I have a lot of nice Italian winter clothes that make me look like a sophisticated Lebanese professor, so my friend Robert and I go around pretending to be experts in Arabic politics. It doesn’t work in the summer though. I don’t have the right clothes.
As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I’m the least authoritarian professor you’ll ever meet.
I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.
If President Obama were to enroll in an American government class, the professor would mark him absent on most days. In the first 100 days of his second term, the president has failed to show up to class, take notes and complete the daunting task of rising to the challenges facing him.
I never thought about becoming a politician. But during the military dictatorship, my grandfather was put in prison six times and my father twice. If my family and my country didn’t have this history, I might be a professor somewhere today.
My parents divorced when I was born, and my mother is a political science professor, like a feminist Mormon, which is sort of an oxymoron.
At Columbia Law School, my professor of constitutional law and federal courts, Gerald Gunther, was determined to place me in a federal court clerkship, despite what was then viewed as a grave impediment: On graduation, I was the mother of a 4-year-old child.
My parents, who were both professors at Tsinghua University, hoped that I would follow in their footsteps and become a professor.
I was a mere 29-year-old instructor at Kyoto, enjoying daily research work with some young students. Nothing had prepared me to be a professor at a major national university. Being too young and inexperienced to be a Full Professor, I was first appointed Associate Professor of Chemistry.
God made me to be a sports player. He didn’t make me to be a professor or any of that other crap.
We don’t look at teachers as scholars the way they do in Europe. In Spain you’re called a professor if you’re a high school teacher, and they pay teachers – they pay teachers in Europe.
I remember I had a professor in college. I wrote a great paper. Could never please this guy. But it made me better.
I went to college and graduate school, studying philosophy. I really did think I was going to wind up being a lecturer or professor of some sort.
It takes leadership to improve safety. And I started off the movement in my time, but the person who has done more over the past 20 to 30 years and who has led it is Professor Sid Watkins.
I mean, part of me would love to be a fat tenured professor of theater someday.
I had gotten a master’s degree in administration supervision with it in mind that I would some day be a professor, then get a doctorate degree and move up and eventually be president of a university.
But September 11 marked a big change in the sense that the public was suddenly interested, and as a professor at a public university I felt a responsibility to respond to all of the inquiries about the Islamic world.
My freshman English professor at Kent State University in 1984 told me I was a good writer, and she loved all the silly pictures I drew in my notebook. She said I should try writing children’s books, and so I did.
Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What’s the motive?
I was promoted associate professor in early 1970 and full professor in October of the same year. I spent the two spring semesters of 1972 and 1974 as visiting professor at Harvard University, giving lectures and directing a research project.
Anita Hill thanklessly put herself and her career as a law professor on the line more than 25 years ago to publicly name Clarence Thomas for sexually harassing her at work.
In college, I had an early introduction to classical genetics from Professor Dan Lindsley, also an extraordinary teacher who influenced me greatly.
I go to Stanford, and I’m an economics major, not thinking I’m going to do anything with acting. A professor came to the dorm where I lived looking for people to audition for an August Wilson play, ‘Joe Turner’s Come And Gone.’ I gave it a shot, got one of the lead roles in the play.
I started taking piano lessons when I was about 5, and there was always a lot of music in my family: my parents both play instruments, my grandparents were classical violinists, and my grandfather was actually a music professor and a conductor.
At MIT, in Professor Rodney Brooks’ lab, I was involved in a project, led by Anita Flynn, to build robots using techniques similar to those used in building silicon chips. We got some silicon micro-machined motors to move a bit, but this didn’t lead to an actual product.
My wife is a professor at UCLA in Los Angeles, but otherwise, I’d be right back living on the Upper West Side.
A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service: The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C’, the idea must be feasible.
The moment that changed me for ever was when I had my first seminar with my history professor at the University of Sussex. I realised that history would answer all the questions I had spent my life asking. It was an extraordinary moment.
When I hit 50, I want to go be a professor.
A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
In my day, you could get a faculty job with zero post-doc papers, as in the case of yours truly; but now, the CV of a successful applicant looks like that of a newly minted full professor from olden times.
‘Jane Eyre,’ when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.
I am a middle-class black, a college professor, far from wealthy, but also well removed from the kind of deprivation that would qualify my children for the label ‘disadvantaged.’
I then moved to the University of Western Ontario where I was made a full professor in 1985.
I think if I hadn’t been a writer, I’d have been a teacher like my dad. He was a college professor, and one of my greatest regrets is that he passed away before I was able to prove to him that I wasn’t going to be stuck working at Rax Roast Beef for the rest of my life!
My mother was a professor and she would wake me up at 5:30 every morning. I’ve had that routine since I was a child. So it’s not tough to wake up and face the camera at any time now.
I would never have dreamt that I would live in this country and that we would see swastikas painted at the door of a psychology professor at Columbia University.
My grandfather on my mother’s side was a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; my other grandfather was a lawyer, and one time Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives.
I am a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, where I teach an introductory class in cosmology. I see the deficiencies that first-year students show up with.
One time, someone came up to me and said, ‘I know so-and-so. They’re a professor at Harvard. They’re a big fan of your work.’ But that doesn’t impress me more than any other people feeling that way.
In 1983, I became the Vincent and Brook Astor Professor at The Rockefeller University, where I established a new Laboratory of Neurobiology and continued my close collaboration with Charles Gilbert on the circuitry of primary visual cortex.
When I found out that I had won the MacArthur Fellowship, I had been a professor at Carnegie Mellon for a week. I probably shouldn’t be saying this on TV, but I stopped worrying about tenure.
In 1971 I returned to the University of Chicago as Professor of Physics.
My grandfather was a French professor in Kolkata, though I never met him.
My father, Emil Palade, was professor of philosophy, and my mother, Constanta Cantemir-Palade, was a teacher. The family environment explains why I acquired early in life great respect for books, scholars and education.
I think if I were a college professor, no one would say I was uncomfortable about being shy because that might be expected. But I think because of people’s stereotypes, they think of a football player as someone who is very outgoing and I’m not.
I really started dreaming… and broke out of my shyness when I got to Howard University. My first acting class was an Intro to Acting class with Professor Bay, who really broke me out of my shell, encouraged me to follow my dreams and make them a reality.
I call myself Zimerican. I was born in the Midwest to Zimbabwean parents. My father was a professor at Grinnell College in Iowa.
