Mom and Strange Faculty

Mom was convinced that college and university faculty were strange, a human species apart, divergent, branched off to a limb’s end of blossomed eccentricity.  When pressed for justification, she would allude vaguely to their center-staging theatricality, their against-the-grain idiosyncracy, or the unswayable righteousness  with which they voiced opinions on political or social issues that, according to Mom, “just don’t make sense.”  But mostly, when asked just why university faculty were strange, she would simply say, “They just are.”  That was that.  Case closed.  Thus was it demonstrated.

Actually, Mom had never gone to college, and her acquaintance with university faculty was limited to the few she saw or met on her and Dad’s social circuit or at PTA meetings or civic functions.  Undoubtedly, the logic-minded would accuse Mom of generalizing from too few samples.   Mom, however, placed more trust in her intuition than logic.  And in my experience, that intuition was eerily reliable.  Indeed, my freshman year at the local university confirmed it.

There was, for example, the chain-smoking Spanish professor who during class, doing his bit to conserve the world’s lighter fluid resources, continuously  lit one cigarette from the butt end of another, which he snubbed out in the room’s taupe-colored metal wastecan.   I suspect we learned more in his class about the addictive personality  than we did the Spanish language.

And the economics professor who never, not once, looked up from his yellowed index cards and who, when asked while chalking on the blackboard a rather abstruse economic process, how he got from step two to step three, replied, without turning, “It just happens.”  Seeing him one day climb into a 1950-ish pink and black Rambler confirmed for me his irremediable oddity.

And the English professor who habitually placed his lit pipe into his green tweed suit coat pocket where it smoldered and smoked while he held forth on the beauties of English Romantic poetry.   Perhaps what we really learned was at least one possible cause of human spontaneous combustion.   But, as students of literature are wont to do, we interpreted the smoke as a symbol, an objective correlative, of his fiery enthusiasm for the subject matter

And the Sociology professor who told us, several times, that he had divorced his wife because she had put on too much weight, and who changed his hair color at least half a dozen times during the semester.  He confided in us that he used Clairol.

And the Philosophy professor, “call me Ed,” who sent his wife on the many occasions he did not show up for class.  She would ask, “What did you think about the reading for today.”  We made it clear we hadn’t a clue, and she say, “Class dismissed.”  When Ed did make an appearance, he was compulsively digressive, turning  discussions of Kant and Hegel and Nietzsche into disquisitions on razored haircuts, growing heritage tomatoes, rodeo clowns, granola, and the closing minor third that made the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” so sad.  Unlike Eleanor, Ed, when he came to class, did not keep his face in a jar by the door.

And the English professor who wore academic regalia—gown, hood, and mortarboard cap—about campus and town, and effort, he said, to show that “scholarship was not dead.”   He was a published poet, which perhaps accounts for his pronouncement in virtually every class that “poetry is the higher truth, the revelatory rupture in the familiar through which the transcendent emerges.”   We just found it hard.

But the most colorful flower in this trellised garden of eccentricity was Professor Radzick, who taught early United States history.  One Monday, three weeks into the semester, he strode into class wearing a royal blue T-shirt emblazoned on the chest with a yellow “P” stitched on a circular patch of red.  He set down his briefcase, climbed atop the table at the front of the room, and announced that he was the Prince of Light, come to illuminate us not about the what and where and when of the United States’ colonial history, but the why they occurred.  History was not about general laws playing themselves out across time; rather, history was made by the choices of individual men and women shaped by and carapaced within particular social and cultural structures of feeling and thought.  There may be patterns and causal connections, but no overarching abstract laws governed history, though the fact that it was delivered to us as narrative may make it seem so.  History, the Prince of Light declared, was about the values, beliefs, and attitudes of those involved.  It was shaped by chance, improvisation, contingency.  It was predicaments, contending goals and interests, and the efforts to find a shared response to resolve them.  Such a perspective, the Prince asserted, was the only way to “see” history, the only way to situate ourselves within it and the possibilities for action it provides.

Like clockwork, on the Monday of every third week in the semester, The Prince of Light appeared.  No one was absent from that class.  We burst into applause when he came through the classroom door.  He was the quintessence of what Mom had in mind when she insisted that university professors were strange.  Yet, he was the professor from whom I experienced what critical inquiry felt like, the professor whose lessons I applied to my study of literature and used in my subsequent teaching.  Suddenly, weird did not seem so strange.

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 So, what was Mom’s reaction when I announced one evening after dinner that I intended to resign my job teaching high school English, enter the University of Minnesota’s graduate program, and become a university professor myself?  She said she understood my desire to know more, to grow intellectually, and supported my decision.  But still I wondered: Did she think I had become what I beheld in my undergraduate years?   Did her heart flutter, torque, keen  at my willingness to hurl myself into the current of weirditude, quirkitude, and outlandery?  Would she, as Jeremiah tells us Rachel was, be filled with “lamentation, and bitter weeping”?

While I was home for a weekend shortly after I had begun graduate studies, Mom and I returned from the grocery store to find a note taped to the garage door.  The note, unsigned, told Mom that her cat had been digging up plants in the writer’s garden.   I was angered by the note’s anonymity and declared it cowardly that the writer did not present the complaint forthrightly, face to face.  Mom smiled and said, “Jerry, the note’s anonymous because the person that wrote it doesn’t want to cause bad feeling in the neighborhood.  You know, you’re in graduate school and you’ll study very hard and get a Ph.D.    You’ll have a bunch of letters after your name.  People will call you Doctor. You’ll be a certified, if not a certifiable, smart person  You’ll likely become strange, but it’ll be a good strange because, you know, you’re my son and I love you.   But you’ll have to study even harder if you want to become a wise person.”

Modesty forbade what she could have easily added:  “like me.”  And I felt a sense of something being unveiled.  The Prince of Light; he had nothing on Mom. Hers was a lesson that made me understand that I was incomplete, unfinished, and that my education would be ongoing, arcing far beyond graduate school, far beyond studying literature and teaching.  Hers was a lesson in what being a human person should be like.  Hers was a lesson for a lifetime.