College Stories from Our Sewanee Professors

Ever wonder what college was like for your professors? They were after all, in our same shoes once upon a time. Sometimes we take that for granted and don’t think that they understand everything we are going through.  Believe me, they do! In an effort to display our similarities with current Sewanee Faculty, I asked around for funny college stories. Many did not care to include their stories — maybe TOO EMBARRASSING?! But here are the few that did! Enjoy!

Pamela Macfie (Goucher College)

“My love for Shakespeare bloomed while I was an undergraduate at Goucher College.  There I took every course on Shakespeare offered by the English Department.  Then I headed to Johns Hopkins University, where I took a class focused on Shakespeare and Myth.  The final semester of my senior year, while I was completing an honors thesis on ‘Shakespeare’s Metamorphic Art,’ I experienced something of a Shakespeare-inspired metamorphosis myself.  I played Rosalind in a Theatre Hopkins’ production of As You Like It.  The performance unfolded out-of-doors on the Hopkins campus and featured a trio of lambs, herded by the Forest of Arden’s Silvius.  Since the Hopkins students didn’t have a place to house the lambs on their city campus, the lambs found a temporary home (one that lasted for the production’s duration) at Goucher.  A women’s college in that day, my alma mater had many fenced fields.  These fields, ordinarily the province of the equestrian program, provided the lambs with good forage.  When night fell, my fellow actors and I led the lambs from field to fold–actually, to Froelicher Dormitory, where their plaintive bahs were endured by those who would sacrifice anything for Shakespeare. By day, the lambs traveled between the two campuses on the Goucher-Hopkins shuttle.  Scrambling up and down the bus-steps, they filled its aisles with the jangling of bells and the bleating of nature.  We could not have had a better way to advertise our greenworld comedy, although the lambs’ late-night Saturday appearance at the Hopkins Rathskeller and, later yet, at the Blue Jay Bar surely boosted attendance at our Sunday matinees as well.”

Gerald Smith (University of Richmond)

It would have to be the time when I hi-jacked the Good Morning America bus and parked it in front of the Quad. It is a long story–even longer if I tell it (to quote Pooh).

Jay Fisher (Sewanee)

“When I was in college during my senior year some of my friends and I jumped the train in Cowen around midnight and rode it all the way to Atlanta. When it started to get light the next morning, we jumped off the train, called a high school friend to cook us breakfast and we hitchhiked back to Sewanee.”

“Also, one April Fools day, right around Easter, a friend and I bought some multicolored Easter chicks and delivered them one by one into the dorm rooms of our unsuspecting friends while they were away.”

Virginia Craighill (Sewanee)

“My 25th year Reunion at Sewanee occurred about 4 years after I’d come back to teach in the English department here.  The Friday morning of Homecoming, I had been dutifully teaching Act V of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to my freshmen for about 15 minutes, when eight of my C’ 82 female classmates walked into the classroom, went to the back row of the class, and sat down, without saying a word.  It was clear they were up to no good.  The students kept looking back at them, and I just kept teaching, but when they started to beat out a rhythm on their desks that was a prelude to dirty little song we used to sing, I knew what was coming and decided to call their bluff.

I announced to the students that I’d hired a traveling acting troupe to put on the famous “Pyramus and Thisbe” scene from Act V.  I called my friends up to the front of the room (some of them had been Economics majors, some English, but it was doubtful anyone had read Dream in 25 years), assigned them roles, handed them the students’ texts, and told them to start acting.   In this particular scene, the worse the acting is, the funnier the scene becomes, and the closer to Shakespeare’s intention, and my friends were very bad actors.  However, they gave it everything they had and put on a bawdy, spontaneous, and hilarious show for my mystified freshmen, then walked back out the door.

I’ve tried never to teach on a Homecoming Friday again.”

Christopher McDonough (Tufts University)

“I can remember back when I was in college in the 80s, I decided to grow up big mutton-chop sideburns.  This was the 80s, and you know what was really not cool?  Mutton-chop sideburns.  I loved them so much.  But all my women friends did not, and one day, they decided to do something about it.  They had all agreed that, whenever they saw me, they would say, “Boo! Boo Chris’ sideburns!”  So one day I walked out of my dorm room and all day there were these friends of mine booing my sideburns. In the end, I bowed to the pressure and shaved them off. But I still miss them.”

Jordan Troisi (Albion College)

“College was where I discovered I am a terrible, terrible actor. During my first year at Albion College, my alma mater, a friend was in a bind because he needed one more actor for a play he was stage-directing. So I decided to help him out, even though I’d had virtually no acting experience in the past. I had 4 lines in that play. And during our first rehearsal, I delivered one of those lines so poorly, that the director removed the line from the play, and instead, had me whisper it into the ear of the other actor instead. I had 4 lines in a play, and 25% of them were cut. College was where I discovered I am a terrible, terrible actor.”

Chip Manning (Sewanee)

“I had Dr. John Bordley for one of the early computer science classes (cobalt or fortran program).  Not a very large class but Dr. Bordley was a stickler for compiling with the (at that time) mandatory dress code.  Early in the semester, one of the students showed up one morning with no tie.  Dr. Bordley advised him that his dress was unacceptable and that he was excused from class.  The student showed up about 2 minutes later with the finest looking white tie made of toilet paper you had ever since including a well formed knot at the top.  Dr. Bordley rewarded him for his creativity by allowing him to attend the class for that day but admonished all of us that such solutions would not be acceptable in the future.  Needless to say, we all attend class for the rest of the semester well attired.”

Elizabeth Grammer (Davidson College)

“When I was a freshman at Davidson, I had braces, and I was told by the orthodontist to wear my head gear (which covered the top of my head) for 12 hours if I wanted to get my braces off, and I wanted to get them off, and I was diligent and disciplined as a student and as a patient… and so I wore my headgear in the library at night, much to the amusement of my male classmates. The movie ET was popular at the time, and so each night, these friends would stop by my study table, tap me on the head, point their index fingers to the sky, and say ‘phone home ET.’  All good fun, and so I kept wearing the thing and got the braces off in a timely manner.”

“A friend and I loved to dance, and so we partnered up for an all-night dance-a-thon for some cause.  They picked a winning couple every hour; and in the middle of the night, around 3 a.m., there was a ‘dance off’ among the winning couples, of which we were one. Deaton assured me we would win if I  ‘gatored’–does anyone do this anymore?–on the beer-drenched floor, and because I’m competitive and we badly wanted to win that darn title and get that gift certificate to the local diner, I gatored on that beer-drenched floor. And we won.  I still have a photo of that night, and I am still quite proud of our triumph.  I married a man, whom I love dearly, but who hates to dance. Can you picture Mr. Dr. Grammer dancing on table in a fraternity house or crawling on the floor like an alligator? I still get my dance fix on Karaoke Night at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, though I do not go near beer-drenched fraternity houses and I do not “gator” anymore.”

*If you did not get to read one of your favorite professor’s stories, take this as an encouragement to ask them in person! Some professors are more than willing to relive the college days through story telling!*