BY WILLIAM MATTHEW MCCARTER

For more than fifty years, I’ve been learning. For more than twenty years, I’ve been teaching. If at this stage I can’t profess something worth hearing, then I ought to quit and sell insurance. Students don’t pay for PowerPoints or rubrics. They pay for professors who profess.

The word itself comes from profitēri—to declare openly, to vow, to stake your life on a claim. Socrates professed that the unexamined life isn’t worth living; Athens sentenced him to death by poison for impiety and corruption of the young. Copernicus professed heliocentrism; the Catholic Church might have burned him alive if he had not died of natural causes. Professing was once hazardous. Today, my “hazard” is turning in attendance sheets on time. That’s our hemlock. The School of Athens has been reduced to Outlook reminders; Blackboard modules; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) workshops; and assessment audits. Professors have been turned into clerks.

The sages of old stood at podiums and declared the world. Now we “facilitate learning outcomes.” Pedagogical advocate Ken Bain mapped the shift from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side.” Biologist Scott Freeman showed that active learning improves outcomes. Fine. But in celebrating facilitation, we hollowed out the act of professing. Students now graduate without ever hearing a professor say, with conviction, This is how the world is, and here is why.

On the Right, gag orders like Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” and book bans muzzle speech. Professors are surveilled like criminals. In Texas, tenure is under siege. On the Left, the mob polices language with hashtags and purity tests. One clumsy sentence and you’re a trending target. Entire careers evaporate in the time it takes TikTok to refresh. Neutrality in this climate is not pedagogy—it is camouflage. The Right legislates silence. The Left scripts it. Both kill professing.

The modern university is run by risk-averse bureaucrats. Diversity bureaucracies metastasize into compliance regimes that produce slogans instead of scholarship. Robin DiAngelo built her career in the diversity industrial complex shaming corporations about “whiteness” and “white fragility.” At the same time, working-class adjuncts scrape by on poverty wages. Nikole Hannah-Jones began the 1619 Project as a way to “reframe” history. She isn’t a historian (she’s a journalist), and her edited collection The 1619 Project is not really a history book (but it plays one on TV). Meanwhile, conservatives churn out “classical academies” that sell reheated Cicero with a MAGA garnish. Bill O’Reilly, Brian Kilmeade, and Ben Shapiro move books by the millions while most scholars can’t get fifty people to read their work. These men are not braver or smarter—they’re just louder. Professors abandoned the public square, and these charlatans took it.

Who narrates the culture now? Bill Nye the Science Guy, a TV personality. Dr. Phil, an Oprah-anointed pop psychologist. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, liberal court jesters mistaken for sages. Morgan Freeman narrates Black history instead of Henry Louis Gates Jr. or Cornel West because his voice is smoother. Sean Hannity plays a philosopher on Fox. John Oliver reduces politics to punchlines for people who think satire equals citizenship. The Right props up demagogues. The Left props up comedians. Meanwhile, real professors are buried under peer-review paywalls.

To profess is not to pontificate or dictate. Professing is public accountability. Professing is clarity. Professing is risk. Professing is honesty about commitments. Professing is the refusal to hide behind fake neutrality while the world is burning down around us. Professing means standing in front of students and saying, Here is my truth, grounded in evidence, open to contestation. Now fight me if you disagree. Professing means standing in the public square and saying what the cowards won’t: The emperor has no clothes, whether the emperor wears a MAGA hat or a DEI lapel pin.

To profess in the twenty-first century, we must reclaim the podium. Professing and facilitation can coexist. Explanation is not oppression. We must also defend academic freedom against both sides. We must resist the Right’s gag orders and the Left’s thought police. We must expose our commitments. Neutrality is a lie. Declare your worldview, let students sharpen their knives, and let the sparks fly. Most of all, we must reenter the public square. If Bill O’Reilly and Robin DiAngelo can sell snake oil by the pallet, professors can damn well bring truth to blogs, podcasts, op-eds, YouTube, and TikTok. To profess is to gamble your reputation on clarity.

Academia will say this is a step backward. That professing is authoritarian. That students want “learning facilitators” not “intellectual authorities.” That the safest classroom is the quietest one. But safety is a coffin. Silence is death. The only way forward is loud, unapologetic, evidence-driven professing. Professors must stop being middle managers and start being what the word promises. Not PowerPoint jockeys. Not rubric clerks. Not frightened caretakers of the institutional brand. We must profess. Or the carnival barkers will do it for us.

So let’s get to professing.

William Matthew McCarter is a professor of English at Southwestern Illinois College.