Links
Archives
Sunday, March 07, 2004
|
ACADEMIA TODAY
STEROIDS AND STEINBECK Los Angeles, March 11 --- The ongoing criminal investigation of UCLA's Willed Body program has sparked investigations of other possibly illegal activities on the sunny, palm-lined campus. This week, for instance, police uncovered an arrangement between UCLA's Athletics and English departments in which selected literature professors were allegedly given performance-enhancing steroids. "We got a tip from a recently retired post-structuralist," said Lieutenant Italo Svevo. "She suggested we look into why a number of tenure-track assistant professors in her department were routinely publishing not one, not two, but six books a year without breaking a sweat. She said first she figured a lot of the monographs must have been co-authored, or maybe edited by the faculty member. But no - each one had exactly two hundred and fifty pages, and each page was written by one author. She thought it smelled funny." Svevo arranged to audit some of these industrious professors' classes, and he was staggered by their frenetic, take-no-prisoners lecture style. "It reminded me of the way the Allan Bloom character in Ravelstein is described," he remarked. "It was wild! The kids were jumping out of their seats. Occasionally the professor would display hyper-irritability - a classic steroid side-effect - for no apparent reason." The investigating unit eventually decided to zero in on one professor in particular - Lydia Fertig, a fifth-year tenure-track assistant professor who, it was generally known, had suddenly switched her research interest from Joyce Carol Oates to Norman Mailer. Svevo approached her late one evening in the university library, where she sat hunched in a chair, typing frantically at a computer keyboard. "Professor Fertig?" Svevo whispered. She shot around in her chair: "What the HELL do you want." "I wonder if I could ask you a few questions," he said, showing her his badge. She laughed. "Let me save you some time, officer. Yes, I stabbed him. No, he's not pressing charges. Thank you for respecting my private life. Fuck off." |