Thursday, August 12, 2010

Chili pepper professors

The hard life of professors who are too hot for academia.

Here's a taster, but the whole thing is great:
Lemondrop, an online site for women that calls itself "sweet, tasty, and tart," put together its list of the best-looking male professors last year based on nominations from female students. Another professor who appeared on the list refused to be quoted by name. "One's first reaction is of egotistical pleasure," he wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle, "and then of course disappointment that this is not about your stellar research and that in fact on a scale of hotness academics aren't all that hot, relatively speaking, and to make a list of hot ones is thus, relatively laughable."
To illustrate the (very) low standards of hotness in academia, back in his graduate student teaching days, ECONJEFF himself (who was thinner back then) had a student repeatedly ask him over to her apartment, first for lunch and then for dinner. All invitations were respectfully declined but, obviously, not forgotten for the ego boost they provided.

Via the Freakonomics blog

1 comment:

Jess said...

Forbes.com uses data from RateMyProfessor.com in their recently released rankings of colleges. (See here: http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/01/best-colleges-methodology-opinions-colleges-10-ccap.html ) They actually assign equal rate to "student satisfaction" based on RateMyProfessor.com and to graduation rates or student debt. Their methodology doesn't make it clear whether they give bonus points for chili peppers, though.