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"Fool" Professor

This page used to list me as "Fool Professor." This was because of an unfortunate situation that arose a couple of years after I arrived at UCI...

In the US system, there are three "ranks" of regular faculty -- assistant professors, associate professors, and full professors. For convenience, they are often just referred to as "assistants," "associates," and "fulls."

However, people speaking with a Scottish accent, as I do, make no phonetic distinction between the vowel sounds in, say, the words "pull" and "pool"... or "full" and "fool." This never really mattered much, and I'd never noticed, but came up in a faculty discussion one day, when someone noted that I seemed to be referring to my senior colleagues, collectively, as "fools." Embarrassed, I tried for a while to pronounce the words differently. It's proven too hard to sustain, though, and I have fallen back on my bad old ways.

Since then I've been promoted -- so now I'm a fool professor too. Perhaps the next rank after "fool professor" should be "damn fool professor."

I've stopped formally listing myself that way, though, because it turned out to cause too much confusion amongst those less familiar with the US academic system, or with my sense of humour.