Happiness and comfort in Madison are too often dependent on other people. Every autumn, freshman years are ruined by roommates who blast The Cure at all hours or by attractive neighbors whose long-distance relationships refuse to end. But for upperclassmen, too, the joy of self-reliance is still a pipe dream. For even if you live as a shut-in, students are all at the mercy of one fickle group: professors.
UW is a great school, but professors here are a crapshoot. Some were mistake hirings that never retired. Some are brilliant writers but lousy teachers. Some are great researchers, but treat undergrads like a plague of locusts sent by an angry God to feast on their precious intellectual energy. People always ask how I ended up majoring in Afro-American Studies, and I invariably answer that it was the only department I found where all the professors seemed hell-bent on teaching me.
But even contented students must occasionally face the truly bad professor. For me, that happened over the summer.
My second class of the summer was helmed by a man with a deliberate, sermon-like lecture style. He would take five-second breaks between sentences to let his wisdom sink in, which was odd considering he rarely told us anything our books did not. He then tried to look better in comparison by bringing in an endless stream of even more tedious guest lecturers. It was sneaky, but a few of us hundred students could see through his ploy.
So how does one respond to the lousy prof?
Being the iconoclast I am, it only took me a week to respond with civil disobedience. I would show up a few minutes late to class, not bothering to find a seat. I would lie barefoot on the floor behind the lecture seats and read baseball news on my laptop, only looking up if it sounded like I was missing something of substance.
Score one for the proletariat. But if tedious professors only deserve minimal respect, what about ones who offend us on a human level?
One day, I went to the bathroom during our mid-lecture break and my professor used the urinal next to mine. He then left the bathroom without washing his hands. I returned to the lecture hall to see him shake hands with our three visiting lecturers, who had traveled 9,000 miles to visit Madison. Something had to be done. I asked my friend Mari for advice and her suggestion was simple: throw a coup.
\All you need are a handful of over-educated leaders and as many disenfranchised, landless peasants as possible,"" she explained.
Perfect. If there's anything easy to find in a room of UW students, it's over-educated and landless people. So I took the movement to the streets. But my revolutionary zeal was met by classmates with fear and rejection. It seems that most of my classmates didn't want to challenge the status quo. And in others, the mind was willing, but the flesh was trying to graduate.
The insurrection never gathered steam and I counted my blessings that the class was only four weeks. But it still highlighted certain key truths: Tenure isn't reserved only for great professors and everyone gets stuck with a dud at some point. But when it happens to you, I hope you do your best to stand up for students everywhere.
Vive la resistance.
amosap@hotmail.com.
