John Pezzuto wanted to change his physical appearance forever, but only in a way he and those extremely close to him could appreciate.
He wanted a tattoo of a tiger on his rear, though he used more colorful language to describe the location.
“Why? Well I don’t know why,” he told The Chronicle. “It is a unique concept. It is something that will not be common. It seems to make sense for some type of subliminal reason. But I still don’t know why.”
And as an academic in his 50s, he had reasons to pause. When considering his tattoo more than a decade ago, he asked: Were professors really the type to get tattoos, or was that the dominion of bikers, sailors, or members of the military?
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John Pezzuto wanted to change his physical appearance forever, but only in a way he and those extremely close to him could appreciate.
He wanted a tattoo of a tiger on his rear, though he used more colorful language to describe the location.
“Why? Well I don’t know why,” he told The Chronicle. “It is a unique concept. It is something that will not be common. It seems to make sense for some type of subliminal reason. But I still don’t know why.”
And as an academic in his 50s, he had reasons to pause. When considering his tattoo more than a decade ago, he asked: Were professors really the type to get tattoos, or was that the dominion of bikers, sailors, or members of the military?
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Would it telegraph to some that his mental health was faltering?
Or, he worried, would it suggest that he was having an affair?
Like any good academic, Mr. Pezzuto decided to do more research. And after plenty of soul-searching, which included consultations with friends, his wife, a tattooed diner waitress, and, finally, the tattoo artist, he got the tattoo, albeit with some compromise.
Rather than on his rear, the tattoo was placed on his hip, and it included his wife’s name — at her direction.
His attitude toward ink, as the carrier of some himself, has also changed. No longer are tattoos the domain of the criminal or militant, but rather he describes them as “living pieces of art.”
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“I never did get another tattoo, but I did acquire an entirely new passion and appreciation for the art,” he said.
Mr. Pezzuto, now the dean of the Arnold & Marie Schwartz College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at Long Island University, may be a bellwether of the shifting attitudes within academe regarding professors who chose to adorn their bodies with ink. Their stories suggest a work environment that may be growing more tolerant of diversity in a variety of forms, ink included.
‘The Tattooed Prof’
If you had to pick a poster boy for the donning of tattoos in academe, one of the first names on your list would probably be Kevin Gannon, a professor of history at Grand View University, in Iowa. Online he goes by the moniker the Tattooed Professor.
Mr. Gannon started what he calls his custom paint job early, in 1991, when he was an undergraduate, and he has colored more of his canvas in the intervening years. He even got tattoos across his knuckles to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his dissertation defense. They spell out in Greek letters “Istoriko,” a word for historian. Some may have raised their eyebrows — Mr. Gannon described those folks as the old guard — but he said of his body work, “I don’t think people in my department looked at me as though ‘He is not a serious academic’ even though I had an affect very much that I wasn’t.”
More than anything, I didn’t want it to be a distraction.
When he was interviewing for his position at Grand View University, he made sure to hide his paint job.
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“More than anything, I didn’t want it to be a distraction,” Mr. Gannon said. “You know, because people would remember, Oh I don’t remember what he talked about in his teaching demo, but man he had big tattoos.”
Students on the campus refer to him as the tattooed professor, and people at conferences also recognize him as such. “It’s been a really cool way to connect with people and be a part of conversations that wouldn’t have been possible before,” Mr. Gannon said.
Mr. Gannon said his support of body art comes with a caveat. As a white man, he said, he probably gets some benefit of the doubt about his appearance that a woman or a person of color might not.
And students do ask him about tattoos, where to find an artist and whether getting them is a smart idea. It’s about context, he said. Sure, he has seen an increase in the number of people with tattoos, and even large pieces are in vogue. Tattoo art, he said, can be akin to a person who dresses interestingly. Still, some people may view it negatively, and students should be prepared for that.
“The big thing is, you don’t want to hide who you are,” Mr. Gannon said. “But if you are in a situation where you’re an academic on a job interview, for example, you don’t want to distract someone from your credentials and the substance of your interview. It wouldn’t be your fault they’re distracted, but by the same token it’s still something to consider.”
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Less Trepidation
Many people contacted by The Chronicle mentioned that they noticed more people with tattoos than in the past. A 2016 survey found that about three in 10 Americans have at least one tattoo, up from two in 10 adults in 2012.
Some interviewed by The Chronicle say they feel the need to cover their tattoos during important meetings, and others said they wear their tattoos uncovered. Others keep a long-sleeve shirt or a coat handy should they want to cover up.
Monica Miller told The Chronicle in 2012 of her ink, “I have certainly felt like an outcast in academic circles because of it.” That was when she was a visiting assistant professor at Lewis & Clark College.
Now Ms. Miller is an associate professor of Africana studies and religion at Lehigh University, and she said she doesn’t feel the same trepidation anymore.
It could be, she said, that years after earning her doctorate and becoming a professor, she has become desensitized to the responses. “I can tell when new colleagues are sort of taken back or they’re sort of shocked that this professor has tattoos,” Ms. Miller said. “But because I am also a black woman, because I look younger than I am, I don’t necessarily know what intersecting aspects of those intersectional identities they’re reading, or if it’s a taken-together thing. So it’s always an interesting thing.”
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Regardless, she said she personally hadn’t been held back because of her ink, though that doesn’t mean people don’t react to it. (She is also the director of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Lehigh.)
The population that does have the most questions, however, are the students.
They often want to know what the designs mean, or how many she has. These are topics Ms. Miller said she always shuts down, but she said the students aren’t scandalized — they’re telegraphing curiosity.
“They’re not shocked by the tattoos in the way an academy might have been 20 years ago,” she said. “They are interested in the meaning behind symbols and signs they might be thinking they’re seeing on your body.”
‘To Delight and Remember’
Jennie Lightweis-Goff, an instructor with the English department at the University of Mississippi, had some more reservations about tattoos in academe. She first told The Chronicle about her tattoos in 2010 as a part of a series on inked academics. At that time she had four, but now she has 11.
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Her journey in academe in the past decades has included stops in New York, Florida, and North Carolina, and she said the ink can serve as “reminders of things that are permanent in the midst of transformation.”
The designs on her body include replications of loved ones’ handwriting and an image designed by the artist Kara Walker.
Yet she said she feels a resistance to tattoos within the academy. They can be seen, she said, as the sign of someone who is undisciplined, or at least that can be the case for women.
Academics are a disciplined bunch, Ms. Lightweis-Goff said. In the departments where she has worked, someone is usually testing their fortitude by committing to a paleo diet or the highly restrictive Whole30. Or someone is off to a physically demanding workout like CrossFit or yoga.
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But some may be blind to the type of mental fortitude required to get one tattoo, not to mention several. “If you use your body to delight and remember,” Ms. Lightweis-Goff said, “which I think tattoos are for, if you’re using your body to build a whole history of pleasure and grief on your body, on your skin, that may seem to people undisciplined, especially if your work is supposed to be intellectual.”
That sentiment could affect hiring. Ms. Lightweis-Goff said one of the challenges in academe, particularly for those on the nontenure track, is that their successes and failures can be in the hands of other people.
And she added that top academics don’t carry ink.
“If all of a sudden Judith Butler showed up to a lecture with a neck tattoo that read ‘Bodies that matter,’ academics would be on board for that,” Ms. Lightweis-Goff said. “But it’s a very status-bound profession, and the most visible people in the profession don’t have them.”
Chris Quintana was a breaking-news reporter for The Chronicle. He graduated from the University of New Mexico with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing.