First of all, do you feel much better about yourself by belittling me? Does it make you feel wise and superior? Does being insulting seem like the best way to fight ignorance, the best way to understand and discuss various points of view? Because none of those things strike me as a good way to demonstrate your obvious superior intellect.
May I also ask you if you ever heard of a visiting professor having another source of income? Does it seem possible in your very astute view that someone in that position might also pursue other opportunities? Because I know mid level supervisors who hold patents and have lucrative businesses selling their inventions online. In addition I have a relative who owns a multi-million dollar manufacturing business who not only teaches engineering some years at American universities, but has taught at university in Germany. Of course most people who know him don’t think of him as a visiting professor, they think of him as ‘Gary’ (not his real name), the sole owner of the factory (largest employer in the area and has never had an employee quit!) near the county line - - but I bet some of his students think of him as a part time professor.
Further, I feel compelled to ask you if you think there is ever any valuable lesson to be learned from stories that are fictional? Is there any value in keeping Greek fables alive? Stories constructed to teach a moral must be beneath you. And why would anyone read Charles Dickens or Jonathan Swift, or the Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder as all of their books are not actually factually true? Why read Melville or John Irving if there are no lessons to be learned unless every fact of a story is solidly and factually true?
It does not matter to me if the story actually happened or not. There is a lesson to be learned from someone who hears or sees a lesson that might actually have some basis in truth but does not fit his life experience. There are black women professors who make more than janitors, and some black women professors do write books and teach classes on white privilege. The amount of income disparity does not greatly affect the impact of the story even if it does not meet your veracity meter. Treating it like an urban legend or a morality tale allows us look at the thoughts, feelings, and possibly the fears of the players just as much as if it was a well documented factual case.
The irony is clear, a white man supposedly advantaged by birth is serving a black woman who is supposedly disadvantaged by birth and he cannot fathom the lesson that her success took great effort and his situation is the result of bad luck or lack of effort, or possibly both. It requires the studious to ask if he had a preexisting bias that say whites are superior to blacks — or that men are superior to women that kept him from learning the lesson. Most people who would qualify for admittance to college before circumstances caused them to be blinded (yet somehow hold a job that required use of tools – that is more to be questioned than the income of the professor in my view) could grasp that something that is generally true might not be true in each and every case. The point is that world view can very strongly influence thought processes and fears.
Now, all of that said it is the middle of the night here after a particularly unpleasant holiday after a particularly bad week. I should be asleep preparing for another week but I am instead responding to an insult on a message board- so I will kindly ask you to either make a polite apology to both me and the poster of the story, or attack me with something more than you just happen to disagree. See, I thought that kind of pay for a visiting professor was out of line too-- but before I called anyone a lair I took a moment to think about it and it was not hard to see a possibility where the story might be true through other means. I believe you might have a hard time proving there was never ever in the history of our country a white janitor who . . . . but if the best evidence you have that the story never happened is your own opinion then I suggest you take a less condescending tone with me. I have zero interest in having a flame war with you in the pit, but I also have little interest in being insulted for concocting a possible solution to a theoretical and insignificant situation.
See, Czarcasm was able to grasp the lesson within the story without debating its veracity or insulting anyone. May I recommend this as a model post for future reference?