“Actually,” interrupts Jack Williams (SFS ’25), “sex trafficking is a densely complex issue with a number of multifaceted factors that must be admitted into our consideration.”

The class gasps. No one has ever said something so intelligent. 

“Tell me more,” coos Professor Hopsdick, clearly won over by Williams’s flowery language.

“Well the thing is, when you think about it, at the end of the day, when it’s all said and done, it’s one of those special issues where the specific lens you use to view it is just as vitally important to the means to the end as the method you ultimately use to address it.”

Hopsdick, newly infatuated, replies, “Keep going, son.”

“And when we think about the lenses, we arrive at a dichotomy— a double pairing, real but false— which polarizes the thought-provoking intimacy of the matter, almost like a bifocal (which was invented by Benjamin Franklin, who feels more relevant now than ever).”

“Say more,” moans Professor Hopsdick.

“And when we examine this potentially harmful dichotomy,” Williams continues, “we find a false equivocation in the turned-around backlash repetition of our own contradiction. It wholly perplexes the soul, turning us both toward and away from our globalized darkness, in a way that is both extremely human and entirely artificial. And it becomes clear, now, that the old world cannot become the new world until we address this deep shadow that represents the scourge of our consciousness in the modern-day, post-Eiffel Tower world.”

“Well, I think we’ve solved it then,” concludes the professor. Hopsdick dismisses the class (for what point is there in teaching after the world’s problems have so articulately been solved?) and leaves extremely satisfied. “I’ve finally gotten through to someone. There are students who really care,” he whispers to himself as he loads his tattered messenger bag into the passenger seat of his 2005 Volvo S40. Sure, he may have spilled his boiling coffee all over himself this morning, but this day has really managed to turn itself around.