a jeu d’sprit

by James Como (August 2016)

Students – thousands – could no longer stand him, and so they had poisoned his vocation (for that is what teaching had been for him, a calling) with bad ratings, venomous petitions, veiled mockery, all sorts of grumblings to this dean or that, and the worst punishment of all: avoidance of his classes. It ate away at what he understood to be his standing. Then the other shoe: the provost told him his time had come. After forty years at the same plough, discrete retirement, no farewell dinner.  more>>>