I think I finally see what it is to be a professor. It means you have a project that is yours. You see where it extends and begins to take shape through mist. It is all outside you but it flows to and from you.
I always said this was the project I must undertake before I undertook the project of my dissertation and it is true. People did not believe me on this matter because it was impractical according to standard lights but the more I read and the more I discover by chance the more I see it is true.
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It turns out that an old friend is working on this project too. Her discipline and period are so far from mine, and she lives so far away, that when we do talk, which is not often, I do not ask what she is writing. But a book of hers has just turned up on databases as the place to look for certain historical material interpreted with an eye to the questions I have. The book is reviewed as “cutting edge.” Everything is oddly connected. The contours.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Okay, then, is there a difference between a scholar and a professor?
From an adoring interlocutor.
In French, a “formateur” is who I am: I work with adults and try to help them do their jobs in a language that is foreign to them. And a “professeur” is who y’all are, working within a “school” to improve students’ ability to do or understand whatever field you help them with.
Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français
C’est ce qu’il disent, oui. And that is truly very French. I’m re-reading Césaire’s “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” after having just read a few Baudelaire sonnets, and the worlds are vastly different. Well, so are the languages.
BTW, Geoffrey, who said that? If it wasn’t you.
Rivarol. And that is the extent of my knowledge of French. It was my history teacher, Jimmy Carnegie, who taught me the phrase.
Will find Rivarol. I think that if you speak English you speak a form of modified French. But not necessarily vice-versa.
Well, in the idiosyncratic idiom that has developed in this blog, they overlap. Being a scholar when the blog started out meant knowing how to actually do scholarly work, and not confusing it with fake / superficial stuff. Actually going to the bottom of things. Being a professor means doing that on your own behalf, on behalf of a project of your own.
I always thought I would only be allowed to ghost write for a projected self that would be working on projects that would get non controversial results so I could keep a job. I was always told it would be unsafe to work on a project truly of my own design. Of course, if I were to use these words in a scholarly piece, I would have to sort out their definitions in some more rigorous way and be consistent in their use! 🙂
But I think what I am working with is, being a scholar is knowing how to do real research, not fake research, but being a professor is being in a position to take authority in this research and to feel you are within your rights to do your own work, direct your own work. I heard so many times since so early on that this was precisely what I could not do, I must only be a parrot or something, come up with projects other people would approve of and not think about the ones I wanted to do, that I never got to really situate myself in my work.
I’m glad to be reminded I have an adoring interlocutor today — it is causing me to get more done.
Rethabile, my question about French people is, how, valuing clarity as they do, are they so mentally convoluted … ? or is that why they have to value clarity like that? I mean French people from France, not from elsewhere.
More and more I am starting to appreciate the wisdom that drove me away from gradual school…I would not have survived.
Prof,
The French are mentally *à=+@#}% precisely because for centuries they have believed they’re the best. And they do today, too.
Whatever they put forth is clear and logical. Whatever you or I put forth, on the other hand, is proof that we need our heads examined.