TALES OUT OF SCHOOL

A special section on our professors and what they taught—whether they meant to or not.

Excuse me. Would you mind moving your war canoe?"

THOSE TWO SENTENCES COMPOSE the sum total over eight years of what legendary government professor Vincent Starzinger has said to the editor of this magazine. The editor had spent the day across the river in Norwich with a group of upperclassmen preparing to lead freshman trips, and the Ledyard Canoe Club had provided its war canoe for transportation back to campus. Fifteen people fit comfortably into the long wooden boat, the editor steered. He sidled the canoe up to the Boathouse dock. That was when Professor Starzinger approached, ready for his daily row. His shell lay on the dock, blocked from the river.

"Excuse me," he said politely but in a tone that has overcome generations of students. "Would you mind moving your war canoe?

There was not the slightest hint, in his voice1 of amusement over the juxtaposition of "war canoe" and the Connecticut River. I he canoe was moved. And at that moment the editor'felt like an undergraduate again. No one campus utterance could so recapture the feeling of timidity and absurdity and awe that so many students have when talking to professors.

For this issue, we asked people for their own professorial stories, for the tales that remind us that some part of the self remains the eternal undergraduate.