The Rise of the Amateur Professor

I’ve been teaching entrepreneurship at IE for the last 11 years, but I only teach 30 hours per year. The rest of the time…. I’m an entrepreneur. This means that during most of the year I practice what I’m teaching for a few hours a year. I get the impression that amateur professors are gradually becoming a common thing in top graduate and business schools around the world, in some cases replacing full time professors. These are professors who don’t make a living off teaching, but do it because they care about sharing their knowledge.

It may be poor as statistical evidence, but at the School Of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) of Columbia University, where I studied, adjunct professors account now for 55% of the total faculty. At the Tanaka Business School of Imperial College in London, adjunct professors are around 40%, and similarly, they are a growing part of the faculty of other top business schools like Cornell University or the University of Michigan Business School.

This is great because amateur professors practice what they preach but what’s bad is that sometimes they can’t preach what they practice. With this I mean that they have directly experienced what they teach and probably know it better then anybody who didn’t, but still might know little about teaching, as it often requires a different skill-set and experience. I say this because when I started teaching it took me years to learn how to communicate what I know.