The latest insult word: Professorial!

Professorial must be the insult of the season. ... When and why did professorial become an insult or a political liability?

That is Siva Vaidhyanathan trying to make sense of the idiocy with which the media uses the word "professorial" to imply that we are not "normal" and can't connect with "normal" people. He then writes,

The presumed communicative disorder of professorial speech seems to be the root of the problem. Of course, there is no such thing as a uniform professorial style. My field of media studies is filled with dull, timid, dense lecturers. But it also has its share of stirring orators and provocative interlocutors. Some of us are math geeks. Some of us are policy geeks. Some of us are poetry geeks. Many of us are not geeks at all.

I should poll my students on whether I am a geek :-)
But, I think we have a wonderful context to think about what it means to be a professor these days. After all, as Vaidhyanathan notes, we are a diverse lot. But, there has to be something in common, right?
Well, that is the question that Stanley Katz tackled a couple of years ago. He asserted that:

we have lost something along the way. We have lost a sense of commonality as professors, the sense that we are all in this together — "this" being a dedication to undergraduate teaching and not just specialized research. We have lost a belief in the relevance of teaching undergraduates for the health of our democracy. We have lost confidence that what we do in teaching and research is inherently good, and not primarily a utilitarian occupation. We have lost the conviction that we have a calling, that as professors our duty is to profess.
We have also, manifestly, lost our sense of belonging to an ascertainable and manageable community of teacher-professors. Along the way, we have lost our commitment to the particular universities in which we work.

I think I don't have much to argue with his points. Well, except for one thing: if we think it is that highly valuable for democracy, then we--taxpayers--ought to pay for it. The current system stinks. Further, the context has changed--society and students see college education in strictly utilitarian terms, which means employment, and the health of democracy has no place in it.
Anyway, Katz further notes that

Too frequently even the most thoughtful academics are fixated on academic freedom as the crucial challenge. Academic freedom — the freedom to teach and to learn — is central. But it must follow from an acceptance of the duties of professionalism. We have such academic "rights" only if we embrace the duties of a public profession — to instruct the untrained and to create knowledge. That includes the obligation to identify the standards by which practice can be assessed and to enforce adherence to them. Seen from that perspective, professionalism is the core of democratic behavior, since it entails the acceptance of the principled provision of public services, without
which a modern democracy cannot be expected to succeed. ....

I would like us to consider whether there are not recoverable values and practices in the world that we have lost — and also new ones more appropriate to the 21st-century professoriate. Shouldn't we at least be asking Dewey's question: "But have we not come to a time when more can be achieved by taking thought together?"

Yes, now is the time to discuss these issues. Unfortunately, I can't see this happening at the university where I teach--what can be discussed is strictly defined by one group that shall not be named.