Joe: I know this is a sore point for you. But there is a modicum of 
truth that keeps the cliche alive. First, unlike your generation and 
mine, increasingly professors have never known anything but the 
classroom. This is a problem in any field, but especially, I think, 
for those who write. Second, a great many campuses interact socially 
almost not at all with the communities in which they've been dropped. 
Rather like army bases, where the town is a support system at best. 
Think about State College, Pennsylvania, or Ithaca. This came as a 
surprise for me when I first left New York, where the environment 
envelops universities, which amount to only a small part of the 
communal life of the arts or the mind, and faculty are usually 
pleased to be there and committed to staying. Most of the faculty I 
knew in San Diego tolerated San Diego because of the job and only 
because of the job; after even 30 years they considered themselves 
part of the university community and the community of universities, 
but not part of the larger community of San Diego--they were 
essentially transient. This distancing is more extreme elsewhere. The 
faculty at UC Irvine live for the most part in a community owned by 
the university and inhabited only by faculty. A new member buys his 
house at below market from the university and contracts to sell it 
back to the university for a very small profit. Informal faculty 
ghettoes are of course more common. At many schools faculty children 
go to schools set up for them by the university, which means that 
children don't play the role of passports into the community that 
they often do for newcomers.

The conditions of work for faculty are also usually misunderstood by 
outsiders, because they have so little resemblance to worklives 
outside. First there's the matter of tenure, which exists for very 
good reasons that most people are unaware of. It doesn't help that at 
most universities the work of profs with tenure is increasingly 
invisible--those who don't know any better think that they're 
guaranteed employment at full salary for teaching three hours a week, 
less summers and sabbaticals, because non-classroom work with 
students and scholarship happen in private. And of course 
committee-work isn't calculated in hours and tends not to be noticed outside.

There are only 500 Fortune 500 CEOs. There are tens of thousands of 
university professors. A very small number of folks are ever in the 
presence of a F500 CEO, but something like 30% of Americans spend a 
lot of time on campuses.

Mark

At 09:29 PM 3/1/2007, you wrote:
>You know, the cliche "Ivory Tower" always pisses me off. I suppose
>there aresuch places, but I've been a university teacher for going on
>thirty years &
>I have never inhabited an ivory tower & I don't know many people who have.
>The idea that the lives of college teachers -- at least outside the
>culturally if not educationally elite institutions -- is any more cut off
>from "real life" (whatever that is supposed to be) than the lives of office
>workers or factory workers is not just wrong, it is offensive to common
>sense. And it presupposes pernicious barriers between the life of the mind &
>the life of the body & the life of the human animal in society. We don't
>talk about Fortune 500 CEOs inhabiting ivory towers, but who is more cut off
>from reality? The phrase "ivory tower" has the fusty smell of stale Romantic
>categories. A fair number of poets now make a living by teaching, which is
>an honorable form of work. Are we to be consigned to the outer darkness
>through the employment of a phrase?
>
>Perhaps American academics are particularly sensitive to this usage because
>it has been used -- along with its variants -- by right-wing culture
>warriors to demean secularism & reason, to say nothing of imagination.
>
>Jobs before becoming a teacher: paint factory, car wash, cook, waiter,
>restaurant manager, bartender, house painter, plastic molding factory, porno
>movie projectionist, file clerk. And I have found the workplace politics of
>the university no worse than the workplace politics of any of these other
>places of employment.
>
>jd
>
>On 3/1/07, andrew burke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>The ivory tower has its pitfalls too, as you know Doug ... I worked in
>>factories, on a truck, in radio then advertising, theatre, then academia.
>>And the backroom of the uni was more bitchy than any ballet company! I
>>have
>>a wonderful collection of knives which I have retrieved from my back over
>>the years. (Poetry? Tangentially ... 'How Poets Make A Living')
>>
>>On 02/03/07, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> >
>> > and i haven't felt anything like an order coming from anyone. and even
>> > the vampire thread got to poetry eventually. as to Chris Jones's last
>> > post, i confess i found it odd, funny, & way outside my experience, so
>> > read it but couldnt comment (& i wonder if that wasn't the case for a
>> > lot of others here). i can read it as a bit of satire, or political
>> > comment of sorts, & definitely another reason i'm glad i hid out in the
>> > ivory tower....
>> >
>> > Doug
>> > On 28-Feb-07, at 2:00 PM, Joseph Duemer wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > Andrew
>> > http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
>
>
>
>--
>Joseph Duemer
>Professor of Humanities
>Clarkson University
>[sharpsand.net]