Some people say there is an external, objective reality, an ultimate, verifiable truth that exists independently of any individual and is true for everyone. Others claim the only reality is highly individual and is constructed by each person based on sensory inputs, language and so-called cognitive filters everyone uses to make sense of everything beyond the skin. And then there are those persons who use the phrase, “the real world,” who probably have yet to think about the implications of their rhetoric.

I haven’t always been a college professor. I’ve had jobs as a millwright, a mechanic, a petrochemical research laboratory technician, a shoe salesman and a motorcycle courier—among many others. I spent a couple of decades as a blue-collar man and still wield a pickup truck, a chainsaw and a six-pound sledge with the best of them. I know something about the world of work beyond the halls of academe. In other words, I have street cred.

My ivory tower cred wasn’t any easier to attain. I slept four hours a night during the five quarters it took me to finish my bachelor’s degree in my mid-30s. My two advanced degrees come from a rigorous major Research 1 university. As a college professor, I work six to seven days a week and am on campus past business hours, on average, two nights a week.

I’m not unusual at this university. Many of my colleagues have work experience other than academe and put in long hours here.

What we professors don’t have is respect, at least not widespread respect. We are undermined by legislators who use us for political purposes by depicting us as under-worked and overpaid. We are devalued by a university system that is not particularly worried that faculty at UW-Platteville, and most of the other System four-year comprehensives, are paid considerably less than faculty at comparable state universities.

We are discounted by the rhetoric of our own university: It promotes our academic programs as preparing our students for real-world experience, as if somehow the world of classrooms is not real. By extension, those of us who work here are not operating in the real world, the work students do here is not real, and therefore nothing done here is of any consequence.

If students develop poor habits in the academic world, they carry them over to the next one—the world of work—and become listless drones, the kind of people you hate to encounter when you have an idea or a problem that doesn’t fit into a tidy little box. If students develop good habits here, they go into the world of work imbued with enthusiasm and creativity, ready to tackle challenges and eager to progress. We, as faculty, are observing and guiding the first stages of a continuum, a stage that can be crucial in affecting students’ levels of professional achievement for the next 40 years or so. During this stage, students—young adults—operate as professionals: among other things, they enter into contracts, pay bills, face deadlines, accept consequences, and are evaluated on a regular basis, all as part of their work here.

Higher education is real. What we all do here matters tremendously. Let’s embrace that fact and act accordingly. A good first step would be to realize the power of words by valuing – not discounting – what we do here in academe. Let’s not delude ourselves by pretending we’re not in the real world.

Arthur Ranney is the faculty adviser of the Exponent.