Most universities have it rough. If they’re not ivy league, they have a lot of work to do to impress visitors. Sure, Baron von Ivyleague, clad in a Mr. Peanut-esque monocle and tophat, can give students a ride in his flying yacht, but a tenured professor for Uncle Marty’s Community College has to make do with substantially fewer resources.

Your typical college is a sales atmosphere. Campus tours require the guide to embellish a relaxing pond (south-campus swamp area), beautiful performing arts center (cafeteria, chairs removed), and their recently-updated high-tech computing facility (small network of Pentium 200 MMX computers). All it takes, though, is one crazy tenured professor to ruin the sales pitch.

See, back in 2000, Josh Breckman was making the rounds at various colleges. He tried visiting at off-times so that he could get a more personal feel for the school. His visit to Northeastern went well – he met a nice professor who managed to sell him on the school’s computer science program. She turned Josh over to one of the program’s professors in the school’s computer lab.

This professor had done pretty well for himself. Despite lacking a PhD, or even a masters, he had a tenured position. And as Josh would later learn, he was an alcoholic, and in fact would occasionally hold lectures while drunk.

He led Josh through the Unix labs and introduced him to a few students, and Josh was on his way. As Josh was leaving, the professor came running after them. “Wait, I want to show you something! I have a lot of confidence in our systems here and I want to show you guys something really impressive!”

“Ah, what the heck,” thought Josh. “Sure, let’s see.” Josh followed the professor up to the Unix lab.

Professor Poindexter loaded up a web browser and navigated to http://www.louvre.fr – the homepage for The Louvre. With wide eyes, he turned around and said “look at this… we’re connected to FRANCE!”

Josh was pretty much turned off to the school until a handsome scholarship was offered. He never regretted his decision, except when attending Professor Poindexter’s class.

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