User:Professoriate

'Professoriate', the Wikipedia username, refers to me, Matt Rolph. The name refers to the racehorse, Secretariat, and to the 17th century 'Invisible College' (alluded to by Terry Pratchett in his Discworld series using the name 'Unseen University'), i.e. intends to suggest a quick, nimble, active, and all-but-invisible group of committed academics.

The truth runs contrary to the implications of the nom-de-plum in that I am just one person, rarely edit Wikipedia, and am slow to make substantive changes or contribute to ongoing debates. With few exceptions, I prefer to limit myself to minor grammar and punctuation-related edits, ideally those corrections that are not primarily a matter of style or preference and are thus unlikely to be controversial. Once in a while, I may elect to add content or to make alterations to an article to address ambiguities, misleading statements (usually those that are a result of sentence structure rather than anything more substantial), address matters of communication structure, and otherwise answer the call of the Wiki.

Additional Information:

I am 42 years old. I hold an undergraduate degree in English Literature, an M.Ed. in English Education with a concentration in the teaching of writing, both from Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire (in the United States), and am a PhD candidate in the field of Communication and Rhetoric (at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY) with more than seven years' experience teaching writing, literature, technical writing, and critical thinking at the college level (at my alma mater, Plymouth State). Though I was born in the United States and consider myself an American, I grew up in Canada and in Brazil (in the 1970s) and my family traveled extensively throughout the Americas during my childhood. I speak and read roughly thirteen languages with varying degrees of proficiency, read a book every day on average, and have a wide and growing variety of academic interests.

My family name, Rolph, along with minor variations, is common in former British colonies, in the United Kingdom, and, to an extent, in the United States, and Matthew is also a common first name; as a result, I share my name with several other people to whom I am not, to my knowledge, directly related in any other way, the most famous example being the (much younger) personal trainer who married a celebrity in 2009 after having fathered her baby in 2008. To paraphrase the late Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean", she is not my lover and I am not that one.