A study investigated the apparent inconsistency of meaning connected with the term "professor," using the problematic aspect of the term as a way of examining tacit features of a particular speech community. The "social drama" that served as a catalyst for the study centers around the presence of the national "Accuracy in Academia" organization, brought to the campus of the University of Washington by staff members of a self-described conservative campus journal that implemented a campaign to monitor professors suspected of spreading liberal, leftist, or Marxist views in the classroom. Over the course of an eight-month period 65 different occurrences of talk relating to the social drama were collected, and from these data, 215 statements relating to the term "professor" were recorded. Based on ethnographic interpretive analysis of text, two distinct cultural conceptions of "professor" emerged--liberal and conservative. The liberal group within the speech community defined a "professor" as a person who treats students as critical thinkers, thereby eliminating the need for balance in the classroom, while the conservative group defines him/her primarily as one who respects student beliefs while exposing students to different viewpoints. An exploration of these two conceptions revealed that the conservative culture can be identified as a traditional society by virtue of its veneration of an episodic sequence (way of doing things in the classroom), adherence to which determines the quality of a "professor," and by its reiteration of the status quo. The liberal culture group displays several attributes of classic (rather than modern American) conservative thought--for example, the rights of the individual and the legitimacy of opinion for presentation by the professor in the classroom. References are included and appendixes contain a comprehensive inventory of data citations.) (NKA)