UD‘s Canadian friend Jack sends her news of another Acting Out university instructor. The Acting Out person is almost always a middle-aged guy whose sense of himself as uniquely possessed of difficult and shocking truths that must somehow – anyhow – be conveyed to students has gotten way out of hand.
Like this guy a few years ago at Columbia University who taught physics by “stripping down, curling up in a fetal position and letting ninjas harass him while a projection of the Twin Towers falling and the Holocaust played on the television.” Or this guy – at Leeds University – who also stripped down to convey important truths about events management. There was also a Canadian who taught physics by talking almost exclusively about hidden political “power structures” and then giving all of his students A’s.
And now there’s this other Canadian who teaches intro psych by having his students sign a contract in which they promise to let him use all the naughty words he wants, in exchange for which students will be exposed to such “advanced methods of problem solving” that they will no longer be “duped by social-political agendas.”
Or – as he puts it in another section of the contract – after taking his course, the student will “be minimally influenced by unpleasant experiences.”
Students must read a list of the naughty words and then sign off on them.
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Some of the writing in the contract is mysterious.
If I require special needs I will not approach the professor in order to maintain my anonymity but instead arrange a convenient meeting with the professor and the Special Needs Office.
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Sample exam questions, some of them anecdotal (Students at Laurentian’s med school were told to stick their fingers in a corpse’s rectum and then lick their fingers…) also appear in the contract.
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For UD there has always been a pathos to the Acting Out professor. This is a man who has, after years of confusion and repression, liberated himself – politically, sexually. He’s excited about this, and wants to share it with students. As James Merrill put it, these men are “sharing pain like fudge from home.” Pain (“unpleasant experiences”) has been for them, and will be for their students, superseded by pleasure, so that by the end of the semester everyone will be like Joel Osteen, bursting with the joy of a new life.
January 6th, 2016 at 2:55PM
I would have walked out and dropped the class immediately, as I’ve done with professors who made it clear from day 1 that that class was going to be all about THEM and what they “stand” for. The behavior you’ve described is certifiable, so I would also have lodged a complaint questioning the prof’s mental health with a detailed description of his behavior. If it weren’t a required course, I might just stand up and ask him what he thought he was doing and why he thought anyone should pay to indulge him while he took wild liberties with a somewhat captive audience.
Jackasses.
January 6th, 2016 at 3:22PM
felonious grammar: Totally agree. What’s problematic is that these are often, say, freshman classes – maybe large lecture courses, requirements… The professor may also be someone the student has been instructed to find charismatic, amazing, subversive… Students don’t always have the confidence to go up against these things even when they realize they’re dealing with a jerk. What students do reliably do these days, however, is film these guys. That’s how most of them are outed.
January 7th, 2016 at 11:17AM
[…] Background on Professor Persinger here. […]
January 12th, 2016 at 6:12PM
Read Paul Fussell’s autobiography? Classic case.
January 12th, 2016 at 6:13PM
Actually, there is more in Betty’s, his first wife’s, memoir, MY KITCHEN WARS.
January 13th, 2016 at 8:06AM
Chas: I haven’t read his autobiography — I will.