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Trading Cards for the Professoriate
If you can't beat mass culture, you can join it. Trading cards might help faculty earn new audiences and new respect.
By Luis Martínez-Fernández
In our celebrity-driven, star-struck culture, university professors do not receive the attention or praise—not to mention the paychecks—of movie actors, pop music idols, super models, or sports stars. Although professors' egos may not be much smaller than those of celebrities, academia lacks the promotional infrastructure of professional sports and the entertainment industry. For example, we have no televised award shows (there's a different one almost every night), magazine covers cluttering supermarket checkout aisles, or trading cards. That may explain why so many people know how many home runs Barry Bonds has hit, what Jennifer López is wearing, and who is dating Britney Spears. It also hints at why no one knows—or cares to know—much about the accomplishments of unsung professors toiling at America's colleges and universities.
To begin addressing this unfortunate disparity, I propose that university presses produce and market Trading CardsTM for the Professoriate. I have even trademarked the name in case the idea flies. Professors' cards would follow the format of the popular baseball cards that have done so much to promote the national pastime and its professional players. Both children and adults could collect and trade the cards, and our profession's image and prestige would reach new heights. Moreover, the cards should provide the financially strapped university presses with a solid source of revenue.
The front of the cards would have a photograph of the featured faculty member. The images could vary: a tweed-jacketed historian at a messy desk; a young anthropologist wearing a Guatemalan serape with a poster of Che Guevara lurking behind; a bald biologist hovering over a microscope; or perhaps an Armani-clad dean of a top-ten business school. The professor's name, rank, field of study, and university affiliation would be displayed. That way, instead of showing, say, Sammy Sosa, right fielder for the Chicago Cubs, the card would read, for example, Stanley Fish, professor of English and dean of the college of liberal arts and sciences, University of Illinois-Chicago.
The use of photographs in Trading CardsTM for the Professoriate should go a long way toward helping the public recognize currently faceless scholars. Imagine the boost to an economist's ego when he overhears a faculty card collector whisper in someone's ear, "I can't believe it, the guy at the next table is one of the coauthors of my Econ textbook. I have his rookie card in mint condition." Students could use the cards to select which college to attend or which classes to take on the basis of which professors wear the hippest clothes or have the face of an easy grader.
The reverse side of Trading CardsTM for the Professoriate, like those of baseball's major leagues, would provide information and statistics pertaining to the featured instructor's career. Vital information to include would be gender, race, place and date of birth (for Equal Opportunity Employment purposes only); the institution granting the professor's terminal degree; and whether the professor is a leftie or a centrist (there are virtually no righties in the academy).
The year-by-year chart of statistics ought to resemble those of baseball cards. But instead of team, home runs, runs batted in, and batting averages, the professors' cards would include university name, number of articles and books published, and number of conference presentations and dissertations advised. A line in a typical professor's chart would read something like this: "2002-03, South Jersey University, one article (peer reviewed), two book reviews, no book contract yet, two master's students supervised." Cards for scholars in the natural sciences would also have information on numbers and amounts of grants and other important details, such as how many patents have been filed. More succinctly than a sixteen-page curriculum vitae, a card's year-by-year chart will allow fans to trace the various universities to which a particular scholar has moved after declaring free agency.
A main objective of professors' cards is to get people to collect them with the same fervor with which some individuals collect baseball cards or celebrity autographs. The hobby would offer endless possibilities. Collectors would be able to specialize in cards of specific universities; just like some collectors exclusively seek out Yankee players, a person could collect only cards of New York University scholars. One could also collect by field or philosophical orientation, say, gender studies professors or postmodernists. Or just like some people who focus on collecting rookie cards, collectors could specialize in cards of professors in their first year.
Imagine the value of a Noam Chomsky autographed first-year (1955) card, or a mint-condition first-year (also 1955) card of Toni Morrison wearing the colors of Texas Southern University. Some collectors willing to pay high premiums could specialize in extremely rare categories of cards, such as Latinos playing on Ivy League teams or women chairs of mathematics departments.
The actual trading of cards should be an important part of the collectors' hobby. A collector may want to trade his duplicate Johns Hopkins University history sluggers and two prospects to be named later (ABDs) for a couple of Rutgers epistemologists that he needs to complete a set of the star-studded Scarlet Knights Philosophy Department. A collector focusing on the rare field of Latino scholars may offer several star cards for that of switch-hitting (bilingual) Gustavo Pérez Firmat as a young Duke University Blue Devil.
As with their baseball counterparts, Trading CardsTM for the Professoriate would unavoidably fall into a hierarchy responding to supply and demand that parallels the hierarchical nature of U.S. higher education. A card of a Harvard chemist (even if she is unlikely to be tenured) will probably be worth more than that of a veteran scientist pitching four classes a semester at bottom-ranking North-West State Tech.
Likewise, cards of full professors will be valued more highly than those of junior faculty members playing for similar teams. A card of a Pulitzer Prize winning author like New York University's David Levering Lewis (he has two Pulitzers) or that of a Nobel laureate like economist Robert W. Fogel would be sought after much more vigorously than other cards, just the way trading cards of Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays are. It's not clear yet whether deans' cards would command a premium price or go the way of those "in action" cards that no one wanted.
Trading CardsTM for the Professoriate would be sold in packs of ten, like sports cards, but they would have to subscribe to the prevailing values and ethical standards of academia. Each package ought to include a substantial representation of women scholars and at least one pinch-hitting minority professor. The cards and their wrappers ought to be manufactured with 100 percent recycled blue books and undergraduate student papers. Oh, I almost forgot the gum! Each pack will include a strip of chewing gum, but, unlike the traditional fare, it will be nontoxic, non-animal-tested, and produced with organic rubber harvested by volunteer ecotourists in the rainforests of Amazonia.
In preparation for issuing the first series of Trading CardsTM for the Professoriate, university vice presidents for academic affairs are encouraged to start gathering photographs of their faculties (recent shots), along with year-by-year charts highlighting faculty members' scholarly accomplishments (no minor league information, please). That should be just a first step within a larger promotional effort; the Modern Language Association's yearly convention awards ceremony ought to be televised during prime-time TV, just like the MTV Awards are. And we should have a reality TV show in which a group of young professors is followed around by cameras during their tenure review year to see who the survivors are. Someday faculty scandals may get coverage by People magazine and the National Enquirer rather than just the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Luis Martínez-Fernández plays Latin American history for the Rutgers Scarlet Knights and is senior editor of Encyclopedia of Cuba: People, History, Culture, published in 2003.
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