Freddie deBoer on the pathetic academic specimen sometimes known as “Bob” or “Biff” or “Lizzie” — the dreaded self-imagined “cool professor”:

“heh, probably never expected to have a professor with full sleeve tattoos, huh? well, that’s not the last time your mind’s gonna be blown this semester …”
Image and caption from Freddie deBoer’s Substack

Let me tell you about the saddest figures in the American university. They wear black jeans and Chuck Taylors to class, except maybe on the first day, when they stroll in wearing semi-ironic suits designed to contrast with their ample tattoos. Their syllabuses are printed in Helvetica. They mention Chappell Roan in the first fifteen minutes of the first day of class. They tell their students, with a wink, that they don’t believe in grades — why, who are they to judge their students! They encourage everyone in class to call them by their first names, or perhaps a contrived nickname. They hope to blow everyone’s minds when they theatrically announce that in their classes, students pick the readings, because the students are the ones who really know what’s worthy of their time. They describe themselves as “friends” or “guides” or “partners”, not as teachers or professors. They disdainfully invoke the words “rigor” and “standards” only with ironic scare quotes and want you to know that they don’t believe in deadlines. They subtweet the provost on BlueSky. They are the Cool Professors. And they are frauds.

The Cool Professor fundamentally does not want to teach, as teaching requires the teacher to sometimes be the bad guy. The Cool Professor can’t stand to be the bad guy, chafes at the very idea. That’s the core of all of this. The posture, the cultivated aesthetic of rejection, the performance of cool — none of it’s about students, even though Cool Professors will not shut the fuck up about how they run a “student-centered classroom”. Their affect isn’t about pedagogy. It’s about insecurity and narcissism, their desperate need to be perceived as the rare exception, the rogue academic, the anti-institutional rebel. Cool Professors aren’t trying to liberate students. They’re trying to be loved, and in being loved by students stave off their horror about growing old. And if that means letting students drift intellectually, if that means mistaking chaos for creativity, if that means failing to ever give anyone a hard but necessary lesson, then so be it. Because the thing the Cool Professor wants to avoid at all costs is being perceived as an authority figure, and that is precisely what students most need them to be.

It’s a common misunderstanding, particularly among faculty who feel alienated from the bureaucracy of the university or who fancy themselves transgressive thinkers, that teaching should never be hierarchical. The idea is that it’s somehow oppressive to know more than your students or to presume to evaluate their performance; that knowing more than your students and evaluating their performance are publicly understood to be core parts of being a teacher typically goes ignored. Many who consider themselves modern or progressive in the academy insist that education should be horizontal, an equal exchange between learner and guide, that the classroom is a site of resistance or liberation. But these ideas, while maybe flattering to the professor’s ego and superficially appealing to a certain kind of idealist, are incoherent. They’re built on a fundamental category error: mistaking the classroom for a club meeting, or a dinner party, or a DSA breakout session. The classroom is none of those things. It’s a site of instruction, and in a site of instruction one party knows more than the other; one party evaluates the other; one party is, necessarily, in charge.

(And, for the record, the fundamental dictate of critical pedagogy is always and forever self-defeating: if you inspire your students to rebel against your authority in your own classroom, they’re still following your lead and thus not rebelling at all. The ubiquitous goal of prompting students to resist top-down education, whatever that means, is unachievable, because if you do prompt them to resist, they’re actually complying with your desires, not resisting them. It’s a good old fashioned paradox and not one you can bluff your way out of with abstruse academic vocabulary.)

The plain fact that a teacher must necessarily have some sort of control over the classroom space that the students do not makes people uncomfortable. Authority always does. But then, the job of a teacher is not to minimize discomfort; indeed, a good teacher will necessarily make their students uncomfortable, on occasion, as it’s often only in the space of genuine discomfort that we’re inspired to achieve our deepest growth. The professor’s job to be responsible for the intellectual development of students, which inevitably involves making judgments: what is true, what is false, what is well argued, what is sloppy, what is insightful, what is clichéd. If you aren’t willing to say those things, if you shrink from judgment, you’re abandoning the role you signed up for, you’re copping out. You’re indulging yourself, and your own flattering self-mythology, at the expense of the people you’re supposed to be teaching.