Why didn't anyone ever do anything?

Good times in the old office.

It's the time of the year when former students drop by while on their way somewhere else, in town visiting family for the holidays, hitting the shopping centers or just feeling a little auld land syne. Such was the case with the handsome grinning bald man Rebel Girl found waiting for her in her office a few days ago. Chunk seemed to be holding court with him, so Rebel Girl assumed the man was her faithful office mate’s student but no, he was one of hers from years ago, now approaching his fortieth birthday. He’d been driving by he said and thought he’d stop by to see how she was doing.

The more he talked, the more she remembered him, despite the startling absence of his youthful head of hair. She had been teaching that semester in the trailers, a leaky trailer on the outskirts of the parking lot and this student had struggled mightily but succeeded. He liked to sit in the back and rocked in his chair, which worried her, and indeed one day he rocked completely over, falling back and over, hitting his head with a crack Rebel Girl swears she can still hear. She reminded him of this and he laughed. He was so young then they both agreed.

He is a teacher now, teaching AP calculus and water polo at a private Catholic high school. Doing just fine, he said, each year more grateful for his old teachers. He was off to find Mark McNeil after his visit with Rebel Girl. He admired the new LA building and her new office digs and she directed him to where he might find McNeil in the still-relatively-new-to-him BSTIC building.

“Are you visiting anyone else?” she asked. “Who'd you study with in Math?” He was, after all, an AP calculus teacher. 

What followed was a sad and familiar tale. He had studied, he told them, with a professor now since retired with whom he did well as math was his strength but what he had really learned in that class, he said, was the kind of teacher not to be. As a teacher, he said, you need to hold students up, not pull them down.

Rebel Girl and Chunk immediately recognized the professor, famous for his rude classroom manner and his animosity toward female students in particular. The professor’s behavior was an open secret on campus. He was protected and tolerated through the years as people made various excuses for his behavior or downplayed it.

Minutes passed as each shared stories with a “Can you top this?” attitude until all looked at each other in despair and congratulated each other on not, indeed, being that kind of teacher or person.

“But why didn’t anyone ever do anything about him, about his behavior?” asked the student.

Friends in high places, they told him. Plus a tolerance for sexism.

That’s just wrong, the student said. 

They agreed.

A few days later, Rebel Girl was in midst of end-of-semester individual conferences with all of her composition students, an exhausting but useful activity. One of her outstanding students this semester is a vet, a student who attended IVC in the late 90s, dropped out, joined the military and now has returned and is excelling, ready to transfer. At the end of their conference, she asked him about his previous time at IVC, what it was like. He began to tell the tale of the math professor, in whose class he did well, but whose unprofessional behavior he recalled with the same fresh repugnance as the previous student. He asked the same question: why didn’t anyone ever do anything about this man?

It’s still a good question.

Anyone know the answer?

Hello darkness

The film was released on December 22, 1967 — 50 years ago