Rotunda of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va. (LOC)

I remember the worst teacher I ever had. It was at SUNY Buffalo. He was teaching Childhood Psychology. This professor was a conflagration of worsts. His ego was so puffed up by everyone telling him what a smart academic he was that he couldn’t see beyond the bridge of his glasses. His biggest transgression that set me off was that he refused to supply the class with a syllabus until the day after the Add/Remove Deadline had passed. He considered our presence in his class on the opening day to be a personal insult, that we were “shopping for courses” and that we weren’t serious about our majors. When it became very clear to me that he was not going to follow the rules about a timely release of the class syllabus I marched down to my department and issued a formal complaint and in that same meeting removed myself from this man’s class. I didn’t need his obnoxiousness to graduate. I was told that there was nothing that could be done about him, that he had tenure and that short of him committing a felony could get him dug out of his position.

I appreciated his position and understood the spirit of what he was trying to do, even while I railed against it. This particular point has come up before and I’ve blogged about it at length. That ever since the late 90’s, kids in college have been attending with a different structure of assumptions and a different approach to attending a college. This very old professors primary complaint was a quaint throwback to a culture that has come and gone. Higher education is less about the privilege of going to college and just another self-glorified service provider, with a contract and negotiated terms and conditions.

It was many years ago that I attended this professors class. He was already very old (one foot in the grave, the other on a banana peel) so I can only assume that he is firmly and soundly dead. C’est la vie.