The door decorations of North American professors
James M. Lang has a droll dissection of why professors decorate their office doors the way they do in the Chronicle of Higher Education. My personal favorite: A theologian who wears a pious and serious demeanor around campus, but who will occasionally allow colleagues glimpses of a wicked sense of humor, features just two items ...
James M. Lang has a droll dissection of why professors decorate their office doors the way they do in the Chronicle of Higher Education. My personal favorite:
James M. Lang has a droll dissection of why professors decorate their office doors the way they do in the Chronicle of Higher Education. My personal favorite:
A theologian who wears a pious and serious demeanor around campus, but who will occasionally allow colleagues glimpses of a wicked sense of humor, features just two items on his door: a postcard memorializing the martyrs of his religious order, and a cartoon in which a man is ordering dinner for himself and his dining companion, a large fly, in a French restaurant. After he places an elaborate order of gourmet cuisine for himself, the man in the cartoon finishes with: “and bring some shit for my fly.”
Alas, the only mention of my discipline is not exactly a favorable one:
Some professors, for example, clearly use their doors to send messages to their colleagues or to the administration about their productivity. Witness, in this vein, the political scientist whose three postings all concern events at which he served as one of the keynote speakers.
[What about your door?–ed. Compared with most of my colleagues, I have a relatively flamboyant office door. Three Onion headlines (my favorite: “Intensive Five-Year Study Finds Five Years a Long-Ass Time“), two drawings by Sam, two New Yorker cartoons, and one Weekly World News headline. My favorite door hangings, however, are culled from Vivian Scott Hixson’s He Looks Too Happy to Be an Assistant Professor, a must-have collection of cartoons for academics. Front and slightly off-center on my door is a cartoon showing one graduate student whacking another with his briefcase, while two students comment on this in the foreground. The caption reads, “None of that wishy-washy relativism in this seminar!”]
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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