professoriate

English

Alternative forms

• professorate
• professoriat

Noun

professoriate (plural professoriates)

1. Professors considered as a group or body.
   • 1850, “Report of the Adjourned Debate in the House of Commons on the English Universities”, in The North British Review‎^[1], volume 14, page 183:

     A satirical work, published in 1721, speaks of the chairs which were allowed to exist as habitually filled by persons utterly incompetent; and though we cannot tell how far to believe its details, something of the kind must be supposed to have taken place in order to account for the discredit into which the Professoriate fell, and from which it can scarcely be said to have recovered.

   • 1914, Stephen Leacock, chapter 3, in Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich‎^[2], New York: John Lane, pages 96–97:

     […] at that moment the whole professoriate was absorbed in one of those great educational crises which from time to time shake a university to its base.

   • 2012, Science, Technology & Human Values‎^[3], volume 38, pages 126–149:

     Technological Change and Professional Control in the Professoriate.

   • 2021, Noah Feldman, Kavanaugh Is the Last Hope for Abortion Rights, in: bloomberg.com, 2021-08-22

     Did these interactions, taken as a whole, reinforce Kennedy’s willingness to reach liberal outcomes in a series of high-profile cases? No less a judge of character than his colleague Scalia thought so, hinting in writing that Kennedy’s leftward bent came from a desire to please the professoriate.

2. (dated) The office of a professor.

   Synonym: professorship

   • 1899, George Francis FitzGerald, Lord Kelvin: Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, 1846-1899, Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, Biographical Sketch, p. 6,^[4]

     A generation that has been reared on the ideas involved in the conservation of energy can hardly understand the position of science when Lord Kelvin began his professoriate.