The Crazy Professor
I had dinner with an old friend, Boris, last night, and his assessment of my future in academia echoed an opinion I've heard countless times: "You'll be the crazy professor."
I think being the crazy professor is a pretty cool idea, and I imagine something like that would happen based on my views, standards, and so forth... but, why is it that people think of me as a professor, and suddenly, the word "crazy" pops into their heads? I'm not exactly a lunatic, after all, and most of the things I do are relatively down-to-earth. Perhaps your run-of-the-mill professor wouldn't show up to class with bright purple streaks in his hair or what-have-you, but maybe that's the difference between crazy and normal? Maybe the difference has more to do with my ridiculously broad range of interests? I'm not really sure.
If any of you happen to have an opinion on this, I'd love to hear or read it.
One other thing Boris mentioned was pretty interesting. In his robotics work, he occasionally comes across people who are capable of doing tons of different things on a project, like computer programming and control systems and sensing and on and on, and it often turns out that regardless of what subjects they studied for their advanced degrees, they did their undergraduate work in physics. It seems physics, when taught places other than where I did my undergraduate work in it, actually covers a very broad range of topics, and this becomes incredibly useful when dealing with the applied sciences later in one's career.
Now, I hate to cut this entry short because I rather enjoy writing about academic things, but it's after 8:00 AM now, and I haven't been to sleep yet. So, good night.
Comments
Hmmm...the crazy professor, huh? Well, what I have observed is that society uses the word "crazy", in addition to all of its other meanings, to also describe someone who the describer believes is significantly above average in intellectual prowess, but doesn't quite understand in what way. For example, it would be highly unusual for someone to say, "Hmmm...based on your highly developed language skills, combined with the somewhat different behavior that I observe from you, I can deduce that these traits are symptomatic of someone who is significantly above average in intellectual prowess. However, I am not competent enough to be able describe what I am seeing in any kind of organized way." In English, we have no way of saying the above phrase in a simple, concise way. So, of course necessity is the mother of invention, society has somehow come to use the term "crazy" as a shorthand way of saying the above phrase. When I hear people use the word crazy to describe someone who is obviously not dissociated from society in any type of clinical way, from my estimation, it says more about the describer than the describee. The same thing can be said about people who use curse words as fillers in every day language. When I hear people do this, what I actually hear is, "Someone please help me. My language skills inexplicably stopped developing at the 2nd grade level and I am unable to communicate as a normal, functioning adult. Someone please take pity on me, as I am linguistically stunted and probably emotionally stunted as well." That's what I hear! So, when someone describes you as "crazy", that one words certainly speaks volume about the person using it.
Posted by: arc | January 20, 2007 08:56 AM
Allowing for arc's bitterness towards the irrational tendencies of the undereducated and never having met Boris I will say that he is for the most part correct. I think most people would, if they knew the word, substitute "eccentric" for crazy in his description.
As to why you would be the "crazy professor", this comes from the fact that most professors are viewed as stoic and weirdly attached to their subjects. Most people are astounded to realize that most professors are pretty normal, i.e. have families and outside interests from their school persona. The "crazy" ones are the ones who shock people into seeing professors as humans in some fundamental way. My two favorite examples are Einstein and Feynman. They respectively displayed everything from obsessive compulsive behaviours to the inability to remember to eat. They played musical instruments; were often carried away by the intellectual questions of their peers; and never ceased to amaze the people around them with their ability to make "crazy" intuitive leaps of logic that were often born out. Other less well known examples tend to be people that can relate to large portions of the populace and make human the often overwhelming single-mindness most professors display.
Posted by: tlt | January 21, 2007 02:01 PM