Q&A: Between a Professor and a Researcher
Between a Professor and a Researcher
Question
You once said (and quite rightly) that there is a difference between being a professor of something and being someone who actually engages in that thing itself—for example, between a professor of philosophy and a philosopher. And you also said that in the humanities it is hard to point to that difference, but it still can be done.
What about medicine? It seems to me that medicine is the only field where that difference does not exist. 99.9% of the professors in a medical faculty are themselves doctors. Do you know the reason why in medicine the professors are themselves doctors, unlike in other fields?
Answer
It really is not the only one. I think most fields are like that. The same is true in engineering, and also in law and in the natural sciences generally. A lecturer in physics is a physicist, and a lecturer in mathematics is a mathematician.
Even in the humanities the difference is very clear. There is a difference between a poet and a scholar of poetry, and between a writer and a scholar of literature. In philosophy it is more blurred, but it exists there too. The same is true in the study of Jewish law and the Talmud (the difference between an academic researcher and a traditional learner).
Admittedly, in the natural sciences there is a different discipline of applications there (science versus technology), and there is a gap between a lecturer in engineering and a lecturer in physics. But both deal with the thing itself. When we are talking about the study of human activity, there is a difference between the person who does the activity and the person who studies it.
Discussion on Answer
I wasn’t distinguishing here between a lecturer and a researcher, but between different fields. I don’t know how to define a general line, but in many areas of the humanities (philosophy, poetics, Talmud) there is a difference, and there is a tendency not to notice it.
I do see a difference (between the professor who researches the field and the person who actually practices the field itself) also in mathematics or physics. A professor of physics only explains what is already known, whereas a physicist not only deals with what is already known but creates (or tries to create) new insights in physics.
Unlike medicine, where the professors, in addition to what they explain to students and what is already known to them, are themselves doctors who heal new people every day; therefore a professor of medicine is usually also a doctor.
What do you think of this nuance?
Obviously there is a difference between a lecturer and a researcher. One teaches something already known, and the researcher adds information. Is that the definition of these fields? What is there to discuss here? There is no difference between them regarding their relation to the person who actually practices the field itself.
In medicine there are lecturers who are doctors, and some who are not. Those who teach how to do something practical are, naturally, people who work in that field. That is true in every field.
I don’t understand where this discussion is going.
I don’t understand either. I got confused; I’ll try to sort it out in my head. Thank you.
Those who study philosophy are really fit to be called historians of philosophy.
They know how to say what philosopher X said in the past about topic Y. And that is the only thing they acquired in their philosophy studies.
If there were a requirement for those who study philosophy to also be philosophers (that is, to love wisdom, and not just philosophy), then the faculties would be almost empty.
I’m confused. So to sum up: a lecturer (= someone who teaches) in X engages in X itself, while a researcher of X does not engage in X itself, and it doesn’t matter what X is—except for the humanities, social sciences, and philosophy, where the lecturer = the researcher and yet does not engage in philosophy itself?