By Victor Greto
Before I became one, I’d always wondered why most college professors were pompous asses.
I’m a journalist, and whenever I had to interview a college professor – man or woman, black or white – I’d invariably experience a creeping nausea.
It happened whether I interviewed one for an opinion about politics, or science, public policy or art.
“It’s pretty complicated, Victor,” one or another would sigh to me, no matter what the issue.
“Try me,” I’d respond. I mean, I’m half-way intelligent, and I even went to college myself.
I’d hear yet another sigh on the other end of the line, a deep breath, and then a flood of polysyllabic jargon that I patiently translated back to them for those lesser beings who read newspapers or magazines.
And now I’ve become one of them – a college teacher with his own office on the top floor of the main building at Wesley College in Dover.
Two years going, and here’s what I’ve discovered.
Yes, teaching college is about preparation and performance, thinking and commiserating on your feet.
But it’s more about being an adult on a campus full of children who should be adults.
It’s about listening to stories of pregnancies, drugs, alcohol and pill-popping, of who is breaking up with whom, and why she or he now hates him or her.
During my first semester, two young women told me they were pregnant.
The rash of grandmother deaths during Finals Week never fails to amaze me.
The bad writing, incomplete sentences, illogic, and profound disinterest in all things relating to books never fail to impress me.
The non-stop texting and Facebooking and the wearing of iPod earbuds everywhere – and the rolling-eyed reluctance to stop any and all of this for class – never fail to inspire me.
All this contributes to the pompous ass thing.
But there’s much more to it than that.
See, in a newsroom – and many other places where men and women commingle and work together – you talk and interact with half-way intelligent adults, most of whom have a fairly interesting angle on one thing or another. You argue and drink and become very close with some of them.
Being an adult who grows as a person is all about figurative and literal thrust and parry.
But in a college, they sequester us adults in offices (ivory towers) of our own.
Now, since 90 percent of my interaction with other human beings is with children who know so much less than I do, I can’t help but feel, well, really goddamn smart. Experienced. Powerful. Cool.
That is, until I try to read the stuff my colleagues write in their journals – even the ones about journalism.
For instance, take one article, which reads in part, “The common tendency to attach the label ‘uses and gratifications approach’ to work in this field appears to virtually disclaim any theoretical pretensions or methodological commitment.”
This kind of writing grows on you like a fungus. You begin to think in a twisted syntax that, after a while, makes perfect sense – and whose perfect sense becomes reflected in your upturned nose and down-turned eyes; and infiltrates your voice to where it becomes both husky and impatient, filled with mmm-hmmms and a litany of, “It’s complicated….”
So, it’s no wonder that typical professors hold such a dim view of journalists – those hacks who grind out writing that stereotypically plateaus at a 6th-grade level – just like their students, come to think of it.
It took me two years, but I figured it out.
See how complicated it is?
Sigh.