“Now listen, I think the best way for you all to understand the material is by talking about and figuring it out amongst yourselves, not just getting lectured at by a boring old man,” said Professor Elroy to his ENGL 207 class.

Attempting to get the discussion started, sophomore Melissa Alderman began to suggest that “in the first page of our reading, I thought Faulkner might have been implying–” before Professor Elroy stepped in to note that, while her answer was on the right track, she was actually completely wrong in every possible way (embarrassing!). So wrong in fact, that a 30 minute tangent was necessary to right the course, a tangent that would begin with the themes of The Sound and the Fury before veering off into remarks on professor Elroy’s other class and their reading, the professor’s recent marital struggles, a strange anecdote about Wittgenstein masturbating to mathematical equations during WWI, only stopping when Elroy spilled hot coffee on his pants while demonstrating Wittgenstein’s technique.

Seizing the rare moment of silence, Thud Willemsen (SFS ‘23) saw his opportunity for a kiss-ass question about Elroy’s thoughts on Faulkner’s stream of consciousness style. This would elicit a 30 minute answer so convoluted every student left the class ten minutes late and with a worse understanding of what “stream of consciousness” meant than when they started the day.