So we’re up to our eyebrows in work these days. Work with our students, work on the various and sundry departmental and university committees that we’re required to participate in and of course work on the book – make that books – and let’s toss in an article or two while we’re at it.
When I first went to school, I had the standard image of university professors in their ivory towers (or ivied towers, or ivied ivory towers) wearing tweed, smoking pipes, spending their days thinking deep thoughts, trading witty quips with other deep thinkers. As luck would have it, my very first English professor (and as it turns out the very first professor I met as an undergraduate) was exactly that tweed wearing, pipe smoking man. Or so I assumed. He certainly came dressed for the occasion and I took the rest as a given, filling in the blanks with available stereotypes garnered from a childhood and adolescence of excessive movie viewing.
I also took as a given that this man had unlimited amounts of *time*. After all, he only taught three classes and that was only three days a week. What could be cushier, I wondered, than the life of a university professor?
