ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses some of the issues facing civilian professors teaching in a senior military school, in this case the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama. The virtual pendulum that swings back and forth between the rewards and the challenges of teaching in such a school reflects a deep divide between academic and military cultures. Like the other senior schools of professional military education, the Air War College has a mixture of civilian and military faculty members. The chapter refers to the military faculty as "the colonels" and uses the masculine pronoun because very few women serve on the faculty. These senior officers are remarkably similar, sharing many strong and weak points across service lines. The colonels as a whole have little in common with their civilian colleagues. For the Air Force, these "colonel-doctors" constitute the ideal "civilian" faculty members. While career officers, they have sufficient "academic stink" to legitimize their civilian faculty status.
