By Jordan Everson

The Chronicle (Duke University)

August 29, 2007

(U-WIRE) DURHAM, N.C. – Please note your job title. It is not expert, not researcher, not congressional testifier, not future Nobel winner. It is professor.

So then profess! Enlighten your students with the marvelous task you have undertaken, the ideas that inspired you, that you have dedicated your life to studying.

There is little for you to gain from professing; research, not teaching, determines your career advancement. Only disastrously bad student evaluations will hinder your upward mobility, an easily avoidable fate so long you reserve low grades only for the truly indolent and hand out evaluations during the last day of classes. Still, as professors you have an obligation to teach us, your students.

A university degree simply states that the graduate can study and pass tests. It implies little or nothing about lasting knowledge. We, the students, have certainly failed to uphold the ideals of education, but you professors must lead us and the university back to its original intent.

The sanctity of the university resembles that of the family. Professors, we come to you as a child comes to his parents, with little to return for the much that is given and relying on a natural sense of duty to drive your charitable actions. As parents give attention, support and understanding and too often receive little in return, except the sight of their children growing into adulthood, so I beg that you earnestly give your knowledge and support to usher your students into their own manifestation of the educated mind.

Are you comfortable knowing that you had the chance to guide future leaders, and gave it a tenth of your strength?

Professors, I implore you: Engage your students. Change the world not only through erudite publications but through the spread of wisdom to the men and women you have the luck to influence.

Do not return papers with a short comment and a letter grade. Write a paragraph about our work, about our thoughts against yours. If our only feedback on a paper is the letter grade, how can the goal of our learning be anything other than achieving a high letter grade?

Please understand that many of us will not pursue in later life what we study in college. Give us something to carry with us.

For that is, I think, the purpose of our undergraduate years — to get our real education, not to train for our profession. I hope that you will understand my pleas, that you will rededicate yourselves to professing and to resuming the sacred conversation between teacher and student.