The academic world has its robes in a bunch because critics of President Obama are increasingly calling him “Professor,” and not as a compliment. Various blogs and academic websites are attributing this to the anti-intellectualism of the Right, the populist dislike of academic elites, contempt for higher education, and other motives that confirm the author’s own biases.

Silly me: I naively assumed that they called Obama “Professor” because he was one, and also because his demeanor, speaking style and fondness for lecturing are professorial.

Most presidents acquire an image that is used by the media, pundits, cartoonists and others to sum up his background and style, often critically but not always. Eisenhower was “the General,” Truman “the Common Man,” Nixon was “the Crook,” JFK was “the Ivy Leaguer,” LBJ was “the Wheeler-Dealer,” Ford was “The Bumbler,” Carter was “The Peanut Farmer,” Reagan was “the Actor.” I think “The Professor” is one of the more complimentary ones; it sure beats George Bush’s handle as “the Idiot.” But no: Professor Charles Ogletree of Harvard knows better: referring to President Obama as a professor is racist.

Ogletree is the founding and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. He claims the “professor” label is an attack on Obama’s race, the equivilent of  labeling him “uppity.”

“The idea is that he’s not one of us,” Ogletree explains in his professorial way. “He has these ideas that are left wing, that are socialist, that he’s palling around with terrorists — those were buzzwords, but the reality was they were looking at this president as an African American who was out of place.”

Ogletree’s logic is impenetrable. If anyone thought Barack Obama was an everyman, they were not paying attention. Very, very few U.S. Presidents have been seen as “one of us”: people become presidents, indeed people become leaders precisely because they are different from us. Presidents are, as a group, a pretty strange bunch. Concluding that there is something different about a president, his skills, his background and his view of the world does not mean and has never meant that he “doesn’t belong.”

But attributing every critique or characterization of President Obama as veiled racism is despicably unfair, dishonest and disrespectful to his critics. It is also unfair to President Obama, who has earned the right to be ridiculed, lampooned, insulted and criticized like his predecessors without having to be guarded by race-baiting defenders who believe he can do no wrong, and that any attack must be malicious and based on bigotry.