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(Tenured Radical)

Friday, October 21, 2005

TEACHING TODAY

A Regular University Diaries Feature


Harry White, English professor at Northeastern Illinois University, teaches by example. But what a curious example it is.

Here's an example of his writing (I got this from Erin O'Connor) -- writing of which he was so proud that he published it in a campus newspaper (he's complaining here about some anti-gay people who came to campus recently and made anti-gay noises):


And they should all go **** themselves--and I hope it hurts when they do and that they catch a disease and puke all over themselves and die, horribly, somewhere near Clark and Diversey [in Chicago] where four off-duty male nurses, all clad in black leather, remove their bodies to a nearby hospital where they are cleansed, disinfected, dressed in women's clothing and dumped into a sewer.



Fascinated by his prose style, I raced to White's faculty webpage, where I found this sardonic commentary on the futility of it all... or is he cleverly punning on his last name? Whatever -- the top of the page has his name and phone number, and then the rest of the page is like a Rothko canvas or a Mallarme poem -- lots of white.

UD is getting pretty frustrated with the tendency of some professors to have webpages and then put nothing on them (see in this connection also the Washington State University professor of education I blogged about recently).