No-show professor had excuse: He died in April
AP – 3 hrs agoThe students were waiting for Henry Teune (TOO'-nee) to teach a political science class at the Ivy League school in Philadelphia on Sept. 13.
University officials say that about an hour after the class's start time, an administrator notified students by email that Teune had died. The email apologized for not having canceled the class.
Penn junior Mallika Vinekar was among those who waited. She tells the student newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian that they just figured he was late.
Teune died in April at the age of 75.
The story was first reported Monday by the Penn student blog Under the Button.
"They just figured he was late." Well, obviously. Everybody refers to him as the late Professor Teune.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised that none of his colleagues noticed he was gone. I guess the political science department is pretty dead over the summer.
Imagine cleaning out his office. His desk is probably buried under a summer's worth of mail.
In chemical terms, he reached equilibrium. Of course, Dr. Teune knows all about that - he wrote a book about it.
@Beaker Ben
ReplyDeleteEver seen the UPENN campus? Place is so huge you could hide an entire US Army division in their spare utility rooms, cleaner's closets, and other vacant spaces.
This story reminds me of a professor I had at Northeastern Ghetto Tech; he showed up for the first day, changed rooms because the class was too large, then never showed up again. The second in command showed up and taught the class instead; the first professor I never saw again - his replacement said he had some sort of medical condition.
If he died in April, are we to assume he was on leave during the spring term? While I can see UPenn students succumbing to spring fever and not complaining about a missed lecture or two toward the end of the semester, I can't imagine them failing to protest a lack of grades for spring-term classes (after all, they paid for them).
ReplyDeleteOr maybe the fall course schedule was created before April? Still, you'd think someone would have noticed an in-term death, and projected its likely consequences into the next term. Despite perennial complaints about older tenured proffies and their yellowed lecture notes, I've never heard a claim that they continue to lecture after death (which does, after all, end tenure). Actually, that's an interesting question: do proffies haunt academic buildings after their deaths? Or, if they/we choose to stick around, is it in other venues?
If CM had a "Comment of the Day" feature, I'd nominate Beaker Ben.
ReplyDelete"...do proffies haunt academic buildings after their deaths? Or, if they/we choose to stick around, is it in other venues?"
ReplyDeleteNo they haunt the places where their worst students work: Burger Kings, Target Store loading bays, the nudie booths in Nevada, every stripper pole in America....
The ghost of Reverend William Spooner is said to haunt New College at Oxford, no doubt because he was there for over 60 years. Ghosts that speak are rare; those that can raise a smile when they do are rarer still. As Spooner observed, "You don't want to hear a speech, you just want me to say one of those ... things."
ReplyDeleteWait! We get the haunt a strip club? Sign me up. When is the next train coming by?
ReplyDeleteStreiny: Students can afford to go to stripper bars? Or are they supposed to be working there?
ReplyDeleteThe latter, yes. After graduation.
ReplyDelete