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Saturday, November 22, 2003
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Who Wants to Be A Professor?
I thought of this game show idea (a variant of the hugely popular American show, Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?) the other morning, as I walked by a poster in the lobby of F. Hall. The poster advertised a special seminar to be taught next semester by “Professor Lanny Davis.” Wasn’t Lanny Davis - one of the grubbier Washington lobbyists - President Clinton’s servile pointman on the Lewinsky scandal? Yes, that’s what Davis was. But now that the Unpleasantness at the Executive Branch has receded, here he is in his new guise, a venerable academician... Someone made Lanny a professor! And someone could make you a professor too! Yet why, you might ask, should I want to be a professor? Well, you might be temporarily out of a job, out of clients, or, like Davis, out of favor public relationswise. If you’ve been somewhat shitty in a past life, morphing into a Professor is like a colonic. An aura of cleanliness and unimpeachability, of attentiveness to things of the spirit rather than material objects, of studious selfless virtue, continues to cling to the professoriate in America, and you can have a piece of this! In a recent radio interview, a well-known American journalist explained that he had lately been feeling rather bad about himself because he had lost his tv gig, “But since I’ve become a professor, I feel much better.” Being a professor does make you feel better, and everyone should have a swing at it. |