This paper synthesizes the impressions of what is known about members of the education professorate, examines the relationships between teacher educators' formative experiences and personal and professional characteristics, and attempts to answer the etiological question: who is an effective teacher educator? A body of literature on the demographic characteristics of individuals charged with preparing the nation's teachers indicates the "model" teacher educator is a 50-year-old Anglo male reared in a rural, lower to middle class family. Conformist values were upheld in the family and in the culturally homogeneous public school he attended, and he completed his doctoral program in piecemeal fashion at various institutions close to home. As a faculty member, the model teacher educator works over 50 hours a week, teaching 3 or 4 courses per term. The autonomy and freedom the job provides and the opportunity to work with students are satisfying; low salary, service activities, and the constraints of the bureaucracy, are among the least enjoyable aspects of the job. The model teacher educator considers his job to be stressful in terms of time pressures and the increased emphasis on measurable outputs. However, he is in good shape and deals successfully with the pressures and tensions of the job. This kind of data can have implications for both teacher educator selection and preparation. (Contains approximately 70 references.) (LL)