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Recently I tweeted about stress-tummy in 5 semesters of Latin. That isn’t what comes up when I think of the worst of college. Instead, I think of the time a sat under a seminar table in protest during freshman writing. A small thread. https://twitter.com/devinfitzger/status/1283776282740719616
You might ask how I ended up there. I had reached the limit on the hostile environment created by the prof. That day, he made a classmate cry. So I said to the prof that if he said anything shitty like that again I would sit under the table in protest. He did and I did.
What we all knew was that he’d been making harassing comments to pretty classmates the whole term. Are you an athlete? A dancer? Because [description of body or movement]
I was immune, because I was profoundly not-cute at the time. But my underage sister wasn’t when she came for a campus visit two years later.
The lowest point was when I complained to two professors, same generation, in my home department. My anger was dismissed — nothing had happened *to me*, so I was encouraged to “let it go” and “it’s just his way.” These are people I still admire & love, but there is still a cloud.
One of my adored mentors retired a few years ago. I took a surprise flight up for the celebration. The gross professor from my freshman year, though he was long-retired, was present. And of course made a comment that I had “improved” since college.
There are so many layers to this kind of thing — I took a second class with the creep, I met monks who knew him as a benefactor, I saw students who met inappropriate behavior and egged it on themselves. I’m tweeting about this and I’m still not able to make this a neat narrative.
What I can tell you is that nothing, absolutely nothing, enrages me more to this day than profs who don’t respect boundaries, who play in this gray area of mind fuckery.
