[lit-ideas] Re: anecdote of the authoritarian professor
- From: John Burt <burt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 10:10:56 -0500
I don't think Mao is much idealized in the academy now, but I know
there are still some admirers around. It was one thing to do so before
the full story of the Great Leap Forward came out. Certainly as late as
the early 1980's the dimensions of that disaster were not generally
known in the West (they were a surprise to me). It's another thing now.
I don't know when Eric's friend took this course, but I wonder if the
professor involved still thinks what s/he is reported to have thought.
John Burt
On Wednesday, March 24, 2004, at 09:36 AM, Scribe1865@xxxxxxx wrote:
> I asked my friend to supply the story of the difficult professor and
> have
> copied it below. It proves nothing, but illustrates difficulties with
> one
> professor. -Eric
> ____
> ... old story indeed ... he was teaching a class on the American
> Renaissance
> (Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Emerson, etc.) and suddenly one fine day
> began to
> rhapsodize about the perfection of the Maoist system ... said, with a
> dreamy
> utopian look in his eyes, that Mao made the intellectuals work in the
> fields
> with the peasants for six months out of the year ... like an idiot, I
> burst out
> laughing, imagining this guy being forced out into the fields by Bush
> Sr. (prez
> at the time) to work with the farmers ... dead silence, passage of deep
> geologic time ... felt like the last human, finally spotted by the pod
> people ...
> the prof fixed me with the coldest glare you can imagine, and I just
> smiled and
> shrugged ... he then went on with his lecture, and I got a C at the
> end of
> the semester, the lowest grade I ever got in an English course ...
> moral: when
> around fundamentalist cultists, don't laugh ...
> not really much of a parable for that list of yours; I doubt they'd be
> impressed ... a C is not much of a punishment really ... today I'd
> probably be
> reeducated in a sensitivity course, serves me right ... outtahere
> -----------
>
>
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