Get Out and Stay Out!

At an art college where I taught, there were people with strong opinions.

I was chatting with the professor in a History of Photography course one morning--I had casually dropped in prior to the beginning of class to say a friendly morning hello. The class was about to be lectured on the early 20th century French photographer of nightclubs. I'll edit his name in later.

I commented, somewhat offhandedly, and not publicly, that his photographs constituted a kind of nightmare-scape. The professor, bridling, said he didn't want "that kind of talk" in his classroom. Photographs represent facts about the world: if they were "art"--i.e., a medium that might rightly deal in such things as dreams--one could perhaps say what I'd said. He was ordinarily rather mild-mannered, so it took me a moment to realize that he was really angry. He drove the point home, however, by summarily, in front of the students, throwing me out of his classroom with the memorable words: "Get out of my classroom. And stay out"!

This certainly goes down in the annals of intellectual infamy. He may have been small, but he was Pompous. They often go together.