Over a year, we engaged in an ongoing dialogue about what it means to be a professor and how we might do a better job of making the public contributions of our work more explicit. Throughout our dialogue, we continually discussed how we, as faculty members, must always work within the institutional constraints that allow the professoriate to exist in the first place. This conceptual essay, which is anchored by a critical theoretical perspective, is poised to make a contribution to the scholarship on faculty careers, professorial understandings of the public good, as well as the practice of faculty evaluation.