Professing
A Manifesto for Academic Authority in Crisis. By William Matthew McCarter
For more than fifty years, I’ve been learning. For more than twenty years, I’ve been teaching. At this point, if I can’t profess something worth hearing, then I should hang it up and sell insurance. Parents don’t pay tuition for their kids to sit through PowerPoints and assessment rubrics. They pay for the spectacle of a professor professing. That’s what the job title promises.
However, the role of the professor in contemporary society is under siege. Once regarded as intellectual authorities, the custodians of knowledge and interpreters of cultural meaning, professors now often appear as middle managers of accreditation, shuffling attendance sheets and learning outcomes.
Historically, to profess meant “to declare openly.”1 Professing was not simply teaching; it was staking a claim, advancing a worldview, risking something. In the nineteenth century, the lecture stood at the center of academic life. Today, the lecture is suspect. Student-centered learning, interdisciplinarity, and institutional precarity dominate the landscape. And so the question presses: Do we still profess?
The word comes from the Latin profitēri: “to declare openly.” It meant a vow, a profession of faith. In the past, professing could mean risking your life on a declaration of truth. During the Middle Ages, Copernicus professed that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and the church nearly excommunicated him. In Classical Greece, Socrates professed that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living, and Athens handed him a cup of hemlock.
Professing was hazardous. Today? My hazard is turning in grades on time. That’s my hemlock. Aristotle never had to file a drop slip. Plato never had to submit outcomes to the accrediting body. However, here we are—heirs to the School of Athens, shackled to Microsoft Outlook reminders.
The erosion is partly pedagogical. Ken Bain described the shift from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side.”2 Active learning is not just a fad but empirically effective: Scott Freeman et al. showed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that student performance improves when engagement increases.3
But in celebrating facilitation, we risk hollowing out the declarative act of professing—the act of staking a claim, of saying, “Here is the truth as I see it.” As Dietrich and Evans argued, the dichotomy between lecture and active learning is false; explanation and modeling actually amplify, rather than undermine, engagement.4 Consequently, many undergraduates can complete an entire degree without hearing a professor unabashedly profess: staking out an interpretation, defending a worldview, and saying, “This is how the world is and here’s why.”
The retreat is not only pedagogical but political. Florida’s Stop WOKE Act and restrictions on Israel–Palestine discourse elsewhere have chilled faculty expression. The AAUP reports mounting intimidation of faculty for classroom speech.5 In this climate, neutrality functions less as a pedagogical approach and more as a means of survival.
Critics worry that professing reverts to authoritarian, top-down education, which slides back into a hierarchy. Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, warned against the “banking model” of education, where students passively absorb content.6 From this vantage, professing looks like a relic of hierarchy. And yes, the risk is real: to profess badly is to pontificate, to close off dialogue.
But professing does not have to mean pontificating. Professing, properly understood, is not dictation. It is public accountability. It is transparency about commitments. Neutrality masquerading as objectivity often hides more bias than it reveals and disguises commitments rather than democratizing the classroom. As bell hooks reminded us, “to teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential.”7 Such care requires honesty, not opacity.
We professors like to imagine ourselves as sages in ivory towers. The truth? The towers have crumbled into cubicles. We look more like middle managers with reading lists. And while we’ve retreated into our jargon and peer-reviewed fortresses, the public square has been colonized by carnival barkers. These aren’t accidents. They’re what happens when professors go silent. I’ve written academic articles. I’ve published an academic book. Maybe two dozen people read them, and a dozen people cited them in their research.
Walter Noll once lamented that professors are rewarded for research and teaching evaluations, but not for intellectual declaration.8 Mark Noll extended the point: to profess is not just to teach minds, but to shape discourse in democratic culture.9 Professors are not only experts but also citizens. Our proclamations, grounded in evidence, are essential to civic life.
The public, however, does not call on us. Why? Because we abandoned the public square. Bill Nye plays a scientist on TV, despite not being one. Dr. Phil became the face of psychology because Oprah said so.
Morgan Freeman narrates Black history instead of Henry Louis Gates Jr. or Cornel West because his voice is smoother. Sean Hannity pretends to be a political philosopher every night at 8 p.m. None of this is accidental. It is the consequence of our retreat into jargon and behind paywalls. Meanwhile, Bill O’Reilly and Brian Kilmeade sell reheated history in airport bookstores by the millions. They aren’t smarter. They’re just louder.
So now that I’m approaching the backside of my academic career, I have nothing to lose by professing. My final act as an academic may be to save the academy from irrelevance. However, in order to do this, I must commit to the following:
Reclaim the podium: Not as an authoritarian dictate, but as a courageous stance. The lecture versus active learning binary is false. Professing should coexist with facilitation.10
Defend academic freedom: Without it, professing collapses into silence. Lehrfreiheit, the freedom to teach as civic service, remains foundational.11
Declare my viewpoint: Professing means making claims that are evidence-rooted and open to contest. False neutrality is neither rigorous nor honest.
Expose commitments: Pedagogy is never value-free. Faith-informed, identity-informed, philosophically informed teaching clarifies rigor by declaring context.
Expand professing beyond the classroom: Professors must reenter the public sphere. That means blogs, podcasts, op-eds, and even TikTok if necessary. If Einstein was right, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough,” then the test of professing is clarity without footnotes.
Professing is not sermonizing. It is a risk. It is clarity. It is evidence with oxygen. To profess is to say that the emperor has no clothes, that the Earth is round, that the Sun does not revolve around the provost’s ego. To profess is to speak truth. The messy, loud, unapologetic truth.
Academia may say this is a step backward. I say it is the only way forward.
William Matthew McCarter is a writer and professor in Southeast Missouri. His work has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and Steel Toe Review.
Oxford English Dictionary, “profess.”
Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard University Press, 2004).
Scott Freeman et al., “Active Learning Increases Student Performance in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics,” PNAS 111, no. 23 (2014).
Heiko Dietrich and Tanya Evans, “Traditional Lectures Versus Active Learning: A False Dichotomy?” American Institute of Mathematical Sciences 2, no. 4 (2022).
Polarizing Times Demand Robust Academic Freedom (AAUP, 2023).
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Continuum, 1970).
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress (Routledge, 1994): 13.
Walter Noll, The Role of the Professor (Carnegie Mellon University, 1997).
Mark Noll, foreword of Professing Christ, edited by Jonathan Pettigrew and Robert H. Woods Jr. (Integatio Press, 2022).
Dietrich and Evans.
Jeffery C. Sun and Heather A. Turner, “Vise Gripping Academic Freedom,” Journal of College and University Law 49, no. 2 (2024).