Why would anyone say that university professors don't live in the real world?

Question

I have seen this several times. It irks me. Is the world that college professors live in any less real than the one everyone else does?

Most of them have a Ph.D. That doesn't happen overnight, and it sure as hell doesn't get handed to you.

Many of my professors had distinguished careers, and were either retired or only on the faculty as adjunct professors. Some of my distinguished professors were a: judge, police officer, prosecutor, FBI agent (retired), budget analyst for the CRS, anthropologist with 20 years of field work all over the world, foreign service officer (retired)... the list goes on and on!

On the side, these people did things like go on diplomatic missions to Israel and Palestine, or fight FGM in Africa. I think that my professors lived more in the real world than most of us who spend time debating these things on Y!A. Can we give them a little more respect?

Not at all, Aggiegirl... Actually, I am thinking that people who make these comments have never been to college, or they would be aware of the outstanding credentials required to teach at a university. I am not justifying to myself, I KNOW these people are brilliant!
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And, great professors don't indoctrinate you, they teach you to think critically. My opinion wasn't always the same as my professors' either, but I found it all the more stimulating just for that reason.

They worked for government because I took government classes. I just don't see how being a police officer could remove someone from reality any more than being a doctor or a business owner... they still have mortgages and car payments like the rest of us.

Answer 1

It could be a back-handed compliment...or a complaint to unrelenting authority.

Such frustrations come from those who will most likely never occupy the same intellectual "world" these profs comfortably inhabit.

The complainers deserve some sympathy that the value of an inner life is outside their grasp, or in the worst case, that their temporal existence demands all of the time necessary to appreciate anything better.

They may be trained for nuclear physics, but are marooned at Starbucks serving Frappuccinos. Spend enough time there, and one could imagine the life of a barista to be more real than the plumber's or the professor's life, until the toilet or the world economy needs fixing.

Perhaps Einstein said it best, when he reminded us that "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

To the thumber-downer: Are you prepared to prove which world is real?

What is real to you may be unrecognizable to someone on the other side of the world, who might be horrified (and often is) by what you consider "real," and vice-versa.

The purpose of higher learning is not to prepare us for the jobs of yesterday, or to reinforce the pernicious mistakes of the past, but to separate us from the mundane long enough to imagine a better world, a necessary step if we are to build one.

Much of what you depend on every day was never considered "practical" until it was first imagined, communicated to, and finally embraced by others, often after protracted intellectual battles with the status quo... which doesn't mean that everybody "gets it."

A perfect example of this impasse is that downward thumb some of you have clicked on. Rather than entertain the thought of someone defending the professor you disagreed with in school, the one who may have given you less credit than you thought you deserved, you assume that he didn't know what he was talking about. Perhaps it is you who didn't know what he was talking about, hence the grades.

To turn this discussion around for a moment, a guy with a PhD named Victor Wouk developed a car to meet new EPA guidelines, and wound up doubling the gas mileage in the process. The EPA balked at testing his vehicle, then dismissed it out of hand as being "just not a very practical technology..." for the real world, of course. The date was 1974, and the car was a hybrid. Remember, not too long ago, when SUVs were hot?

33 years of real-world engineering later, it's back to the future. What a magnificent waste of time, money, and oil!

The problems of your "real" world will increase, until you step outside that world long enough to consider something else, whether or not it sounds practical at first. When you do, you will probably find your crazy professor out there waiting patiently for you, to create that next real world together.

Answer 2

One thing I noticed about all those various careers of your professors. Almost all were gov't jobs. Don't you find that interesting? Most people in the real world don't work for government.

The reason many people generalize this, is because many professors stay in the academic system for a great deal of their lives, first as students, then grads, then maybe they leave for a few years or not, then associate professors, then full tenured professors. They've never had to go out and hustle in the real world, or at least, not very long.

As a rule, professors don't have to make their quarterly numbers, don't have to worry about finishing projects and shipping products on time, don't have to worry about making payroll, don't have to worry about how what their productivity level is, etc.

Once tenured, they are virtually guaranteed a job for life, unless they really commit a major academic sin. Even whacko professors like that Ward Churchill guy can say all kinds of crazy and offensive things, and he's still got his job.

My personal anecdote is when I was taking Economics 101, my professor would spend about 5 minutes teaching economics, and 55 minutes delivering socialist anti-American propaganda speeches that would have made the Kremlin proud.

Answer 3

"How many of you atheists live in the real world?" All of us, by definition. It's not possible to live in a fake world. "Why do I suspect that most of you are teenagers and students without a lick of REAL WORLD knowledge?" Because you are trolling? "all your gay liberal theories that your professors teach you don't work out here!" Scientific theories do not have sexual preferences, nor do they have political bias. They simply explain natural phenomenon. They do have application in the real world. The computer on which you are reading this message was built and works as a direct application of multiple scientific theories. "You think you know so much but soon you will find out how little you really know." I agree. Every good student realizes that the more they know, the more they don't know. Each answered question leads to ten new questions. "So how many of you have REAL jobs and REAL lives like me, and how many of you are punk kids in college/high school?" I am a chemist working for a major chemical solutions distributor in Charlotte, NC.

Answer 4

Clearly, you had many distinguished professors that had lived in the real world and brought something to the table.

Unfortunately, there are also many professors who spent their entire adult life at colleges, studying about things but never practising it. These are the ones that have never lived in the real world. Many things sound good in books (i.e. on paper) but are not practical in reality. You can't understand this without having spent time in the 'real world.'

See the difference?

Ain't nothin' wrong with government service and anyone who assails the 'real world' status of a police officer clearly has no idea how much they see of 'the real world.'

Answer 5

As a college professor who has also worked in the real world, let me explain. Many of my colleagues support ideals that are not workable in the real world, yet they want to impose these ideals on working people. Working people take offense at that, because they know that these professors have never had to make a payroll or work the night shift. The Ph.D. is rough, but it's not the same as what other people go through.

Answer 6

B/c some college professors only surround themselves with people that think just like they do. So they get some false sense that they are right and the opposition is wrong. Some professors are very smart and not so biased, but many are just so utterly full of themselves. They come up with hypothesis and conlcusions that they back up with SELECT information and many times think their little theory or way of looking at things is right.

Some professors are just too caught up in themselves and what they believe in. They oppose anyone or thing that doesnt agree with them b/c they just surround themselves with like minded people rather than diverse viewpoints.

After college I realized some professors were just so full of themselves and extememly biased and never presented both sides of an argument equally.

Answer 7

Those who have spent their entire careers in academia clearly show it. Those who have worked in the "real world" know that theories are just that - theories. And they can take their real world experiences and place the theories in correct context. Many things in the "real world" are different than academic theories and what they think is or ought to be.

I'll give you an example-- writing computer programs in college is quite different than in the real world. Alot of college programing results are only to meet a simple need and are nowhere near the robustness necessary in commerical ventures . Of course, there are also very robust college orginated software packages that became so by the very need of being commerically viable.

College profs that comment on social matters often are living in a utopian dream world.

Answer 8

if someone's saying something that disagrees with you... and they clearly have an education...

you have to slander them some other way to discredit their remarks...

Conservatives are great at it... the "liberal media" to anything that's reported against them...

"the college professors that don't live in the real world" if anyone tries to use anything that an academic has found...

I mean the very statement "liberals have a mental disorder" is nothing more than a sad, blanket attempt to get everyone to ignore anyone who disagrees with conservatives...

when you can't fight the facts... you call the people who present them "crazy" and "bias"... attack the messenger...

the sad thing is... many people belive that there are these vast "left wing conspiracies" tring to bring the conservative party down... and that everything that liberals say are just lies to do just that...

EDIT: some campuses may be liberal... I'm sure it's not easy being liberal at Liberty... but I'm not so sure that's a bad thing... it merey reflects the ideas of the area...

Answer 9

when they teach business they teach by the book when in fact it is not like that at all they forget to mention all of the bribing, scheming, and payoffs as well as many other things associated with owning and operating a big business but professors do teach the basics very well.
or do you mean sociology professor who only teach one side or one point of few this happens alot.

Answer 10

I don't mean to be rude but most professors, my father in-law is one, with a PHD in engineering, are liberal one trick ponies, who are very good at one or two things but aren't really very good at fitting in with everyday people.