Compassion is always good. The professor in question is adored.
But when an alcoholic on the faculty — multiple DUIs, operating without a license, public intoxication, felonious assault on a police officer, violation of pre-trial release, failure to appear in court —melts down in front of her students, in class …
… “She wasn’t finishing her sentences,” [one] student said. “It was like she couldn’t find the right words. We asked what was wrong but she just said she wasn’t feeling very well.”
For a few minutes after watching Evans, another student said they believed she was having a stroke.
“Someone went to call 911, and everyone else just sat there really upset,” the student said. “She’s easily everyone’s favorite teacher.”
… While the class waited for the ambulance to arrive, students tried to talk to Evans.
According to the student, when asked what was wrong, Evans told students that the university had taken away her job because she had been charged with a DUI. When police came into the class, they told students to leave.
This woman – driving drunk on a suspended license, assaulting police officers – is dangerous. She should not have been in a James Madison University classroom.
December 6th, 2010 at 10:11AM
I taught for 40 years at Brown University. In all my time there, the most inspiring, best loved, kindest professor I ever knew, in any department, was also the most deeply unhappy man I have ever met. He was at least a little drunk, too, pretty much every hour of every day. Poetry was his specialty, and in the classroom he was superb, apart from the very rare days when he couldn’t make it to class. (I sat in on one of his poetry classes for a whole semester, because I wanted to learn from him, so I can speak to his excellence as a teacher from personal knowledge.)
On campus, he was no danger to anyone, and helped countless students overcome the difficulties of life, and sometimes even find their reason for living. (Behind the wheel, I agree, it was another matter altogether — but he wasn’t behind the wheel on campus.) It would have been a great loss to the university if he had been removed from his position for being drunk in the classroom.
More generally, in my own experience, at my own university, the best and most inspiring teachers usually been the sort of people who can give university lawyers nightmares. It is they with whom most students seem to feel most comfortable, and talk most freely. It is from them, and only from them, that students can learn the most important lesson of all, which is how to become an adult human being despite the many flaws and the core of inherent depravity (cf. Augustine and Calvin) that we all have within us. Students seem to be much more aware of these dark things in themselves during their college years than they have been before, or will be afterward. They need to have models for getting by in life despite all these things.
From the wholly functional and totally upright members of the faculty, university students can learn many things, but not this one supreme lesson. Instead, the faculty who give university lawyers no grief at all teach an opposite lesson, which is about hypocrisy, denial, and how appearances trump substance every time. Some students want and need precisely those lessons. Their goals are simple: to become smoothly functioning parts of some great corporate machine or other, to acquire a measure of wealth and power, and to live in comfort.
The really rewarding students, however, are the ones who despise wealth, power, and even comfort. They are in love with truth and wisdom, and are even ready to take a bullet in pursuit of those goals. They grow up, when they survive at all, to be really dangerous people — just the sort of people that this tired old world of ours needs.
This sort of student *starves* at a university unless he (or she, of course) can find the sort of the professor who gives university lawyers nightmares. It is the mark of a great university that it can educate this kind of student, too, and therefore that it can also make a place for this kind of professor — despite the advice of its own lawyers!
December 6th, 2010 at 10:44AM
Robert: I hear what you’re saying – and I love the way you say it.
But I mean it when I say this woman is dangerous. And not merely in the behind-the-wheel sense, which, as you agree, is obviously true of alcoholics.
I mean she’s dangerous – let me use precisely the arguments you’re using – she’s dangerous because she crosses the line between liberatingly subversive, somewhat crazily on the edge, inspiringly nutty and resistant to conventional academic culture — which is all to the good, as you say — and simply distressingly out of control.
I doubt the ‘dangerous’ professors you describe in your comment had the arrest record of this woman. They were tight a good deal of the time, sure, but they maintained reasonable control over their lives.
The pathos of this woman’s students having to take care of her; the way, in their innocence, they assumed her slurred speech meant she must be having a stroke; their deep distress at witnessing a person they respected behaving madly; their equal distress, one assumes, at being hustled out of their classroom by a police officer… This can’t be what you mean by a professor who bracingly embodies for students the truth of our flaws and depravity.
I remember, at Northwestern, where I was an undergrad, taking a French literature course with a man I gradually — very gradually; I was insanely innocent about the whole flaws/depravity thing — realized was a drunk. It did nothing for my understanding of existence to witness his meltdown. It just really upset me, as it upset everyone else in the class. We learned nothing – no French, no nothing.
December 6th, 2010 at 12:12PM
Now it’s my turn to be a bit puzzled, Margaret. We may in fact be on different pages.
Do you think it is actually *dangerous* for students to witness a respected adult self-destruct before their very eyes? Is the deep distress that such a sight naturally produces somehow *dangerous* to their well-being?
Maybe it’s a generational thing. I was born nine months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the world was very different during my childhood than it is now.
In the eighth grade one of my classmates died at a party we all attended, and another of my classmates found his body. There was no school-sponsored grief counseling, nor did any such thing seem to the rest of us to be needed: death, even at a young age, was simply a part of our lives that we already knew about and accepted, wrenching though it was. So were such things as injuries that crippled, beatings that maimed or disfigured, bullying, abuse, incest, suicide, even kidnapping and rape by a schoolmate, etc.
But the ethos was “Really hard shit happens to nearly every young person, and it’s our job as young people to figure out — by our own resources — how to get on with our lives as well as we can, even when it has happened to us personally. It’s only going to get a whole lot worse for each of us once we’re adults.” So we dealt with these things, often out of adult view, as best we could, and we got on with our lives.
At Brown there was another much-loved professor, about 20 years older than I, who was gay. He was a strong supporter of athletics, and advised a great number of student athletes — all male. In those days there were faculty apartments in every large student dormitory, and he had one of them. One morning some of his advisees discovered him bound, gagged and severely beaten on the floor of his apartment in the dorm, and his apartment ransacked and robbed. (He was in his high sixties at the time.) Everyone assumed — he never said — that he had brought someone home from the city who was more “rough trade” than he knew how to deal with. He recovered after a long hospitalization, and kept on living in that apartment in the dormitory almost until he died. The athletes who found him got on with their lives, without much flap about any distress they might have experienced at finding their advisor in such a condition.
Another professor, in creative writing, showed up in class one day with a hunting rifle, announced that today’s class would be about fear, and at one point in the discussion proceeded to sight his rifle in on each student in class. (The rifle was unloaded, but he deliberately didn’t tell the students that.) This was too much, even for someone with my hard-edged background. I had grown up with guns and had been a member of the NRA, and he had just violated the rock-solid norms of responsible gunmanship. (Is gunmanship a recognized word?) But Brown was full of professors and administrators who knew nothing about guns and less about gunmanship. They just put him on a leave of absence for a year or two, and then he was back in the classroom once again.
The world changed at Brown sometime in the 1980s. I still remember our collective surprise when a new Dean of the College, a baby-boomer, made a point to telling all the faculty that undergraduates might look like young adults, but they were really just children, and needed to be treated as such, even coddled. At first we thought it was just a personal quirk of hers, but policies were soon implemented along those lines.
And, lo, within about five years, most of our undergraduates were acting like children instead the young adults we had taught in former years! That was the real shocker.
So, yes, I did mean to include professors who are on occasion out of control, sometimes even in ways that distress or frighten students enormously. (The professor with the rifle, as I said, crossed a line, but that was about the norms of gunmanship more than anything else.)
But it may be a generational thing. You will have to judge that for yourself, taking into account what I have written above about what life was like for junior high and high school students in my days.
In any case, those days are long gone, and maybe it’s just as well that they are. But back then, that was just the way life was, and life was not at all sacred, but a cheap thing, easily lost or taken. Then it was every young person’s job to learn to deal with things the way they were, not to try to change things. And I am a fossil by now, bearing witness to a world that is long gone — whether for better or for worse, you will have to judge for yourself.
December 6th, 2010 at 12:27PM
I witnessed something similar in graduate school. A relatively new hire- who taught some fairly high-powered classes, of which I took two – was an alcoholic. A few times in class he was not coherent, and his exams were a nightmare. Most of what I know from those classes are what I taught myself from the textbook.
It was heartbreaking because he was obviously a smart guy, but he had so many problems.
It’s also not good for the reputation of the department. I cringed when driving a group of undergrads back from a field trip and I overheard a couple of them saying, “This place is so great. Where else can you go out to a bar and get trashed along with some of the professors?” Meaning the person in question.
His contract was not renewed. Last I heard, he had been arrested in California for driving drunk, on a suspended license, without insurance.
Most of what I learned from him in re: teaching fell into the “horrible warning” category. (As opposed to “good example.”)
Still, it was very sad and very distressing, especially for several of my grad-school colleagues who had put them on their committees and then had to scramble to find a replacement.
December 6th, 2010 at 12:58PM
Robert: You make me think… So let me think out loud, as it were…
I yield to no one in my hatred of the nanny state.
Okay, maybe Camille Paglia hates it more than I do, but I swear I’m pretty much right up there with her.
As for guns, I acknowledge having been a lily-livered yuppie about them for years, until I did this series for Inside Higher Ed...
http://www.insidehighered.com/content/search?SectionID=10&SearchText=professor+meets+gun&SubTreeArray=95777&SearchButton=Submit
But I’m still way lily-livered.
You’re right – it’s a generational difference. As in: I grew up in an affluent two-parent loving family in wonderful surroundings and never had much of a sense of the treacherous nature of the world. I’m an affluent tenured professor married to another tenured professor. It’s not that my life has been without nightmares – I’ve got my own version of the list of terrible events everyone who makes it into their fifties has – but bottom line is that, yes, I’m privileged, protected, pampered. In Ravelstein, Bellow’s narrator says a friend “who knows me well said that I was more innocent than any adult had the right to be.” I’m conscious of this in myself. Probably the reason films like Black Swan are popular (I haven’t seen it, but have a sense of its plot) is that so many Americans are like this. I’m certainly conscious in myself of a strong unwillingness to face shit foursquarely.
The question between us is, I guess, about delivery systems — to use one of the many odious phrases the people trying to destroy university education find appealing. How am I going to get the truth about human life? About our vulnerability, our self-destructiveness, the complex ways in which sensitive troubled brilliant people can be both inspirational teachers and, well, menaces? It’s true that one of the reasons I loathe the distance ed revolution is precisely because I want students to see complex embodied human beings thinking and feeling in front of them. I’ve always been inspired by this statement from William Arrowsmith:
So chaos, yes; but form and order have to be there too. I think maybe we’re only quibbling about where lines get drawn, where the complex business of allowing students to witness the ways in which personal, intellectual, and artistic order suffers into being, and the ways in which this order is actually very fragile and contingent — where that presentation in some humanities classrooms tips over into an intellectually useless — because merely personal — surrender to chaos.
December 6th, 2010 at 2:30PM
I think we are just quibbling a little about where the line should be drawn, not disagreeing on fundamental principles.
However, I should probably explain my own background in turn. It was the opposite of yours. My father’s mother was left a very young widow after having been disowned by her old-world family for marrying her first cousin. (Her parents were violent and abusive to a very high degree, so this was wholly in character.) Grandmother survived, in part, by working as a dime-a-dance girl on the Oakland waterfront, and then she got a job as a bookkeeper for an auctioneer who dealt in old furniture and pubic-administration estates, but was also a fence, a peddler of political influence, and a man who also kept a few thugs and killers on his payroll just in case violence was needed to fix some problem. She met her second husband, my step-grandfather, in that business. He had left home (in Europe) by himself when he was 13 years old, and crossed the Atlantic to find work. Among other things, he been a carnival sharper in his younger years. He was very good at stage magic, and he could pick any lock or safe you might ask him to.
My father — an infant when his mother was widowed — was kept at home, in dresses (baby clothes at that time), until he was eight and his older brother intervened. He then went to school, got an associate’s degree and then a bachelor’s — the first of any of my relatives ever to go to college. He entered the Navy as an engineer, and worked on the Norden Bomb-sight project during WW II. However, he had almost no people skills, and so he had a hard time after the Navy in the aero-space industry.
And that was by far the more normal, functional, respectable side of my family.
My mother’s side was much poorer than that, hugely eccentric in occultism (and magic!), and not at all functional or practical in any way that I ever could see. Also, the extended family on that side — mostly relatives by marriage — consisted to a great extent of sad, rueful, falsely-cheerful alcoholics, who also did a certain amount of sexual fooling around with one another inside the family.
And none of this was ever hidden from children, including me and my brother.
So I have always been well acquainted with things that many families never deal with openly, or sometimes even have to deal with, and I long ago learned to live with people like this on easy terms.
Sometimes I think that nothing could scandalize me. But then I read your blog, and I am reminded of a wholly other kind of deviance and criminality, which lies beyond the ken of poor people such as my relatives were. What you disclose is not about survival or even human weakness so much as it is about naked hunger for all the wealth and power going.
And I am enormously grateful that you are turning a spotlight on it all. I saw far too much of it in my years at Brown, and it disgusted me — me, who thought (before I became a professor) that I was beyond disgust at any human behavior whatever! I think that says something about the good you are doing.
I always marvel, even now that I have retired, how I ended up a professor at all, let alone one at a university like Brown. It came about almost by accident, with a few pushes and shoves from people who thought I was smart. I had originally planned to be a locksmith rather than a Medieval philologist.
Ah well, life has its way with one, whatever one thinks one’s plans for it are. It certainly had its way with me. Now that I am an old man, I even fancy that I know *why* I ended up at Brown despite my firm intentions to do something else. There have been a few wonderful young people over the years whom I was able to keep from going mad, or from taking their own lives, or from dying before their time, and a few more whom I helped to find meaning in their lives. And I could not have helped even one of them without all the weirdness and horror I had to go through and deal with back in the day. And this is my own rich reward for all the trouble. I am grateful.
In sum: yes, we agree, I think, about what matters most in higher education and what it takes to achieve it. The rest is just quibbles, due, I think, to our different backgrounds more than anything else.
December 8th, 2010 at 3:36PM
Robert wrote “What you disclose is not about survival or even human weakness so much as it is about naked hunger for all the wealth and power going.”
That description is one heckuvan honor.
December 8th, 2010 at 3:39PM
Townsend: Yes. Indeed. It is a great honor.