Reply to Met with a family member who is a professor and it let us to dropping several potential colleges from consideration

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Professors are generally arrogant blow hards with unearned superiority complexes. [/quote]

Yep.  Absolutely.  That's why I'm up grading right now.

It does, however, make me wonder why you all seem to want so badly to send your children to study with people like me.  If we're so useless and awful, why waste money on us?  Surely you could find other ways to purchase a decent life for your kid.  And my life would certainly be easier if the only students in my classroom were the ones who actually wanted to be there.[/quote]

[b]I want my kid to study with professors who value/respect careers outside of academia. Most at SLACs do not. [/b]As evidenced in your own post, it's not an easy or lucrative life. 
[/quote]
If you actually knew professors, you would know that we all strongly discourage students from going into academia. We are fully and painfully aware that tenure-line positions are few and far between, that the pay is insufficient, and that combining an academic life with family can be very difficult. So, I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that professors don't value or respect careers outside of academia. We do and 99% of the time encourage our students to pursue careers outside of academia. I've been a professor for 25 years, and I can count on one hand the number of students I've thought would actually succeed and encouraged to pursue an academic career. 
If you're the same person who keeps posting about blowhard professors, please rethink your wrong stereotype of academia. You have convinced yourself that your narrow view of the academy is correct, and there are several professors on this thread who are telling you that you need to broaden your view.[/quote]

There are multiple posters on this thread who’ve called out professors for being blowhards. I’m one of them. It’s not just one person. Your unwillingness to take some criticism and instead chalk it up to someone else’s narrow-mindedness is a tired, predictable, ivory-tower response. [/quote]

One of the anti-professor posters here acknowledged that their opinions were shaped by encounters with family members.  That's understandable as a personal reaction, but not an accurate way to assess the practices and values of the entire profession.  And namecalling hardly constitutes constructive criticism: I am sure that the standards for such criticism were much higher at the college where you earned your degree (and formed your thoughts about the faculty?), just as they are at the colleges and universities where we teach.  If you have broad experience that reaches beyond just your own educational trajectory, or have researched higher-education data, or have worked in academia, you might have strong negative reactions, but you surely also have more to say than just "blowhard" or "ivory tower."  I'm glad to listen.[/quote]

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