INT. DAY. A bucolic college campus; a book-strewn corner office. Two MALE PROFESSORS, HANK and SMITTY, have their feet up on their respective desks at the end of a long day. Their faces are haggard and drawn. Even their elbow patches look tired. HANK sighs.
SMITTY: “You look tired, Hank.”
HANK: “I feel tired, Smitty.”
SMITTY: “Drink?”
HANK: “Don’t mind if I do.”
SMITTY passes HANK a small brown bottle. HANK takes a contemplative sip.
HANK: “It’s getting harder and harder to awe these inexperienced female teenagers these days, Smitty.”
SMITTY: “Tell me about it, Hank.”
HANK: “Just yesterday, in one of my intro classes, I used the word ‘problematic’ in a sentence — real casual, just to let them know I’m one of the good guys — and not one of them stayed after the lecture to ask me just what I meant by that or to see if they could borrow the conspicuously dog-eared copy of Pedagogy of the Oppressed I like to leave on my desk in case any female students want to borrow it.”
SMITTY passes the bottle back to HANK.
SMITTY: “Things are bad all over.”
HANK: “You know, it’s very important to me that I be thought of as down.”
SMITTY: “Amen.”
HANK: “That copy has my phone number in it. You know, the old ‘write your phone number on the front page of a copy you lend to female students only under the “IF LOST PLEASE RETURN TO” bubble’ gag?”
SMITTY: “It’s a great gag.”
HANK passes the bottle back to SMITTY.
HANK: “It’s a damn great gag. My father used it, and his father used it — not in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, obviously. Whatever was working at the time. Leonard Abbott or someone, I guess.”
SMITTY: “Right.”
HANK: “They always come for the book. They’ve never known anyone who wears pants with a belt and reads books about oppressed pedagogues. They always come for the book and then I tell them about another book they just have to read after they finish it, and then I forgot the book in my office, and then I can start emailing them drunk on Christmas afternoon telling them about my bad back and how my wife has never read…never read…”
SMITTY: “Borges?”
HANK: “Yeah. Borges.”
SMITTY: “That’s real rough, Hank.”
HANK: “Or I wait to corner her at a faculty party and say something uncomfortable and real quiet about what she’s wearing, so nobody hears me but her, and she starts to wonder if even she heard me right.”
SMITTY: “They love that. They love that almost as much as they love their Molly drugs and their Pokemons, those female students.”
HANK: “Or I take her aside the second or third week and tell her I think she’s got real potential, real potential for greatness, then after she disagrees with me about something real minor…[laughs]…minor…I tell her I’m disappointed in her lack of open-mindedness and give her a C.”
SMITTY: “I tell mine their boyfriends don’t appreciate them.”
HANK: “I get pills for that bad back, you know.”
HANK rummages around in his drawer. SMITTY pulls an orange pill case out of his jacket pocket.
SMITTY: [shaking the case suggestively] “These pills?”
HANK: “You elaborate polefucked son of a bitch.”
SMITTY: [grinning] “You’re not the only one whose wife doesn’t read Borges.”
HANK: “Just works a full-time job with health insurance and raises my children.”
SMITTY: “Back pill, Hank?”
HANK: “Don’t mind if I do, Smitty.”
The two of them enjoy a quiet pill.
SMITTY: “The classics aren’t working like they used to, Hank.”
HANK: “You’re telling me.”
SMITTY: “I ask myself sometimes — what did I get this degree in comparative literature for, if not to intimidate and impress a bunch of young women who until very recently were still in high school?”
HANK: “S’a good question. Damn good question.”
HANK passes the bottle back to SMITTY.
SMITTY: “Because I sure as hell didn’t get it to compare a bunch of literature.”
They laugh.
SMITTY: [softly, almost to himself] “Compare a bunch of literatures at each other.”
HANK: “That’s not why I got into the business. No, sir. I got it so I could stand up in front of a group of mostly impressionable and anxious girls less than half my age and make them listen to me talk about how I proposed to my first fiancé and to deliver long, impassioned monologues about The Red Knight I memorized fourteen years ago.”
SMITTY: “I didn’t mind the work, though, Hank. As long as I could go to bed at night knowing that at least one girl who feeds herself with a school-sponsored meal plan was impressed with me. That’s all the thanks I needed. The admiration of that girl who has very little to compare me to, and also tenure.”
HANK: [solemnly] “And also tenure.”
SMITTY: “But mostly the admiration. Let’s say 70/30 admiration/tenure. As long as female adolescents with drinking problems were incredibly impressed by the sight of a grown man doing his job, that was enough for me. As long as all I had to do was remember a few passable lines of Virgil to quote offhand and watch their eyes go soft with longing, that was all I needed to keep coming back.”
HANK: “You know what the worst part about college girls is? The part of it that’s the worst part about college girls?”
SMITTY: [shaking his head] “Nope. Tell me, Hanky.”
HANK: [pointing to himself] “Me, I get older, but they stay the same a…same amount of uncomfortable with my forward and personal behavior.”
SMITTY: “Didn’t used to be that way. Nope. Used to be as long as you had a few streaks of grey at the temple and a complete set of Baudelaire and you could write your own ticket. Not nowadays. Nowadays they want to do well on your tests and receive thoughtful, qualitative feedback about their work, and that’s it. Cold, hard transactions — in and out of the classroom, without a second thought for our starving souls. Is that what we’re here for? Just to teach and then go home?”
HANK: “Not even a first thought for them, even. It’s not enough that we’ve done things like gone through an artistic phase or bought a house or remembered the decade they were born in. What do they want?”
SMITTY begins to laugh uncontrollably.
HANK: “What? What is it?”
SMITTY manages to calm himself down with an effort.
HANK: “You all right?”
SMITTY: “It’s three o’clock, isn’t it?”
HANK: “Yeah. Why?”
SMITTY: “Aren’t you supposed to be teaching a seminar right now?”
HANK begins to laugh as he realizes the same thing.
HANK: “Fuck. Yeah.”
HANK begins laughing harder and harder until even SMITTY grows curious.
SMITTY: “What?”
HANK: “You’re supposed to be in seminar, too.”
They laugh together.
SMITTY: “Maybe being late will impress them.”
HANK: “Something has to, Smitty.”
SMITTY: “Something will, Hank. Sooner or later, we’ll find something that will.”
SMITTY passes the bottle back to HANK.
FADE TO BLACK
Tags: hank and smitty, kill your male mentors, male professors, the academy, the admiration economy, the old “write your phone number on the front page of a copy you lend to female students only under the “IF LOST PLEASE RETURN TO” bubble” gag
THIS. ALL OF THIS. This is amazing.
Man, this makes me glad I went to a design college where all the male teachers were gay. I would have been a bunny in the headlights!
This is FLAWLESS.
I was so lucky to never have to watch a friend of mine fall for a douchebagel like this. In fact, I don’t know a single woman at my school who did (which isn’t to say there are none, but it was a relatively small school). I know professors who tried, but they failed.
Perhaps this is also a good place to note that I think it’s about time the literary trope of “innocent young woman falling in love with broken older male professor” can die a well-deserved death.
“Douchebagel”! Thank you for bestowing that gift upon me.
That was meeee! Yes, that was meeee. All in. Corner office and all.
…
I’m gay now though, so.
We called them silver foxes, deriding them, and laughed.
A+ illustration.
I’m guessing that neither Hank nor Smitty looks remotely like Harrison Ford in a bow tie.
Smitty looks like Elliott Gould’s character in “Ocean’s Eleven.” Hank looks like Donald Trump.
I went to a women’s college and had a ton of male literature professors, and thankfully all but one were not in the least bit creepy. (One had consistently sexual interpretations of everything we were reading, which, suuuuure, maybe, but at least he didn’t talk about anyone’s personal life, his or otherwise.) On the other hand, I know one of my professors married a student (an older student, not a just-got-out-of-high-school student) a few years before I got there.
Other women’s college graduates, did you have skeevy professors on par with co-ed schools? I wish we had a skeevy professor index to use as a comparison point.
ehhhhhhhhn. We had a marriage “scandal” too but I can’t remember if she was an MFA or not the big drama was, of course, that the wife he was married to before 2nd ex-student wife still TAUGHT IN THE PROGRAM. ETA: he was a big “experimental poet” proponent, and all the visiting experimental poets were skeevy as get out.
that might’ve been it though. and actually my only professor (now friend/mentor) who taught me the literatures was gay, so. what about TAs??
I don’t think so, but then I was (am) pretty oblivious to that kind of thing. There was one professor/student affair that became so well-known that even I heard about it, though. His wife started working at the school afterwards!
haha pretty sure i went to the same school.
i think i might have as well
Oh man there was this way older anthropology prof who was suuuuper into ‘alternative models of relationships’ and sexual exploration, ACADEMICALLY OF COURSE, at my university who had married a way younger grad student. For some reasons they lived in our residence (we had this Oxbridge system with colleges and quads and ivy-strewn stone walls, and creepy older profs who lived in res… I dunno).
They had a baby. Once I saw desperately trying to get across the quad with a screaming toddler who WOULD NOT walk anymore and bags of groceries, and I carried her groceries so she could carry him. She was sad, I think. But didn’t really talk to me. Ugh that dude.
Barf! How awful! I went to women’s college in the South, so it was all very baptist and above board. I had several male professors, but none creepy. I am 40 now and can’t imagine being interested in a 20 year old for anything. I may admire the physique, but couldn’t imagine having to go through all that young direction finding stage again.
I also went to women’s college (though not southern Baptist) and also no creeps.
But mainly I’m here to say yes! I too am 40 and the Young are pretty but ew! Ew ew ew! Would never touch, yuck.
Also went to a women’s college, we had a professor whose fiancee was a rising senior (and traditional-age). It was before my time, though.
Molly drugs and Pokemon are my new Facebook interests FYI.
Pokemons, pop. Pokemons.
“Oh, Jack. The plural of Pokemon is Pokemon.”
Male professors are just aging Squirtles in our Pokemon.
The “kill your male mentors” tag! A+ would laugh again!
Also, I just thought of Paris Gellar and her elderly professor, and of Kelly Kapowski and Professor Lasky.
Paris and Professor Fleming! That was so excellent. Especially because it gave Lorelei the opportunity of saying “Well, they’ll always have Paris” and Rory replying “Wow, how long have you been sitting on that?”
Oh god. I just remembered that in high school the one who went on to marry one of his daughter’s classmates told us the story of how he impressed his wife with the Pigeon Test, you know, the one about feeding them randomly in relation to work so they’d be really into you and work SUPER HARD to impress you, this was framed as dating advice for how to handle boys, I thought I’d repressed this but no that really did happen.
The fired-for-taking-the-ski-team-drinking one happened, too.
Jesus H. God, no wonder I stopped having male professors as soon as possible.
Huh. I never had creepy male professors in college. Lucky, I guess?
Very.
Extraordinarily. Maybe I had all of yours for you?
Compare a bunch of literatures at each other.
Maybe cuz Canada, but I never had a creepy male English professor (and I was an English major!). But I also never interacted with my profs unless I had to. That definitely helps.
My sister had a boss while she was in univ who was like this though. He made her call him eery night with the sales figures or something (my face when she told me this: O.o), and then used her number to drunk text her, and things got so bad that she eventually had to leave. Oh, and of course his wife hated her, even though she didn’t do anything wrong. So looks like they’re branching out.
I didn’t have creepy male English professors either, but I had a couple of creepy older male French professors. And one very young (23) male French professor who was not openly creepy, really, but who did once get drunk at a French society mixer and loudly proclaim that he chose to major in French because the classes were 90% female.
That’s pretty creepy though, IMHO.
I didn’t take English, and am Canadian, so maybe I dodged that bullet. There was an chem professor about half the female portion of the class had crushes on, but he was also very obviously uncomfortable with that. I also had a creepy grad school Resource Management prof. Here’s a tip, Creepy Prof: if you’re going to drunkenly holler at me across a campus hallway, at least get my name right.
I am Canadian and didn’t take English. I had a creepy Biology professor. They are *everywhere.*
(Carleton University , Ottawa circa 1969) One of my journalism profs announced to the class that he had had mumps over the Christmas Break and was now therefore sterile girls!
A philosophy prof married a third year student. They are still married btw, apparently happily. We knew them through the community organization.
And then of course there is Stuart McLean…. yes that Stuart McLean.
And oh yeah– our high school gym teacher (boys programme) was transferred to our school for ‘dating’ a student at his old school. Although he was kinda cute, actually.
Oh god, the wife hating you is so awful. This happened to me not with an authority figure, but with a male friend who tried to get in my pants. I had never understood why his wife didn’t like me until he was in my apartment, drunk, and making the most awkward moves in history. I always liked his wife, too.
I can’t even. Using “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” as the book of seduction = Nail (no pun intended) + Head (no pun intended). For real, I took class from a “Hank” who used this book!!!
FADE TO BLACK
STOPS FADING TO BLACK, TWEETS A MILLION TIMES
NO REALLY, FADING TO BLACK NOW
NO WAIT, JUST KIDDING, MORE GROSS DETAILS
SERIOUSLY, FADES TO BLACK
…FOR NOW
STARTS TWEETING AGAIN WHEN AGHAST AT LACK OF INTEREST IN THE NON-TWEETING
BTW, I SLEPT WITH LOTS OF WOMEN!
Were any of them attractive residents of Munich?
There were so many tweets, so many. It made for a rather depressing lunch hour today as I tried to catch up.
I had high school teachers like this. One told me I seemed “really mature for my age” and loaned me a book with his phone number in it when I was in 9th grade. And therefore 14 years old. With my hair in braids. (Okay, my hair is still in braids now, but back then it was in two braids on the sides of my head with Love-in-Tokyo hair bands.) Fortunately, the thing about being 14 was that I saw a teacher’s phone number in the inside of a book, and all I thought was, “He didn’t put in the area code; I guess he never leaves the county.”
D: bullet: dodged. well done you!
Thanks. I wasn’t even his student that year; I was the next year. A teaching assignment he probably rued, because he was a truly terrible teacher and I had no qualms about letting him know. May actually have walked out of class when he called Daisy in Gatsby a bitch. Or maybe it was when he said there was no point in reading the end of Huck Finn; who knows.
You are my hero. Every high school should come equipped with at least one of you.
aaaaaand this comment is where I realized this was a republished post; “I guess he never leaves the county” is too good a line to forget.
Oh wow. I never had a professor like this (although looking back I didn’t really have a lot of male professors) but I had a middle school art teacher who was exactly like this. We all thought he was creepy and sad and he used to give weird back rubs to the female students (we were like 12 at the time) while critiquing our work and there were rumors about him hooking with students that we never totally believed until one day one of my friends went to drop off an assignment after hours and walked in on him making out with one of the high school kids just weeks after his wife had given birth. So yeah.
Ohhhh and I had a creepy study abroad advisor in college who used to hit on all the female students (and become bffs with the male students) and when I sternly told him I didn’t appreciate him putting his hands on me he went on this long thing about how I was being uptight that involved asking me weirdly personal questions about whether I let other boys touch me. And when I complained he said that that’s just how they do things in Latin America.
Which, wtf? Half my family is from Latin America (different country, but still) and somehow we’ve all managed to not sexually harass anyone. And of course, once again I told no one (I wish there was a way to do this anonymously) because everyone adored him and I didn’t want to make things difficult.
I’m laughing, but on the other hand I’m also like, the Misandrist Revolution cannot come soon enough….
Unfortunately, I have waaaay too many stories relating to this. I had two teachers in high school that were involved in student-teacher relations/scandals (one of whom made passes at my best friend, which she ignored, before he moved on to the next girl), and I can think of rumors of at least three others. And, just before I got there, a basketball coach at this same high school ran away with a young girl to Mexico.
In college, I admired a suave bachelor professor to a fault, but it resulted in a public embarrassment, and he was not the kind to prey upon impressionables. But then I had a French film professor that would constantly make sexist / sex-related comments, so much so that I stopped going to class, failed to turn in assignments, and didn’t take the final. He passed me anyways.
Ugh. Misandry forever.
I know it’s wrong, but I want to see more of the adventures of Hank and Smitty. There’s a tag! It must be used!
You are speaking directly to my soul Mallory. I work in higher ed with too many people like this (however I will defend tenure with the last breath in my body as it is most useful for women and minorities who have opinions). When I see this type of behavior going on I internally seethe “FEMINISM IS WORKING” and look forward to the demise of the gray old man who doesn’t know how to attach a fucking document to an email but says he’s “concerned” with the “back talk” from women in his class.
High school art teacher. All of my male professors were great, but my high school art teacher (10th grade) was very creepy. I was in 10th grade and I was the only girl in my art class. He gave me a lot of attention and praised and displayed my work, but there was always a creepy suggestion to his attention. He was more overt with some of my friends in another class, but luckily they were not forced to be alone with him and could team up together to oppose him. He liked to draw large, sultry naked women at the front of the room while we worked. Eventually a Swedish exchange student joined the class, and he stopped paying so much attention to me. It was always creepy in a way that was hard to describe to other people, so I didn’t say anything to my parents or administrators.
The next year he was fired for telling a girl she would look good in a painting smock, a thong, and nothing else.
Late as usual, but I never had creepy uni professors, my creepiest teacher was my year 12 Japanese teacher at high school.
I remember his telling us he got into teaching Japanese for the women, because Japanese women wear very short skirts, and also him showing us a borderline soft porn Japanese movie in class…half of it was a normal story about a women trying to find the best ramen recipe to open her own noodle shop, interspersed with random scenes of what I can only describe as porn with food…we thought it was pretty funny at the time…but looking back, what on earth was out teacher playing at?!
Tampopo! That’s a great movie! Maybe not for high school, but worth rewatching! (PS hi, newly delurking)
ah, I can never remember what’s it’s called! Yeah, I wouldn’t mind re-watching it, I just remember thinking at the time that it was so inappropriate to be showing to a bunch of high school kids! The bit with the shrimp under the bowl on the woman’s stomach freaked me out, I just remember thinking, what if it tried to burrow downwards!
Tampopo! That’s a classic. Maybe a bit much for high school, but great stuff! About the sensuality of food and all the different emotional response we have to it. My favorite shot is the little child too young to speak with the sign hung around its neck, “please do not give me any sweets” or something like that, and a person sees it and gives the child his own ice cream cone which the child eats very, very slowly. That or all the proper Japanese ladies imitating someone who looks like an outtake from a Marx Brothers film slurping spaghetti.
Laughter – loud laughter – is probably a good disinfection agent for this sorta thing.
I was the adoring teacher’s pet of three professors (2 in history, one in government) who had terrible reputations – one was actually nicknamed Action Jackson (not his real last name) – but never had a Hank or Smitty moment with any of them. Sometimes it’s great to be merely “pleasant faced,” as L.M.M. would put it.
ah, I can never remember what's it's called! Yeah, I wouldn't mind re-watching it, I just remember thinking at the time that it was so inappropriate to be showing to a bunch of high school kids! The bit with the shrimp under the bowl on the woman's stomach freaked me out, I just remember thinking, what if it tried to burrow downwards!
HANK: [pointing to himself] “Me, I get older, but they stay the same a…same amount of uncomfortable with my forward and personal behavior.”
Perfection.
“The two of them enjoy a quiet pill.”
I have not finished reading, but I had to stampede down here to shout about how amazing this line is.
Ok. As you were.
"The two of them enjoy a quiet pill."
I have not finished reading, but I had to stampede down here to shout about how amazing this line is.
Ok. As you were.
Also: I never had this professor. My male professors were…normal? Well, non-predatorial, anyway. Not in undergrad (large state school) or 6 years of grad school (tiny private school). We didn’t even have a “that guy” in the English department. At least not that I heard of (wait, was no one telling me the good gossip??) We did have a professor who was a founding member of Berlin, and that was cool. Also, one completely socially awkward professor who wore a pirate shirt to class, but said brilliant things while wearing that pirate shirt and giving paper comments like “Your writing has potential but not promise,” and one day he answered a panel question with this beautiful speech about how we study literature because we inhabit the books we love, and they inhabit us. And everyone wept.
I guess maybe my experience was atypical.
Also: I never had this professor. My male professors were…normal? Well, non-predatorial, anyway. Not in undergrad (large state school) or 6 years of grad school (tiny private school). We didn't even have a "that guy" in the English department. At least not that I heard of (wait, was no one telling me the good gossip??) We did have a professor who was a founding member of Berlin, and that was cool. Also, one completely socially awkward professor who wore a pirate shirt to class, but said brilliant things while wearing that pirate shirt and giving paper comments like "Your writing has potential but not promise," and one day he answered a panel question with this beautiful speech about how we study literature because we inhabit the books we love, and they inhabit us. And everyone wept.
I guess maybe my experience was atypical.
You are my hero. Every high school should come equipped with at least one of you.
When did misandry become a positive thing? I'm a little confused. Misandry isn't the solution to anything.
Misandry solves everything. It became a positive thing in 1974, shortly after lunch.
“The two of them enjoy a quiet pill.” DEAD. Still a wisecracking bastard I see!!
Ugh, I ended up switching subjects in high school due to a male teacher who just couldn’t stop and I was not capable of handling it – probably because I WAS SIXTEEN.
Had a few more of these kinds of profs at uni too. My favourite is the one who insults you by implying that women are naturally inferior scientists AND STILL CONTINUES TO EXPECT YOUR ADMIRATION AND DEVOTION!!! (THAT DID NOT EVEN EXIST IN THE FIRST PLACE.) I mean come on, just how fucking silly with privilege and entitlement can a person be.
Yuck. This is my tenth grade English teacher all over again. Oozing praise and attention, smothering uncomfortably close and attentive, offering all manner of special attention and advice. Later fired for molesting a different boy. I narrowly dodged a bullet there, but it still bothers me that while I knew what he was up to, it never occurred to me that he was grooming other students to try to molest them too, so while I steered my own way out of danger, I never spoke up when it might have helped others.
Besides, this was the 90s. I thought if I reported being sexually harassed by a male teacher I wouldn’t be believed and I’d face even more bullying. Oh the homophobic, silencing, harasser-enabling, horrible 1990s. How I don’t miss them.
Sorry you had to deal with that. Much sympathy.
The self-replicating cycle is that, when you get to college and can begin to really analyze literature, you discover it is, indeed, all about sex. Therefore what kind of young men become English majors and eventually English professors? OK, I’m guilty– though I’ve only been in middle and high school, and not likely for much longer. Truthfully, for men, becoming an English major is the liberal arts equivalent of a medical student choosing to specialize in gynecology.
The self-replicating cycle is that, when you get to college and can begin to really analyze literature, you discover it is, indeed, all about sex. Therefore what kind of young men become English majors and eventually English professors? OK, I'm guilty– though I've only been in middle and high school, and not likely for much longer. Truthfully, for men, becoming an English major is the liberal arts equivalent of a medical student choosing to specialize in gynecology.
The irony is she’s writing about LIBERAL professors in the Humanities.
I am imagining this in the voices that Brendan and Jason from Home Movies use during the Hungry Hot episode http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytRcqJ_CfhY
“Even their elbow patches look tired.”
CLASSIC!
Love the OP! I know this post is late–I just stumbled across this and hope someone will see this and can tell me if there’s a women’s group that can offer advice about dealing with predatory profs who manage to stay under the radar and are dearly loved by their see-no-evil, hear-no-evil peers and admin. We have a live one at my school, and he’s too calculated for a sexual harassment charge. His targets become complicit–seriously, he’s a convincing, sick fuck–and they’re often married (as is he). I know of two–myself and a friend of mine–and both are silenced because of obvious fears/concerns (I suspected she had been targeted, so I shared my experience, and then she shared hers). Basically: is there anywhere to turn for sound advice when Title Nine only exasperates your already painful absence of power? I made mistakes (choices based on his intentional deceptions), but that doesn’t mean he should have no accountability for his predatorial manipulation of his students and the mentee/mentor energy.. At least I hope not. Thanks in advance for any contact suggestions.
I have no idea. I think people have this idea that The Era of Accepted Sexual Harassment is over, but after one of my professors had been being a creep I found out at the club for women in the department that he’s famously awful to everyone, and no one does anything about it on the assumption that he’ll retire soon. Ugh.
Hi, Sally! In college, I was a part of an activist group called FuckRapeCulture, where we organized to combat things like this. Title IX complaints are actually not all that hard to file, and Know Your IX (http://knowyourix.org/) representatives can help you if that is a path you’re interested in.
For your situation specifically, though, I would recommend that you get in touch with Sun Devils Against Sexual Assault ([email protected]), a group from Arizona State University. They have a lot of experience and remarkable success with handling predatory professor-student relationships. You can find their website at https://sundevilsagainstsexualassault.wordpress.c… .
Hope this helps!
books about oppressed pedagogues.
the best thing.
Ye gods.
VARIATION I AM LIVING CURRENTLY: Mid-twenties-aged secretary at liberal arts college is visited at her reception desk every day by Crazy Russian History Professor, who cannot read social cues and has no interest in actually conversing with Secretary or respecting her time, but merely wished to eat thirty minutes of her time rambling on about current affairs and how awesome he is until Older Secretary In the Nearby Office rescues Younger Secretary with a phone call ruse, as a way out of the interaction.
This may or may not be autobiographical.
Thank god I’ve just stumbled across this now and not before taking Dirtbag Etgics Professor’s class. Never has there been a more oppressed pedagogue.
How _is_ he? Are there more dirtbag ethics professor stories?
Not really since he had his fit of histrionics and I got the hell out of Dodge. Though when he sees me coming across campus/the library/a hall/what have you he will go to any lengths to not make eye contact.
He is right to fear. It is seldom that I permit my enemies to live and it is only for lack of time that I have not yet unleashed my network of rabidly conservative alumni and trustees on him. (The rabidly liberal ones carry less weight and are fewer in number.) Let’s see what they make of his pedagogical methods.
(Also can everyone just ignore that my phone misspelled ethics up there please and thanks.)
Is “Dirtbag Ethics Professor” a thing? A known personality type?
(I ask as an ethics prof who generally tries to avoid being a dirtbag.)
Almost caricaturedly liberal, pretentious, ignorant, disrespectful, self-aggrandizing, prone to hysterics, dirtbag ethics professor is -hopefully- nothing more than an unfortunate sport.
Oppressed pedagogue.
So, so perfect.
I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that both these guys manage to center their curriculum on the works of John Updike, no matter what.
*silently thanks all listening deities that all her lit professors were gay*
Ugh. I had one prof that was kind of like this (he clearly had Once Been Cool, and was desperate that all of the Cool Girls still think he is Cool).
My horror tale is of colleagues: now profs who were once classmates on facebook talking like this. _on facebook_. Like dude, I know we be friends on the Internets, but please refrain from talking in public about wanting to bang your 20-year-younger-than-you-students, because _creepy_. And then they’re all like “what do you mean, creepy, i am just being HONEST” How do i explain that that just makes it wprse?
Argh. Why do these dudes think ‘verbalising every impulse they have about everything’ = RADICAL IMPORTANT HONESTY. The fact that your boner exists doesn’t automatically mean that it matters, sweetheart.
Oh my Lord – I Knew these guys. They taught at my school . . . . . .
I see a lot of teachers/professors dating students stories in the comments, but I’d just like to brag on the third principal of my HS in as many years who was dismissed for having an “affair” with a current student and (1) lending her a school district phone for her personal use and (2) as I remember, letting her drive a district car?! Which gave the impression that if those misuses of district resources had not occurred, the “affair” might have been let slide…
Don’t ever change, Garfield High School. (I sincerely hope that it has changed?)
You went to Garfield too? Hi! (I’m assuming you mean the one in Seattle, but maybe there are other Garfield High Schools with sex scandal problems.)
I did! Class of ’99. I was almost a classmate of Lindy West or Macklemore, but not quite.
Go Bulldogs?
Class of ’02, right here! I didn’t get there until junior year, though, so I would have come in in 2000, right after the year of all the scandals. I never really got the full story on that year, actually, because the students seemed so traumatized by the whole thing that I didn’t want to pry.
Oh hey! You might have known my brothers Max K (intolerable) or John H (tolerable). My blended family ran that school for like seven years (no we didn’t).
Thank god, I was terrified you’d be like Class of ’14 or something and I’d have to cringe at my own mortality.
Ha! I had the same fear. No, I don’t think I knew them, although the name Max is ringing a very faint bell. But then it was a big class, and I didn’t know that many people in my year. What with transferring and having to make up required classes, I ended up mostly making friends in the year after me.
I actually loved Garfield, despite the total shambles the school was in when I got there. I was one of those people who sang the school song and actually meant it. (Though I was very weirded out when I read Assassination Vacation and discovered that the song was adapted from a poem written by James A. Garfield’s killer, like, seriously, school, what is up with that?)
I’ve seen this happen in the classroom, and it’s almost always terribly obvious to everyone (not just their targets) what’s going on. The closest I’ve come to it myself (save for a couple of professors who may have had a crush on me; I wasn’t really good at reading that sort of thing) was a female high school English teacher who was less Flirting with Students and more Not Really Good At Maintaining Appropriate Boundaries.
I actually really needed this today, because my thesis supervisor is a DINK.
I was an English major, but one of my male teachers was in love only with himself, the other with Herman Melville. I may have been oppressively crushing on one of the junior professors, who was happily married but just the kind of tall skinny bearded Shakespeare-loving type I craved. He avoided my longing glances, to his credit. I will always cherish making him laugh hysterically when I and some friends did a scene from Merchant of Venice in the style of Salt n’ Pepa, though.
“One of my male teachers was in love only with himself, the other with Herman Melville” sounds like the first line to a really interesting short story.
I would totally read that story.
I am feeling so grateful rn for my male university lecturers who were so lovely and respectful. And also the three or four who, in retrospect, were clearly keeping some of the others in line. They get gold stars and, when we have to send all men to the tundra, perhaps they will qualify for the occasional extra blanket or something.
Please don’t send them to the tundra, there’s Aboriginal women here who have had enough of these guys to deal with already!
Antarctica also has tundra, yes?
Nope– Just ice.
In physical geography, tundra is type of biome where the tree growth is hindered by low temperatures and short growing seasons. The term tundra comes through Russian тундра from the Kildin Sami word tūndâr “uplands”, “treeless mountain tract”.
Tundra – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tundra
I greatly enjoyed this educational comment on the tundra.
Hilarious and true as always, but just a bit too true. That EXACT thing at the party, with the low talking and the cornering happened to me my freshman year. He actually “insisted” on walking me to the bus stop, since it wasn’t safe for me to go alone. I didn’t want him to follow, but I just didn’t know how to say no. He grabbed my ass at that bus stop and I never told anyone. I was so scared; he was Dr. Mr. Big Tenured and who was I? Ugh. Fuck ’em all.
I was about to say that I luckily never had a teacher or prof like this, but people have told me some pretty skeevy things about one of our HS English teachers, and then there was the JV soccer coach. He liked to touch our shoulders and he thankfully didn’t come back.