Hi, I’ve been asked by one of my profs to find out who the longest serving professor is. The criteria are:
I have been trying to find the answer to this for a couple weeks, and have had no luck.
Thank you in advance.
Thursday
Sorry, but this sounds like homework, and board policy legislates against providing answers to homework problems. It doesn’t sound like you need “luck” - I think you just need to trawl around the Internet a little longer, perhaps on College websites.
In the spirit of Dead Cat’s caution, I’ll just say that I found one who served 49 years. How far have you gotten?
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After corresponding with GKThursday, I am convinced that this is not homework, he is trying to help a professor find out the information. This is not part of any schoolwork.
Any help you can give would be appreciated. Sorry, GK.
Carry on.
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I think that your longest serving Professor in *one school *might be not indicitave of of a long serving teacher.My stepdad has been devoted to teaching his whole life, but, of course, shifted schools, especially in the 70’s. Last year, at the age of 73, he was finally forced to retire, and two weeks later, led a contingent of students to China. He really will just drop dead while teaching, is a good teacher, and will always do that. (I was a very lucky benificiary of that)
In this light, I think it very odd that your profs are requesting long term profs at one school, when the basic MO for profs in the 70’s 80’s was in a very shifting mode, and quite competative. Now, it’s even more so., with ability to move between schools. Ask him about that factor.
There’s probably quite a few immediately post WWII profs around who haven’t moved; such as Henry Lardy:
He still had a lab as of last year.
OK, I found a 56-years in one place prof:
Theodore Benac, Math Prof at the U.S. Naval Academy
I don’t have the book handy to provide the name and details, but one of Stephen Jay Gould’s essays was on a gentleman in the geology department at McGill U., in Montreal, who was on Percy Raymond’s 1930 study of the Burgess Shale and who continued to teach, on a limited basis, in the 1990s, when Gould was invited to a special lecture he gave on the subject. He sounds like a worthwhile candidate to get the particulars on.
Professor John Mixon has been teaching law at the University of Houston since 1955 and he’s still going.
As an aside, what is it about this question that made people think “homework” other than the fact that the person asking is a Guest? What sort of class would have this as a homework assignment - Intro to Minutiae?
Firstly, sorry GKThursday - I knew that whatever I did would be wrong :).
Firstly, yes, the board does tend to get more homework questions from guests than Members - presumably many students see the board as an easy way to get their homework done for very little effort (clearly the OP is not in this category). It could easily be a question set to test students’ research skills, I thought.
So, does the professor still need to be working? Or can they be retired, and we just count the active (non-emeritus) years?
Does syndication count? Because [url=http://imdb.com/name/nm0426157/]Russell Johnson* would be right up there.
How far back can we go? What about Plato? Pythagoras? What exactly do you mean by ‘Professor’? (I’m aware that there’s a big difference between the UK and the US here.)
Bump–come back and refine your request! 
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien became a Professor (of the English Language) at Oxford University in 1924.
He retired in 1959.
However he was elected to Fellowships at both Exeter and Merton in 1963, and only left Oxford in 1968.