Becoming a professor is complicated by a lack of clear guidelines for promotion to permanent status and, paradoxically, a surplus of mechanisms for institutional transparency. Drawing on Lilith Mahmud’s anthropologies of discretion applied to secret societies like the Italian Freemasons, this paper compares becoming a professor to an initiate’s journey toward becoming a member of a secret society. Membership in both requires a balance between knowing who to know and knowing the codes of what goes said and unsaid. These ways of knowing may manifest in mentor/mentee relations, in informal networks and communities of practice, or in acts of compliance and resistance to the neoliberal university.

由于缺乏明确的晋升为永久地位的指导方针，以及自相矛盾的机构透明度机制过剩，成为教授变得复杂。借鉴 Lilith Mahmud 对秘密社团（如意大利共济会）的审慎人类学，本文将成为一名教授与一个新人成为秘密社团成员的旅程进行了比较。两者的成员资格都需要在知道谁知道和知道说什么和不说什么之间取得平衡。这些认识方式可能体现在导师/学员关系、非正式网络和实践社区中，或者体现在对新自由主义大学的顺从和抵制行为中。