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The Prime of Miss Jean Spooky

They’re hip, they’re hot, and, after years in the shadows, they’re coming to a university near you.

They’re the new wave in academia, and they’re blowing all the old ways of being a professor out of the water.

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Move over, Guest Lecturer; make room for Ghost Lecturer.

Visiting Professor? Visitant Professor!

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It’s the Prime of Miss Jean Spooky. It’s Goodbye Mr Chips, Hello Mr Blips. It’s Goodbye Mr Spock, Hello Mr Spook.

It’s Ghoul School, and it’s just in time for Halloween.

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Ghost professors we’ve always had with us, but they’ve mainly haunted Europe, where the halls of derelict public campuses echo with the spirits of absentee lecturers, and the Middle East, where veiled specters flit from room to room.

It’s only lately, with the rise of medical school ghostwriters, PowerPoint zombies, and the daemons of distance learning, that America has come to know its own faculty phantasms. These are the professors who take advantage of new technologies and corporate simulations of scholarship to enter into a liminal realm where one is at once disembodied and salaried, silent and published, vanished and teaching.

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To be sure, a few naysayers have crawled out of the woodwork.

They even have a rallying cry, something Frederic Chopin once said:

Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

Margaret Soltan, August 20, 2009 9:44AM
Posted in: the university

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4 Responses to “The Prime of Miss Jean Spooky”

  1. Jeffrey Kallberg Says:

    I’m positive Chopin never said any such thing – it doesn’t sound at all like him.

    (Careful of those online quotation sources – some of them suggest it was Rabindranath Tagore who said this. I had occasion to peruse online quotation repositories recently, and was amazed to see how inaccurate they are, and how much they repeat errors found in other compilations. For example, many of them attribute a series of quotations on the aesthetics of music to Red Auerbach, the late coach of the Boston Celtics. He was good at many things – basketball, cigars – but didn’t have much to say about music, as I recall.)

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Uh oh. I’ll check on it. Someone has to have said it…

  3. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Well, this looks to me like a very credible source, Jeff:

    http://chopinproject.com/chopin-quotepage/quotes-by-chopin/

    Taken from his letters.

    http://store.doverpublications.com/0486255646.html

  4. Jeffrey Kallberg Says:

    The chopinproject site is certainly very credible, generally. But I have my doubts about other quotations there, not all of which can come from the collection of his letters.

    According to Google Books, your Chopin quotation appears in print in English as early as 1895 – well before any collection of Chopin’s correspondence was printed in English. This makes me suspect it ultimately comes from a gathering of sayings attributed to him by others. Sometimes these aren’t reliable.

    But I’m happy to learn otherwise. This wouldn’t be the first time I’m wrong, the apodictic tone of my first comment notwithstanding!

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