Academia Now

Professor Willard: My office... shit; I'm still only in my office... Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the classroom. I'm here a semester now... waiting for a class... getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute the snowflake squats in the dorm, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around the walls moved in a little tighter.

Dean Corman: Your mission is to proceed up across campus on the shuttlebus. When you find Dr. Kurtz’s classroom, infiltrate the class by whatever means available and terminate the professor.

Professor Willard: Terminate the Professor?

Dean Corman: He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct, giving long essay exams, assigning massive amounts of reading! he's flunked over 90% of his class!

Trustee: Terminate with extreme prejudice.

Department Chair Lucas: You understand that this class does not exist, nor will it ever exist on any transcript...

The silverback, the one they called “Doc”, was from Yale. He was wrapped too tight for an R3; probably wrapped too tight for Yale. Lance, the new TT, was a famous grad student from UCLA. One look at him and you wouldn't believe he ever gotten a grade lower than an A+ in his life. Clean... Professor Clean... was from some South Bronx community college and the light and space of our campus really put the zap on his head. Then there was Dr. Phillips, the Department head. It might have been my class, but it sure as shit was the Chief's department!

Professor Willard: How many students had I already flunked? There were those six that I knew about for sure. Close enough to drop their tears on my gradebook. But this time, it was another professor. That wasn't supposed to make any difference to me, but it did. Shit... charging a man with not following the syllabus in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500. I took the class. What the hell else was I gonna do?

Professor Kilgore: Smell that? You smell that?

Professor Lance: What?

Kilgore: Whiteboard marker, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. [kneels.] I love the smell of whiteboard marker in the morning. You know, one time we had graduate exams for like 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' grad student body. The smell, you know that marker smell, the whole classroom smelled like... [sniffing, pondering.] ...final grades. Someday this semester is gonna end...

[suddenly walks off]

Professor Willard: [voice-over] "Someday this semester is gonna end." That'd be just fine with the kids in the class. They weren't looking for anything more than graduation. Trouble is, I'd been back there, and I knew that it just didn't exist anymore.

Grad Student: Hey, man, you don't talk to the professor. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a adjunct warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he'll... uh... well, you'll say "hello" to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you. He won't even notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say, "Did you read the syllabus? Did you know the end word in syllabus was ‘bus’? "... I mean I'm... no, I can't... I'm a little man, I'm a little man, he's... he's a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged sneakers scuttling across floors of lecture halls...

Professor Lance: This Kurtz guy? He's wacko, man! He's worse than crazy. He's tenured. It's fuckin' pagan idolatry. Look around you. Shit! He's loco... I ain't afraid of all them fuckin' whiteboards, and PCs and desks and shit. I used to think if I died in an evil place, then my soul wouldn't be able to make it to Heaven. But now? Fuck! I mean, I don't care where it goes, as long as it ain't here. So whaddya wanna do? I'll not renew his contract for next semester.

Professor Kurtz: (Looks at his student evals): “The horror, the horror: