she’s my pledge wife!” Professors, on the other hand, have one word for everyone they know: Colleague (henceforth referred to as the C-bomb). Professors throw around the C-bomb when it makes them appear to have more authority. Phrases like “my [C-bomb] in the U.N.” and “my [C-bomb] in the Senate” are thus very common phrases used by professors, when in reality, it would probably be more suitable for them to simply refer to them as “an expert in the field who I kind of met once and who sadly declined the offer to sign my breasts.”
