The Homa Files

Sarah Palin: ” … we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law”

Harvard professor, Charles J. Ogletree: ” … a thinly veiled attack on Obama’s race”

The teacher formerly known as Professor Ken Homa: “Say what?”

Apparently, there’s a long history of the salutation “Professor” being a slur … so, students have been dissing me, right ?

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Excerpted from Inside Higher Ed Professor in Chief, February 10, 2010

Barack Obama has been called a lot of things since he hit the national stage: Celebrity, elitist and even one who “pals around with terrorists.” But as his poll numbers come back down to earth, and an emboldened conservative movement sharpens its attacks, the label that seems to be sticking to Obama as much as any lately is that of “professor.”

Speaking to Tea Party activists in Nashville last week, Sarah Palin did her part to keep the “professor” dig in circulation.

“They know we’re at war, and to win that war we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”

Obama’s supporters accept his higher education experience as evidence of a thoughtful pragmatism.

But, the “professor” label has just as easily been used as a bristly brush, painting the president as an out of touch dreamer who formed theories in the Ivory Tower that can’t be translated into concrete policies from the White House.

The attacks on Obama reveal longstanding stereotypes about the professoriate that continue to speak to a subsection of the electorate for whom higher education is regarded with skepticism.

“The term academic is often used interchangeably with elitist, so there is this notion that if one is well educated that that person is also an elitist and therefore out of touch with the concerns that everyday people have, as if people who are well educated aren’t everyday people.”

The late William F. Buckley Jr., famously opined that he’d “rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

The term professor is seldom used as a compliment, and instead “implies dry, hectoring, unemotional, self important, all of the negative stereotypes of somebody who is vainly certain of his own superior mental capacities but doesn’t have a human connection.”

It’s no surprise that anti-intellectualism has resonance among some Americans today.  Higher education programs are increasingly moving toward the pre-professional variety, and students and parents inclined to press colleges about how their programs will lead to jobs — not to intellectual growth. In that context, the stereotypical liberal arts professor is ever more marginalized.

Charles J. Ogletree, a Harvard professor says he sees the “professor” label as a thinly veiled attack on Obama’s race.

Calling Obama “the professor” walks dangerously close to labeling him “uppity”.

“The idea is that he’s not one of us … as an African American president, he’s out of place.”

Thomas L. Haskell, a professor emeritus of history at Rice University, agrees that racial bias may be implicit in the attack on Obama’s professorial past.

“For me and a lot of other academic types, we identify with Obama precisely because he is an intellectual. But … John Q. Public may be frightened of these people, especially because this particular intellectual is a black.”

Full article:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/10/obama

This entry was posted on February 16, 2010 at 7:52 am and is filed under Education - Academics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.