Perhaps a bit of a funny question.
This week I read a long article in The New Yorker, ‘The Paper Tomb,’ about a classics professor at Bennington, name of Claude Fredericks, whom some of you may or may not vaguely know as a model for a somewhat bloviatory character in Donna Tartt’s debut novel The Secret History (1992).
I was struck, to say the least, to find this Fredericks himself had enjoyed in toto three semesters of Harvard College, in the early 1940s, having as his professor of classics Mr Harvard himself, John H. Finley Jr.
Just one and a half year.
I am sure those three semesters amounted to a solid basis, but still… how the hell do you get to be a classics professor at Bennington or anything without even so much as a bachelor’s degree? That is my question.
Fredericks didn’t just teach Greek and Latin, he also dabbled big time in Dante and some dribbles of Japanese literature. He preferred to teach at home and needless to say he had incessant sexual relationships with students, in short, an educational nightmare of epic proportions.
But still… how did he even get the job?
The article is entitled ‘The Paper Tomb’ because Fredericks wrote a diary about all this stuff, that was supposed to be his claim to fame.
Perhaps this topic more properly belongs in ‘The Academy’ section of these boards?