Professors not having appropriate professional boundaries with their students has a very poor track record historically (though I realize I’m mostly talking about sexually predatory men, which is obviously a very different thing.) The article says “But the students who knew her best described her as a singular force of good in their lives.” but I think that may very well reflect a kind of survivorship bias. We’re not hearing from the students who were devastated by being humiliated in class and perhaps were driven away from a field of study they could have been nurtured in instead.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 8:13 AM on May 11 [35 favorites]

I'm with Horace Rumpole. Yeah, it's cool that several students feel that their lives are better for having Prof. Hassold in their lives... but humiliating them is never cool. Doing so deliberately, and in front of others can be devastating.

I teach high school students. I want them to learn and think and read and write. Embarrassing students in front of their peers does precisely nothing to help their learning.

There's a quote from Harvey Fierstein that applies... “The jockey never recalls using a whip. The horse never forgets.”
posted by dfm500 at 8:36 AM on May 11 [25 favorites]

This is complicated. The good she did was good indeed. The downside is encapsulated in just a few words: "humiliated", "withering style". Some students would be negatively affected, but some would strive to meet the standards she set down. In the messiness of our internal worlds, my humiliation could be triggered by the most innocouous of offhand comments by a well-regarded teacher. I have some responsibility to process what an instructor says and does. I can process it into hatred, resentment or a burning ambition to prove myself. The teacher has the power to pronounce, the student needs to exercise the power to process.
posted by storybored at 9:00 AM on May 11 [6 favorites]

I sometimes feel that the heirarchy of toxic personalities by profession is actually:

- Hollywood bigwigs
- ACADEMICS
- startup founders
- Doctors (not all doctors, but the worst are SO bad)
- Wall Street
- (tie) Lawyers / other CEOs

... and I just don't think that gets enough public recognition.

And obviously that's complicated, there's a lot of good people trying to do good work, but the amount of ego in professorships and the academy broadly is just so off-putting.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 9:11 AM on May 11 [3 favorites]

"Stalin was good man."

So said my fathers Russian girlfriend. Survivorship bias for real.
posted by Pembquist at 9:13 AM on May 11 [7 favorites]

Well, I think she sounds delightfully sweet.

Despite the lede, it sounds like she rarely had any students attend to her house/yard - only one student is mentioned, and it's clear they were close already. I'd feel differently if she was regularly plying random students to do so, but it doesn't sound like that at all - clearly she did have boundaries, which is why most students only ever met up with her in restaurants and other public places.

As to the "humiliation" "withering style" - well the only example we get is:

“Her conclusion that the woman in ‘The Straw Hat’ is an aristocrat is simply wrong,” Professor Hassold wrote in Ms. Bailey’s academic file on Dec. 8, 1995. “I do not understand how she could have read about the works and gotten it so muddled.”

I personally wouldn't write that about a student's work, but it also doesn't strike me as that horrible. I've had professors that are mercurial and I've had professors that have high standards and are direct yet consistent - the former are stressful to work with, the latter are more often than not sweet people who are very committed to what they do and to their students. The fact that not only dozens of students remember her fondly and credit her for their success, but also continued to travel to meet up with her after graduation speaks pretty highly of her.
posted by coffeecat at 9:24 AM on May 11 [11 favorites]

I had been working at New College for a few years when Dr. Hassold announced she'd be retiring. The college wanted to do a magazine piece on her legendary career, but one did not simply tell Dr. Hassold she would be the subject of a story. You asked permission and hoped for the best, because she was said to be cranky if not outright dismissive of such things. And somehow it fell to me to get said permission.

Her office in Caples was actually the southern half of the mansion pictured in the story, and to get to her desk near a window overlooking Sarasota Bay you had wind your away around tables and bureaus and chairs stacked with boxes and papers. It was dimly lit, just natural light from windows behind blinds and curtains, so it felt like one of those scenes in a movie where the protagonists pick their way through the murky museum storeroom in search of monsters or treasure or such.

I found her eventually, and I remember she just sighed and seemed resigned, but graciously agreed. The eventual writer said their interview was pleasant and went on for hours, and that the story was fun to write. I tracked down some alums and added their recollections (none are in the NYT story, by chance) and every one had nothing but respect and admiration for her. (Yes, such stories rarely include criticism or unkindness, but I don't remember ever hearing even a whisper of that.)

The story now is in one of a couple dozen boxes, as I'm packing up my house to move, or I'd share it. But I recall that the story depicted Hassold as powerfully feminist, strong-willed, smart as hell and someone who truly wanted students to learn. In that, she embodied what New College was before Gov. Ron DeSantis and his cronies took over and the school.

The college had a retirement party for Dr. Hassold under a big tent on the bayfront, several of her students traveled back for it, and she seemed touched by that. There are lot of Novos (New College alums) here on the Blue, and I'm hoping a few of them show up and share what they know of her.
posted by martin q blank at 12:29 PM on May 11 [20 favorites]

The “cult of Chris” framing is such a reach. The professor was a quirky academic who had no children of her own, how is that a “complex” legacy? How is her generosity indicative of extreme favoritism to some of her students (and worse, never described behavior)?

Maybe Professor Hassold was a cruel teacher, but it’s not depicted in the article. As Coffee Cat points out, the one example of her harshness is a written critique. The now adult student doesn’t seem particularly wounded by it.

That she was a hoarder is interesting (doesn't everyone have a hoarder in their life?) but calm down Mr. Sanders.

If the professor was less than the accomplished educator as described in the article, at least she gave life changing money to 30 people?

Thanks for the link.
posted by rhonzo at 2:21 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]

Looks like the New College website has purged traces of the old days but I found a copy of the story tucked away on the 'net. I'll put in a couple of excerpts here, redacting the name of an alum because the alum is not in the NYT story but might have been in the professor's will. First from a longtime colleague and former faculty dean:

"Perhaps Cris's greatest contribution is the new form of teaching that she actually pioneered at the college," said Douglas Berggren, emeritus professor of philosophy. "Cris went beyond the seminar discussion to which many of us were committed. She called upon her students to create detailed presentations for class discussions. They learned how to encounter the material firsthand, unmediated by the interpretations of the professor, a skill that stood them very well in graduate school."

This from an alum who lobbied her way into one of Dr. Hassold's advanced courses as a freshman and went on to take more and have Hassold as a thesis advisor:

"I looked in the course catalog my first year and saw this course I had to take... I went to talk to Cris and it was very clear she was this feisty, ass-kicking dynamic person. There was just something where I felt like I had to work with her." ... When she turned in her first paper, she said, it was clear that she was not at the same level as the older students, but Hassold knew what to do. "She neither gave me a pass because I was early on in my development, nor did she tear me down. She met me where I was and set high expectations for how I could get to the next level."

The class turned out to be a defining experience. "It was one of those moments people talk about, where their brains exploded and their worldviews completely changed," she said. ... Students marveled at their professor's seeming contradictions. They would see her white hair and her conservative clothes, and hear her colorful Old South expressions -- "and then the next things out of her mouth are radical, post-structural feminist, and queer gender theory, and she does it without blinking!"

I didn't know Dr. Hassold, but I heard a lot of stories like this, and I wish I'd had professors like her.
posted by martin q blank at 2:41 PM on May 11 [5 favorites]

Many students wondered, however, why Professor Hassold never invited them into her home.

Was professors inviting students over such a usual thing at New College?
posted by trig at 2:49 PM on May 11 [1 favorite]

Ok. I mean, people really seem to be taking the "critcism" bit and running with it. Is it because she is a lady professor, she is not allowed to be strict about her subjects? This is college, after all. And it s not like she was making personal comments about students.

During the same time period as mentioned in this article, many pastors and priests were doing much worse things, and were violating a lot more than personal boundaries. Teachers have received disparately more punishment for the same crimes of pastors and law enforcement.

When I was in college, professors having dinner at their houses was common.

Really I suppose it s a sign of the general anti-intellectualism we have, that a sentimental piece about a nutty, but generous professor is getting so much flack, and we wonder how a teacher could feel dedicated to her students.

It s also significant how much respect we've lost for teachers. Being married to one, I know a little bit about the struggles to assist student who need help, it s much harder now to assist students with transportation, food, etc necessary for them to study, even though most people support the restrictions for non-contact.


When did that happen? The 2000s?
posted by eustatic at 3:08 PM on May 11 [3 favorites]

"Stalin was good man."

So said my fathers Russian girlfriend. Survivorship bias for real.

lol, this professor is Stalin because she criticized her student's work? Isn't that a writing professor's job?

What a wild piece of unsupported hyperbole. Yes, all the students who got bad grades were like innocent victims sent to the gulag, and everyone saying nice things just has no idea how much they've been bamboozled into thinking she was a thoughtful human. They were probably paid! Wait, they were paid!!
posted by oneirodynia at 4:16 PM on May 11

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