Everyone remembers the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where
Indiana Jones, with his iconic Fedora and bullwhip, narrowly
escapes from a Peruvian temple with a stolen golden idol,
avoiding the path of a rolling boulder and a band of arrow-
wielding Hovitos tribesmen. In the next scene, we see Dr. Jones
home again, teaching an archaeology class at “Marshall College.”
He stands before the class in a bowtie and glasses (which,
oddly, he doesn’t seem to need for the rest of the film). Just
as the first scene represents a popular image of “the
adventurer,” the second scene plays into what sociologists Mari
Dagaz and Brent Harger say is a common perception of what a
college professor “should look like.” Dagaz of Depauw University
(Ind.) and Harger of Albright College (Pa.) published a paper
called “Race, Gender, and Research: Implication for Teaching
from Depictions of Professors in Popular Films 1985-2005” in the
journal Teaching Sociology. “When students enter college for the
first time, they inevitably have prec