Wild stories of your college professors

I had a young associate prof in a political science class climb up onto a desk and literally yell at us for half an hour about "millions of people dying of AIDS in Africa". *Literally* yelling. He was dismissed for some other infraction the following year.

I had drunk college professor, professor who faked his credentials (he was actually the most competent prof in the department), one who pretended to have or had Alzheimers and would always say he'd forgotten who we were and what class it was, and my favorite, a glorious Mexican Lit prof who read aloud all the most erotic passages from Fuentes and Rulfo, all the time glancing up to lock eyes with hot students in the front row. Maybe all that is pretty normal, though?

Had a very elderly prof who used to get disoriented in the middle of his lecture, walk out of the room and out the front door of the building and wander around the courtyard outside. More than once one of us in class had to get up, go out and bring him back in. He'd pick up where he left off like nothing happened.

At the end of the course a couple of us went to the Dean's office to tell them what was happening. I don't think he was back in class the following semester (this was an elderly Jesuit who lived on campus).

I had a Danish or Dutch chem professor who had a thick accent & mumbled. Nobody could understand a word he said. Then he’d use the overhead projector to write chem symbols & equations and it looked like the pen was being held by a crab having a seizure. There was no way to understand this guy, and it seemed like he was doing it for lols. We couldn’t complain to the dept chair because he was it. This was at a university where more than half the profs were from foreign countries, so it wasn’t as if we were bumpkins unaccustomed to a different accent.

I’ve never seen such a huge bla ck board before, and I’ve attended 3 different universities.

At Brown, we had a Dean of Student Affairs who also taught Econ. He was caught soliciting a cop in a men’s rest stop on I-95. Students would often say out loud or whisper (a la that old space tv show) “Danger Dean Donovan. Danger”.

R6 I had thought Bruce Donovan was an archeologist or the like. He taught econ?

How do you write on a chalkboard that high? Climbing ladders? Isn’t that dangerous, especially for older professors.

Back in the '80s, I had a statistics teacher at OSU who point blank asked the girls not to wear anything too revealing because it was hard to "stand up here and teach when I've got a boner".

r9 I heard a story about a French prof who got a noticeable erection while giving a talk on the Marquis de Sade

I don't know why this is, but the craziest professors always seem to come from foreign language departments

Two more stories:

I had a lit professor who was a major oversharer. She told us one class how she almost stabbed her boyfriend years earlier during a heated fight. Another time, she speculated to us that she thought her uncle had sexually abused her cousin, and gave some rather graphic details. These comments were only tangentially related to the text and the class generally felt very uncomfortable.

Another professor -- also lit -- was probably anorexic. She would drink diet coke during class and looked VERY unwell and emaciated. She was going through a divorce and would spend the first twenty minutes of every class meeting telling us the latest developments. Again -- being in her class was uncomfortable.