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Aug. 21st, 2009 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
settecorviMy first year of college I fell, almost by accident, into the First Year Seminar taught by one of the most interesting people I have ever met. I have hard time articulating just what I mean by "interesting," because I've considered and discarded "pitiable" and "terrifying" as both true but not sufficient. An author with a long and checkered history of odd jobs, from tea taster to corporate shark, he had the sort of charisma that had the entire class thronging around him. He arranged for extra reading and extra meetings outside of class that went on far into the night, and nobody complained, or if they did I never noticed. He started up an e-mail group so the students in his two courses could debate, ask questions, and post those essays he judged worthy. I fell behind on reading the constant back-and-forth that flooded into my inbox pretty quickly; I had four other classes, plus the Conservatory to worry about. Instead, I saved all of the e-mails in a folder titled "The Burning Gods", promising myself I'd read them when I had time. I don't remember why I called it that, besides that I liked the phrase.
Second semester, the FYSEM schedule he offered didn't mesh with some of my mandatory courses. We kept in touch. For reasons I've never really understood, he had chosen me first semester, along with a handful of others. We were the elect, invited over to his house for debates, offered mentorship and the assurance that we were, as his oft-repeated refrain went, "brilliant." I can't speak for the others, but I had some nasty self esteem issues my first couple years. Hearing that yes, I was intelligent, I was a special, special snowflake, I had something worthwhile to offer the world, and getting that validation from a respected authority figure who cultivated the wise and farsighted aura of a guru or a cult leader was amazing. And I really cannot stress his charisma enough. In person he had the sort of magnetic pull that made everything he said seem reasonable, even when you realized it was a load of bull once you'd left his sphere of influence. I ended up talking to one of the other students who'd taken his course and came to the conclusion that it had taken us nearly a year to look back on that class with enough objectivity to say "Wow. The way he positioned us as his little disciples was kind of creepy."
Anyway. Trouble came to Paradise in the second semester. I got it all second hand, at first only from the professor, eventually from some of the students he'd alienated. He told me about the bitter divide in his class over the extra reading he'd assigned, about the vitriolic arguments that devolved in ad hominem attacks, about how shocked and upset he was over the immaturity of his 18 year old students. Oh, and about the student who confessed her love to him and how he invited her out to watch the sun rise. In retrospect, I have no idea how much was true, how much was a lie, and how much he honestly thought was true but did not correspond to reality as most people recognize it. The entire fiasco came to a peak at the end of the second year, when he posted publicly about a relationship he disapproved of between two of his elect. They split off and sent a scathing critique of his teaching style to the administration.
Yes, this is all very dramatic. We were first year college students out on our own for the first time. Rather than get drunk and party, we'd elected to get sucked into a culty tempest in a teapot. I don't know what the professor's excuse was for aiding, abetting, and instigating.
I let myself fall out of contact with him. The gaps between our e-mails grew longer, the e-mails themselves shorter and more perfunctory. With distance, I came to see the extent of his neediness, his ego and arrogance, the way he'd manipulated his students to make himself the center of his own little universe.
But I've let the two hundred e-mails in The Burning Gods lie in my inbox for the past four years, unwilling to throw them out just because I'd become disillusioned. I always intended to read them eventually, hopefully with the understanding that an extra few years of life has given me and sympathy for all of those passionate, brilliant kids talking about philosophy like they were the first ones to ever really think about it. I've glanced through a couple of them and they're about what you'd expect: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Today I hit delete.
Second semester, the FYSEM schedule he offered didn't mesh with some of my mandatory courses. We kept in touch. For reasons I've never really understood, he had chosen me first semester, along with a handful of others. We were the elect, invited over to his house for debates, offered mentorship and the assurance that we were, as his oft-repeated refrain went, "brilliant." I can't speak for the others, but I had some nasty self esteem issues my first couple years. Hearing that yes, I was intelligent, I was a special, special snowflake, I had something worthwhile to offer the world, and getting that validation from a respected authority figure who cultivated the wise and farsighted aura of a guru or a cult leader was amazing. And I really cannot stress his charisma enough. In person he had the sort of magnetic pull that made everything he said seem reasonable, even when you realized it was a load of bull once you'd left his sphere of influence. I ended up talking to one of the other students who'd taken his course and came to the conclusion that it had taken us nearly a year to look back on that class with enough objectivity to say "Wow. The way he positioned us as his little disciples was kind of creepy."
Anyway. Trouble came to Paradise in the second semester. I got it all second hand, at first only from the professor, eventually from some of the students he'd alienated. He told me about the bitter divide in his class over the extra reading he'd assigned, about the vitriolic arguments that devolved in ad hominem attacks, about how shocked and upset he was over the immaturity of his 18 year old students. Oh, and about the student who confessed her love to him and how he invited her out to watch the sun rise. In retrospect, I have no idea how much was true, how much was a lie, and how much he honestly thought was true but did not correspond to reality as most people recognize it. The entire fiasco came to a peak at the end of the second year, when he posted publicly about a relationship he disapproved of between two of his elect. They split off and sent a scathing critique of his teaching style to the administration.
Yes, this is all very dramatic. We were first year college students out on our own for the first time. Rather than get drunk and party, we'd elected to get sucked into a culty tempest in a teapot. I don't know what the professor's excuse was for aiding, abetting, and instigating.
I let myself fall out of contact with him. The gaps between our e-mails grew longer, the e-mails themselves shorter and more perfunctory. With distance, I came to see the extent of his neediness, his ego and arrogance, the way he'd manipulated his students to make himself the center of his own little universe.
But I've let the two hundred e-mails in The Burning Gods lie in my inbox for the past four years, unwilling to throw them out just because I'd become disillusioned. I always intended to read them eventually, hopefully with the understanding that an extra few years of life has given me and sympathy for all of those passionate, brilliant kids talking about philosophy like they were the first ones to ever really think about it. I've glanced through a couple of them and they're about what you'd expect: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Today I hit delete.
