For many years, I had often imagined the moment when I would cross the line from student to professor. And though I had long fantasized about taking a place on the other side of the lectern, I had a second but equally compelling fantasy: Once anointed into academe, I vowed to never indulge in the professorial sins and transgressions of my former teachers -- those collected academic idiosyncrasies that had often made my life miserable since I started college in 1986.
You probably have some idea what I'm talking about. Did you ever seek solace in the office of your adviser, perhaps to discuss a major dissertation crisis, only to have him open and read his mail (or his e-mail) while you poured out your heart? Or did you ever walk a mile out of your way to discuss the course material with a professor because he rarely showed up for office hours and the only time you could nab him was as he charged out of class heading for his car over in parking lot Q? What enraged me most was his disingenuous farewell, "You were going this way, too, weren't you Dan?" "Of course, Professor," I lied.
I could continue -- the papers that went ungraded weeks after I turned them in; the discarding of the course syllabus and commandeering of the lecture schedule by a scattered mind; the public reprimand for the tiniest violation of classroom etiquette; and, most painfully, those endless hours spent waiting outside office doors, sometimes in a line trailing around the corner. Sitting on the floor of a darkened hallway, hoping in vain that a professor would show up for his office hours -- that is perhaps the most indelible memory of my entire education.
These images floated through the silent cab of my pickup as I drove across the desolate southern Illinois farm country. As I approached my one-year visiting position at Washington University in St. Louis, I made a mental list of all the things I would not do as a professor.
But that was August, and we are now in December, and I am at the end of my first semester teaching. You might wonder, then, how I did. Was I able to be for my students all that my teachers never were for me? Did I succeed in resisting all the loathsome habits of a gainfully employed Ph.D.? The answer, I'm afraid, is an emphatic "No!"
What I could not have anticipated during that late summer drive was the suddenness with which I succumb to that postdoctoral affliction, Junior Faculty Syndrome.
JFS, in case you're wondering, is a condition with two separate components. On the one hand, the victim is overcome with a selective amnesia concerning his recent student origins, specifically the most unpalatable memories of student life. At the same time, the JFS sufferer is quite unexpectedly hurled headlong into a love affair with the life of a professor. In the broadest sense, the syndrome is characterized by an unavoidable compulsion to identify less with the underlings a few years behind than with the senior professors 10 or 15 ahead. Put another way, JFS is the whittling away of the mental list of professorial pet peeves we all compose en route to our first teaching job.
Perhaps the worst news of all is the following: The rapid progress of the condition virtually ensures that before you are even diagnosed you will resemble in every way the professor who made your life most miserable during grad school.
Let me relate how I fell prey to JFS, for my quick surrender should underline the losing battle I was waging from the moment I was first addressed as "Professor Kowalsky." Indeed, my new title is probably the best place to start. Through the initial period of infection, as I was gradually seduced by the subculture of academe -- and as the memories of being a powerless student were selectively erased -- nothing was quite as jarring and exhilarating as my transformation from Dan to Professor Kowalsky.
Let's do a little experiment. What does the unassuming monosyllabic name Dan evoke for you? Your server at the Sizzler, perhaps? An uncle who drives a cab? The kid who mows your parents' lawn? Ok, how about the six-syllable Professor Kowalsky? Whose brain would you rather pick, if you had to limit yourself to only one: Dan's, or Professor Kowalsky's?
On a hot morning last August, just a day after moving into my new flat, I ceased to be Dan and became Professor Kowalsky. I had walked over to campus that day to meet the chairman of the department and see if my assigned readings were on the shelf at the university bookstore. The chairman gave me a brief tour, introducing me to various students along the way.
"I want you to meet Professor Kowalsky," he said to a group of undergraduates sitting in the shade. "Professor Kowalsky is teaching in the department this year."
"Hi Professor Kowalsky!" they all said, smiling. "I'm in your seminar, Professor Kowalsky," one student volunteered. "See you later, Professor Kowalsky," another called out as we walked away.
A strange experience, to say the least, but it was repeated often enough that by the end of the morning I had begun to think of myself as Professor Kowalsky. And need I even add that I was enjoying all of this immensely?
I decided to walk over to the bookstore. I strolled up to the counter and introduced myself. "I'm Dan Kowalsky from the history department," I said. "I just wanted to check on my book order."
"Oh, yes, Professor Kowalsky," the student worker stammered. "I will check on that right away."
He disappeared into the back, returning a moment later with an older woman, apparently the manager. "Professor Kowalsky!" she exclaimed. "So good of you to come in!"
I glanced around nervously, wondering what this was all about.
"Jason!" she barked at her subordinate. "Take Professor Kowalsky to row seven!"
"You're in good hands with Jason, Professor Kowalsky!" she added as we disappeared into the stacks.
"Right this way, Professor Kowalsky!" the worker said enthusiastically, leading the way. As I lay in bed that night trying to sleep, my newly acquired title washed over me, the voices of those I had met echoing in my head. Before long I was saying the words quietly to myself.
On campus the next day I met more of the department's faculty members. I was soon struck by a new revelation. It was seductive enough that people I had never met, some of whom were older than me, were now addressing me as "professor." On top of that, I was now on a first-name basis with senior scholars whose work I had admired for years. Sitting down to lunch with a guru of European intellectual history, I was stunned to hear myself say, "Nice to meet you, Dennis." Meet an American colonialist with five books published? "Hi Gary!" was my greeting. An expert in early Modern Japan? "Hey Liz." The author of a groundbreaking study of Linear B? "How's it going, Bruce?"
My head was spinning. Here I was, a completely unknown and unpublished one-year hire, strutting around the campus, tricking people into calling me Professor Kowalsky, while at the same time seeking out endowed chairs just so I could address them as "Larry," "Nate," or "Jenna."
I had just started this job, but already, I was a goner. The transformation from a nondescript graduate student to a full-blown carrier of Junior Faculty Syndrome can be rapid indeed. But my affliction was modest compared to other new hires I've known.
Consider the case of a friend of mine, who we'll call Debby. While still slugging it out with her classmates, Debby was a self-deprecating ABD student with bad skin and a $15 haircut. She was racked with self-doubt about her future and had only begun to write the dissertation the year she went on the job market. She leaned heavily on her husband, who held her hand through the job search and dissertation write-up.
In a shockingly swift turn of events, she received in the search possibly the best job in her field. Some months into her new position at a major research university, I ran into Debby at a conference in Florida, and was stunned by what I saw. In her first semester at the new job she had morphed from a groveling grad student into a self-important academic whiz kid in the advanced stages of Junior Faculty Syndrome.
She had begun by giving up her first name for an initial, thus becoming (I'm renaming her) Professor D. Constanza Weld. She was sporting a new $40 hairdo, not including the dye job. Her skin had miraculously cleared up, no doubt thanks to a high-priced regimen sold at Saks. Most conspicuously, she had shed the ABD spouse, scoring in the bargain a chiseled, degreed, south Slav semiotician, her constant companion on a breathless conference circuit, where she presented the same paper over and over, changing the verbose title of each submission.
I realize I have a long way to go before I can surrender as Debby did to the full delights of Junior Faculty Syndrome. For starters, I need a tenure-track job. A position as a one-year replacement lecturer doesn't fully mesh with the arrogant hubris that full-blown JFS requires. But despite this liability, I find the condition easier to live with every day.
Just last week, for example, I accepted an invitation to lunch at the university faculty club. Even though the engagement was running up against my office hours, I happily agreed to a second martini. Sure enough, when I arrived at my office, there they were, a long line of my students, snaking down the hall.
"Hi Professor Kowalsky!" rang the chorus. I smiled at them, put the key in the door and hollered, "Who's first?" It's good to be the professor, I thought, settling into my comfortable chair. And then I checked my e-mail.
