I�ve been thinking more about the stereotype of the professor as eccentric. This type is particularly prevalent at my university, where the outward embodiment of a singular mind seems to have been raised to an art form.

Those of us who are in or have attended college are probably familiar with the type. We all know them. There was the English professor in my college who wore a brown turtleneck and brown corduroy pants with a brown belt and brown shoes every day, rain or shine, dead of winter or heat wave, classroom or faculty party (or so we imagined). We envisioned a whole closet of identical clothes, neatly hung and evenly spaced. Such an eccentricity, we thought, reflected a minimalist aesthetic, or possibly a mind so preoccupied with higher matter it he banished all petty decisions. Of course, it might just as easily have reflected a complete and total lack of imagination. It all depends on how the intellect itself is demonstrated in the classroom and in scholarly work.

In some cases, as in gender studies, for example, the tics can codify, suggesting rather than a singularity of individual minds, a mob mentality. First of all, gender studies is almost entirely taught by gay men and women of all sexual orientations. Here is a place where the classroom is overtly �already and always eroticized,� for the very premise of the field is based around the nature of acculturation of gender types. Sexuality is always implicit and usually explicit. As a result, gender studies professors frequently wear their genders like a uniform. I will not speak to the stereotype of the gay male gender studies professor, simply because I have never personally encountered more than one. They are the minority still, as most gender studies departments are a recent evolution from women�s studies programs of the 1970s. But for women, it seems, you can�t cultivate just any eccentricity. You must choose: butch or femme. There are those with �50s style crew cuts, plaid cowboy shirts over men�s jeans with wallet chains and workboots. And then there are those with long flowing hair, frilly skirts and breathy voices and extravagant hand gestures. Anything in between seems to be suspect.

This is, more than anything, the cult of personality at work. Several speakers at yesterday�s workshop session repeated warnings that cultivating a cult of personality is fundamentally bad teaching. But the fact is that the university itself revels in such cults. They attract students. The cult of personality may not be good teaching (and I myself am not convinced that that is necessarily so, although it does tend to inspire students to follow blindly rather than think independently) but it is good marketing.

Of course, all of us put on costumes and perform our identities every day in some fashion, and I don�t mean to imply that such things are always conscious artifice, nor do I mean to imply that every academic falls into the category of eccentric. But academia seems to cultivate teaching as a performance and professorial eccentricism is part of the costume. This was implied in several of the sessions I attended on teaching, where many people talked about the importance of choosing and enacting a classroom persona. As college students, we always assumed these eccentricities of the result of a lack of thought, the mildly sociopathic results of a mind occupied with better things. This is probably occasionally the case, but it is much more likely to be calculated, at least to some extent.

Part of why all the graduate students running the workshops were more engaging than the professors had to do with these very eccentricities. It was as if in the case of the more battle-hardened professors the eccentricities had taken the place of actual personalities. Does this indicate a narrowing of experience, a (perhaps necessary) attrition of activities on the hard road to tenure? Certainly the seeds of future neuroses were visible in the graduate students, but for the most part they still appeared to have one foot in the socially normative world.

In college, we always had this fantasy that Prof. brown-turtleneck-and-corduroys had a secret life at home. Next to the closet of brown turtlenecks, corduroys, shoes and belts was another close full of rainbow tie-dyed T-shirts, loud golf pants and Chuck Taylors in every color of the rainbow. I suppose the fact that we, as students, gave Prof. Brown�s wardrobe so much thought shows how influential a classroom persona can be on the way students perceive the professor and his or her reliability as a source of intellectual engagement. Prof. Brown�s wardrobe was, in some ways, an elegant statement of his reliability in the extreme, yet also his quirkiness, hinting at a spark of imagination in the determined absence of any imaginative outward appearance. He had sloughed off the social standards of dress. He was above it all.

The great irony of yesterday�s workshop meetings was about how a good teacher is not self conscious but student conscious; but at the same time, teachers need to take their responsibility especially seriously, because the smallest gesture or action that outside the classroom would not be noticed is suddenly imbued with great meaning. Whether I choose to teach standing in front of the desk or sitting behind it has meaning. How the chairs are arranged has meaning. The sound of my voice has meaning. And, given our extensive analysis of Prof. Brown�s wardrobe, what I wear has meaning.

What kind of teaching persona do I wish to embody? How will my actions be viewed? Which eccentricities, currently lying latent, will become the tics for which I am known, through which I am identified? I don�t know the answer to any of those questions. All I can tell you for certain is that I will not be wearing a brown turtleneck.

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