TALES out of SCHOOL

THE TALE OF A 'TAIL

Faculty 'tails were when a fraternity invited professors for cocktails in order to suck up to them. I invited my creative writing prof, Dean Marilyn Baldwin, and my favorite English profs, Donald Pease and Jim Cox. They all came. Standing in the Zeta Psi living room, we were discussing the problems of transportation (these were the gas-crisis years, remember). Pease said: "You know, all our problems would be taken care of if people just rode trains. They have about an eighth the environmental impact of cars and highways , and people can talk and discuss ideas..."

Cox interrupted: "Oh, Gawd! You Yankees always love trains. You always want to return to some romantic vision of American life. The fact is buses do the same thing as trains, and they can go everywhere, to the smallest towns off the highways where trains don't help anybody."

The discussion got more heated and more allegorical, to the point where Pease was accusing buses of ruining the American intellectual ethos and Cox was accusing trains of ruining the South. An underclass math major stood with his mouth hanging open: "Is this what it's like in the English department ?"