ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an account of the author's freelance life as well his thoughts on curiosity and professionalization. Professionalization is deeply at odds with curiosity. In his experience, professionalization has been a polite way to refer to a process that systematically expunges curiosity and other similarly problematic traits from a person's scholarship, teaching, and eventually character. Professionalization can stifle one personally by restricting what one can say because honest expression is too risky. On a collective level, professionalization is also dangerous because an overly professionalized field or industry often will exclude other voices to protect its identity and integrity. At their worst, professionalized fields are rife with credentialed automata who may not have a single original thought in their heads. As professionals, however, they have developed something far more valuable: a knack for gymnastics, especially that curious pastime, so popular in academe, of jumping through hoops.
