Professor sounds wrong. The accent is on the wrong syllable. We’ve codified the word into being a role by putting the stress on the second syllable so that it falls in line with doctor and instructor. This is pretty standard in English; having the stress on the middle syllable is deceptively normal for English words of Latin origin. Blame good old iambic stress patterns for that.
But, if English was really the romance language it, ahem, professes to be, it ought to emphasize the last syllable, turning professor from a fancy word for teacher into, wait for it…one who professes. Ooooh. Aaaaah.
The point is, professor, like teacher and lecturer is a word divorced from its root verb. That distance creates the equivalent of a linguistic rift where all kinds of semantic broadening and imprecision can creep in and fester.
But let’s back up. Just what does profess mean, anyway? It has always been something of a poetic word reserved for public declarations of faith, undying love, loyalty to the king1, or possibly just your intention to find the ONE PIECE and become king of the pirates. But what it means is best defined by Merriam-Webster in their new(ish) feature where they simplify a word’s definition for younger readers. Here’s the “Kids’ Definition” of profess:
to declare openly or freely
What a lovely word. Stands to reason, then, that one who professes is more than simply a teacher but one who speaks freely, maybe one who tells students what they need to hear rather than just what their textbooks and administrators say they should. Real Dead Poet Society kind of jazz, right? Right? Only, here’s the first of the grown-up definitions, also from Merriam-Webster:
to receive formally into a religious community following a novitiate by acceptance of the required vows
Hold the phone. Those don’t seem like the same thing at all? Etymonline to the rescue:
early 14c., professen, "to take a vow" (in a religious order), a back-formation from profession or else from Medieval Latin professare, from professus "avowed," literally "having declared publicly," past participle of Latin profiteri "declare openly, testify voluntarily, acknowledge, make public statement of," from pro- “forth"
Well. I say to the rescue but there’s actually a lot to unpack there. First off, back formation? Profess is a somewhat rare case of the verb arriving after the noun. Many, if not most, similar words evolve in a familiar verb becomes noun meaning one-who-verbs pattern. In this case, however, profession arose in the early 13th century as a word for someone who had taken religious orders. Over the next three centuries it broadened into the more modern concept of doing a specific kind of work as a source of income.
Profess, on the other hand, has never really made it out of its religious roots. It’s a word that feels heavier than it is, one that seems like it ought only be used for mad, grand gestures, not, say, teaching English on a rainy Tuesday in June. And yet, by definition2, anyone who works as a professor, professionally, is, technically…professing.
Which is ten times better than just teaching if I’m being honest. After all, as we talked about in Issue 11, Mr. Sensei to You, teacher is currently devolving. The social climate around education has changed to such an extent that teacher is rapidly becoming something to be looked down on, a job that one takes because they couldn’t do anything else. You know the “joke” - those who can, do; those who can't, teach.
Professor, on the other hand, while still a loaded term encompassing a world of privilege, rank, and (possibly unearned) prestige, denotes someone who has done some work. Someone who has put in the time to become an expert in a field, most likely through extensive reading, study, and contribution in the form of research and reviewing. In other words, just by doing the work of becoming a professor, you’ve done the job of professing your knowledge and skill.
Which is a problem. In the modern educational sense, professor is still, absolutely, a rank. Attaining full professorship goes hand in hand with getting tenure, budgets, grants, and etc. It shows, in a single word, that you have expert level knowledge in at least one domain. However, anyone who has done the work will tell you that the most humbling facet of any post-grad study is learning just how much there still is to know3.
And let’s circle right on back to that issue of rank. Like in the previous issue, number 12, titled Dyslecture, rankness in university is increasingly divorced from the actual job of teaching at that level. To put it unceremoniously, anyone who is actually teaching in a university ought to be termed a professor both as a job description and as a title. It is literally what the job calls for.
And yet, like sensei, professor carries more than just the weight of teacher. It implies that one has not only done the work of gaining the knowledge but that one has successfully jumped through all the hoops necessary to work at a university, which is some bullshit we’ll talk about more next week in Issue 14, Doctor Thyself.
Stay curious,
Joel
Your fortnightly reminder of Mark Twain’s greatest quote for our times: Loyalty to country, always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.
Number six in the list of definitions, sure, but it’s there.
The second most humbling aspect is learning to acknowledge that you will never know everything in your field. Life is too short, our brains too limited for it to be otherwise.
This was a very good read. Your breakdown of professor vs teacher helped show me how language shapes our respect for educators. Looking forward to Doctor Thyself.
I also have a personal question about language. I left it inbox, when you have time, please check it out