Abstract

This study identifies the images of professors as revealed in 183 articles of ten issues of the Modern Language Association’s (MLA’s) annual journal Profession from 1997-2006. Images are the result of the creative process of “generating new relations through time and space that become constituitive of self” (Wenger 148). These images include the professor’s place in the academic community as well as the community’s place in the individual’s life. The humanities, specifically, and academia, in general, are undergoing a revision in how the intellectual operates. Some call this switch corporatization; others call it the end of the priestly class or the fall of the ivory tower. This interpretative content analysis examines the cultural schema of the professors who wrote these essays and reveals the common images of the intellectual in the humanities that underlie their essays. Only by first systematically revealing how we see ourselves can the humanities address its future.