Professors are often more enthralled by classroom power than by enlightenment

Evidence

Even those professors who embrace the tenets of critical pedagogy (many of whom are white and male) still conduct their classrooms in a manner that only reinforces bourgeois models of decorum. At the same time, the subject matter taught in such classes might reflect professorial awareness of intellectual perspectives that critique domination, that emphasize an understanding of the politics of difference, of race, class, gender, even though classroom dynamics remain conventional, business as usual. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 358 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Hence, like the view of the child, the concept of discipline has itself changed. Two aspects of this change are particularly important. First, the once highly personalized authority of the teacher has become a part of the bureaucratic structure of the modern school. Unlike the teachers in the chaotic early nineteenth-century district schools, modern teachers exercise less personal power and rely more heavily on regulations promulgated by higher authorities. Although frequently prey to arbitrary intervention by parents and other community members, the nineteenth-century teacher was the boss of the classroom. The modern teacher is in a more ambiguous position. The very rules and regulations which add a patina of social authority to his or her commands at the same time rigidly circumscribe the teacher’s freedom of action. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 491 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A professor’s embodied habits can undercut their stated critical politics — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 264; Students collude in a professor’s self-destruction to protect his authority — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 316; Higher education reinforces obedience to authority rather than independent thought. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 17 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Professors can teach radical content while enforcing bourgeois classroom decorum #exemplifies (0.90) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 358
• Professors can espouse liberatory theory while practicing domination in class #exemplifies (0.88)
• Modern teachers exchange personalized classroom power for bureaucratic rule-bound authority #qualifies (0.78) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 491