There is a certain pride that lives in the heart of academics — not the loud, applause-seeking type, but the quiet, centuries-old kind that has travelled with human civilization like an old caravan of ideas. It is the same pride that once made a sage sit under a peepal tree, a scholar walk miles to a dusty library, a mathematician scribble equations by lamplight, and a teacher wait patiently for that one student who suddenly “gets it” after weeks of confusion.

This pride is ancient — older than campuses, older than classrooms, older even than the idea of a “job.” Before kings built palaces, they built schools. Before armies marched, they consulted teachers. Before science had labs, it had gurus, monasteries, madrasas, pathshalas, scribes, libraries, and wandering scholars carrying entire worlds in their heads.

So when a modern professor walks into a room with flickering tube lights and half-working projectors, they may look ordinary — but they carry a 4,000-year-old torch in their pocket.

And that torch is The Pride. It shows up in many flavors.

Faculty Pride

It’s not about status. It’s about the sacred thrill of knowing something deeply — literature that shaped revolutions, physics that rearranges the universe, a theorem that refuses to die. Every good teacher secretly believes they are part of humanity’s backstage crew — the ones who make the stars shine without ever stepping into the limelight. And when a student returns after ten years to say, “Ma’am, your class changed me,” that’s not feedback — that’s immortality.

Institutional Pride

Every campus, whether leafy or concrete, carries a mythology. The alumni stories, the old photographs, the legendary batches, the professors who were half-genius and half-mad, the laboratories that produced ideas before they produced results — all of it becomes part of an unspoken anthem.

A college isn’t just a place. It’s a time machine filled with ghosts of excellence and echoes of potential.

Ecosystem Pride

Rankings, grants, admissions, research output — these are not just metrics. They are the new-age badges in the 4000-year march of knowledge. And yes, academics display them with pride — not because they want to flex, but because they want the world to know: “Learning still matters. Thinking still matters. Inquiry still matters.”

This pride is also their armour. It protects them from low salaries, endless paperwork, half-baked reforms, and meetings that could have been emails but never are.

And here is the deepest truth:

Academics may fight, complain, criticize, and over-analyse everything… but if you look closely, you will see that they all share one secret belief: “Without us, society loses its memory, its direction, and its compass.”

And they’re right. The Pride is not arrogance — it’s responsibility. It’s the knowledge that civilizations rise and fall on the shoulders of those who teach.

The Pride is about the last 4000 years — the quiet, persistent, stubborn, beautiful history of human learning that continues through every teacher, every campus, every semester. And that, is why academics will smile, chuckle, straighten their spine, and whisper to themselves:

“Yes… this is who we’ve always been.”