BitterSweetLife

Earlier this week one of my professors regaled us with a tale of another professor—and such stories are usually quite good. As the story went, at a related institution, in a class very similar to ours, lived a “very popular” professor. He seemed a discerning, pleasant fellow, and was well-liked. Every semester, over a hundred students signed up for his section, eager to sit at his feet and divest themselves of his wisdom.

At this point the yarn seemed like a typical professorial idyll. Tenure, adoring acolytes, a huge lecture hall, all things dear to a Doctorate’s heart. But the saga was about to take a darkly startling twist.

“And so, every semester,” intoned my professor, “they could hardly find a room big enough to accommodate all the students who signed up for his class. However, that problem always took care of itself after the first week or so, when the students looked at the syllabus. You see, this professor always assigned a hundred papers each semester, most of them five or six pages long.”

You can imagine the reaction in my little classroom. It was like the “jump-scene” in a campfire ghost story. The room grew stuffy and close. Suddenly several people developed nervous ticks. One guy convulsively grabbed at the table. A girl on my left let out a little scream. I looked out the window to make sure it was still light outside.

Then my professor mercifully defused the tension with some timely moralizing. “So you see, you guys have it easy. Only—what?—six papers you have to write for me. Anytime you feel like complaining…” etc., etc. He said he’d start brainstorming for paper topics to get the total up to a semi-respectable number, say 50. Sure, sure. We smiled wanly at his mock threat, our knuckles slowly turning flesh-colored again.

100 papers a semester, and in one class. Six papers a week, over 500 pages—for three credits. Does madness does stalk the halls of higher learning? Does a psychopath, wrapped in academic robes, slash the grades of the unwary?

The story had all the trappings of an academic urban legend. But coming from my professor, I was afraid it wasn’t. There’s nothing like a graphic horror story to make you appreciate your pedestrian little life.