When I’m bored in class, there are two things I daydream about 1) Hilarious on-campus wrestling matches (Kyu-po versus Steve the Con Janitor) 2) What I would do as a Lawrence Professor. The second option tends to keep me a little more distracted and allows for numerous variations.
Sometimes I teach something real like “History of Theater” or “The English Novel,” but most of the time I teach what I know – YouTube, cheeseburgers and vodka.
There are a few constants in my imaginary associate professorship: grades are based solely on who can make me laugh or brings the best cookies, I get paid enough to dress like Michelle Obama, and instead of publishing, I just show up on “Best Week Ever” or “The Soup” every once and a while and call it a day. No slacks, no references to “Sand County Almanac,” and absolutely no Moodle. Guest lecturers will include Steve Buscemi, Steve Harvey, Steve-the-guy-who-invented-all-the-Apple-stuff, Stephen Colbert and my father Stephen “Too Tall” Taylor.
Bertrand Goldgar and I eat lunch together every day in the grill, and I constantly wow him by my dry wit and satirical eye and he calls me a modern day Jonathan Swift. I laugh quietly and tell him he is too kind, but I secretly know that it is true. We dedicate 10 minutes out of our schedules every day to sitting in the Main Hall first floor office tripping over-serious professors like Dave Owens and Peter Raccuglia on their way to pick up their mail.
Assistant Professor J.B Sivanich and I stand around and act like we don’t want tenure because we take comfort in knowing that we could pick up and move to any other non-serious (read: liberal arts) institution like Bates or St. Johns or whatever, whenever we wanted to, but he gets insanely jealous when I become tenure-track and he doesn’t and moves to a state school where people mock his pants and don’t understand his beard.
Every spring term, I teach outside, and when it rains we just sit around and complain. In fact, I spend most of my academic year like most teachers do their summers – student-free, well-traveled, doing “research.” I will whole-heartedly support such campus activities as senior streak and those 50-cent cans deals in the VR, and I will never hold class April 20. Read my lips: “No class on 4/20.”
Given my obscene amount of professor crushes, it is only fair that I become Lawrence’s newest female faculty heartthrob. Move over Rosa.
Students will be lining up to take “YouTube 404: Self Satisfaction Through the Mockery of Others” and “Vodka Tutorial” – prerequisite: jocks and cute boys only.” All of this will be done in the hopes of working my way up through the ranks to become president of our fine institution. My first act as president, you wonder …
Housing will now be decided through hilarious wrestling matches. Get ready.
If I were a Lawrence professor…
