What do you profess, professor? A few thoughts on professors past, present and future

Abstract

Inaugural lecture of Professor Michel Clasquin-Johnson, 15 October 2014.

As academics, we are all heirs to the great Socrates' assertion that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what of the professor? There seems to be precious little professorial self-examination going on. What does it mean to be a professor today, not only in the eyes of other professors, but in the eyes of the wider world that pays the professor's salary? What should the professor, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, profess? We may even tread on dangerous territory and ask whether the world of the future will feel the need of such creatures as professors. I shall of course, studiously resist interrogating the present in this regard. I have a decade to go before retirement, after all.