How to become a professor

There’s one sure-fire way to broadcast that you are an academic giant who knew what he was doing in school: Become a professor. For most people, becoming a tenured professor at an Ivy League school is a journey that takes over a decade. Not for you, though. You’re going to be a professor by the end of this article. Here’s how:

1. Throw away all of your clothing. Replace it with tweed. Tweed everything. Socks, underwear, belts, gym shorts… if it’s not tweed, it doesn’t touch your body. Unless it’s that hot philosophy graduate student, Kira Newman.¹

2. Buy a pipe that you can suck on pensively. Walk to your local college campus, locate its quadrangle, or “quad” for short, and stroll around with one hand behind your back, the other holding your pipe. Approach students on the quad and offer some professional advice like, “No, no, you forgot to add a constant of integration to the end of that expression,” or, “I just got the craziest new idea for a class to teach next semester, do you want to hear it?” After you have a reputation for yourself, gain their trust by one day dropping everything you are carrying and playing a round of ultimate frisbee. A professor playing ultimate frisbee will be such a profound image to their young sophomoric brains that it will be burned into their neural pathways forever, and word of you will spread across campus like that of ebolavirus through a remote tribe of African rainforest monkeys.

3. Once you feel comfortable with this system, it’s time to start teaching. Many animals just assume the first creature they see is their mother. Similarly, most college students will assume whoever shows up on the first day of class is the professor. Arrive a few minutes early, stroll to the front of the room, and say, “Okay, okay, people… settle, settle. Come on now. Immanuel Kant’s not going to debate himself.” Grasp a piece of chalk and write your name on the board. Give it a firm underline for good measure and declare your name. Write the name of the textbook on the board, and tell them how important this class is to their lives. When the real professor shows up, no Harvard doctorate or campus security officer armed with pepper spray and a taser will be enough to take your authority away from you. “Your first assignment is to tackle that imposter!”

4. After you pull this maneuver seven or eight semesters in a row, the university will be ready to admit defeat. You’ll get a cushy endowed professorship with a corner office and a somewhat shy but efficient personal assistant with pasty white skin. Sit back in your comfortable tweed desk chair, suck on that pipe, and plan your sabbatical.

5. Remember the motto, “publish or perish.” Many professors spend five to eight hours per day on writing and research, but not you! The easiest thing to do is to plagiarize articles originally written in another language. If you’re interested in archeology, import some academic magazines from China. For computer science and design, try Japan! Brazil and Spain produce excellent scholars in the arts. So few people read out of their own language that no one will ever know.

6. When attending parties and other social events, let your clothes speak for you. Wearing a shirt from a well-known bastion of intellectualism can be the only statement you need. When someone says, “Oh wow, you went to Cal Tech?” respond with, “I took a few semesters there before finding my calling in building orphanages in Tibet.” Make sure you know what the motto of the school you are wearing is, in the off-chance that somebody else went to that school too. For example, if someone asks if you are a fellow Harvard alum, respond with their motto, “Vertias!” If you are asked what your major was, say “physics.” Everyone will be in awe, and no one will be able to ask any questions that could blow your cover.

Remember, academia is perhaps the most poorly designed system in the world, but it’s got too much tradition behind it to change now. Everything is about GPA, honor, and how much ivy you have on your walls. So with these tips and a quick wit, you too can show off your massive intellectual dick by mentioning that you are a tenured professor at a prestigious college!

Lineage: Faking It: How to Seem like a Better Person Without Actually Improving Yourself.

1. If she knows anything about having proper goals in life, she will herself have tweed lingerie. [↩]