The Decathlon for Today's Professors--ten events that show you can navigate your way around campus with skill, ease, and aplomb. The Worldwide Gold Medalist will take home a bronzed version of the Olympic Gold Medal hung around the neck of each and every athlete, except that our Gold Medals will have the likeness of Jim Himself on the front, and a likeness of downtown Scranton on the back. The winning team--composed of individuals from the same department at one university-- will take home a new, full-size Amana Freezer to store their reprints in back at the departmental office.
Here are the ten events of the Professsor Games. If you can get audio files, you will now hear the august sounds of the trumpeteers heralding the events. If not, don't try complaining to your Dean; it won't help. Just say these words out loud in a 4 - 4 beat with the pitch ascending: ta ta ta ta (hold the last ta extra long for dramatic effect). All events will be held behind the main library on the campus of Emory University in suburban Atlanta.
1. I KNOW YOU! Class roster memorization--50 names in 15 minutes. Can you beat the clock and beat the world in this demonstration of the personal touch?
2. MAKE ME LAUGH! Ten sour-faced undergraduates and you have 5 minutes to make as many as you can break into a smile if not a "Yo Yo" chortle.
3. CHANGE MY GRADE! Each professor will have to endure a whining student for 15 minutes. A panel of 10 whining students will judge the best mollify-er. The whining students will be played by members of the Atlanta Theater Guild; the panel of judges will actually be whining students chosen by MMPI profile.
4. ZERO CONTENT! You must do 10 minutes of lecturing in which you say nothing--convey zip about the course material. Your ten minutes should be devoid of course content. However, you cannot simply digress and talk about the wonderful eateries, say, in the Atlanta area. It must appear--at all times--that you are lecturing on the course material and sticking to the topic. But actually you will not be; that is, if you can focus, focus, focus on, well, nothing much. The judges will be paid note-takers from a temp agency. The professor with the least notes (counted in notebook pages, of course) will be the winner.
5. GOOD MORNING, CLASS! You will stick your head through a hole in a wall and say "Good morning, class" to a group of 100 students who will judge you on a 1-10 unmarked "I like this instructor" scale. Remember: first impressions are important.
6. BEARING! No, we don't mean relevance. We mean physical bearing. The professors will walk, single file, up and down the mall and members of the Chamber of Commerce of Atlantic City (flown in for the event) will judge their gait on a hospitality and "body language" scale developed by the Nonverbal Communications Department at Vandelay College. You may talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?
7. OFFICE HOUR AMBIENCE! Each professor will have to walk through a favorite student bar ( adjacent to the Emory campus; hidden cameras provided) and see how many students he or she can shake hands with. More is better in this event, lest there be any confusion about the matter.
8. PASTORAL CARE! Ten clergy from the Atlanta area will interview each professor and see how they respond to other-directed, personal-issue-centered (some would say petty! hah!) questions that have nothing to do with the courses they teach. The clergy will rate each professor in terms of their capacity to show pastoral care (secular version, "I feel your pain"). This will be a non-denominational event.
9. INACTIVITY! Each professor must submit a current Vita and the shortest vita wins. Small is beautiful, and smallest is the most beautiful of all here.
10. HIP-NESS! We are referring to a global construct, sometimes confused with charisma, that changes with the times but whose eternal essence remains invariant under all mathematical transformations and mappings. Each professor will prepare and present a free-form, question-answering, biped-swaggering demonstration of hip-ness to a panel of media consultants to the 1996 presidential candidates. 3 minute time limit. No backup group allowed.