Meeting With Professor Prefaced
Cameron Taylor '12, just moments before entering Professor Morrow's office and uttering something vague in order to avoid talking about his paper for as long as possible.
MEARS- Already eight minutes late for a meeting with English professor Alicia Morrow that was scheduled for 10:30 last Thursday morning, second-year student Cameron Taylor rushed up the stairs of Mears Cottage, entered Morrow's third-floor office, and proceeded to deliver over five minutes of unsolicited prefatory comments to the individual meeting that had been planned.
Though Taylor's preface likely stemmed from his tardiness to the meeting, it covered a host of random topics. Morrow described the comments as “highly incoherent, lacking logical connections as well as any over-arching thesis,” much like his last paper.
According to Morrow, the meeting had originally been set up to talk about Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the topic of Taylor's final paper. However, before taking the time to “even sit down or just say hi,” Taylor began explaining why his paper wasn't as far along as expected, the circumstances that led him to get behind, and something about how this behavior wasn't normal for him, but he was just going through a tough time.
The tenured professor admitted that despite her sympathy for Taylor's predicament, she had a difficult time making sense of his speech.
“First he's late and giving me a rundown of the work in his four major classes. That's bad enough, but when he took the time to explain to me how a few ideas from my class sort of relate to one of his other classes – you know, if you stop and think about it for a second,” Morrow said, impersonating Taylor's nonchalant way of communicating miniscule connections.
“It was then that I realized I might have to call my husband and tell him I wasn't going to make it to our lunch date,” she added.
This was not the first time Taylor had stormed into Morrow's office with preliminary concerns. In the introductory meeting Morrow requires of all her students, which, according to Morrow, “is only supposed to last about ten minutes,” Taylor spent the first three minutes providing a detailed answer to Morrow's standard conversational opener, “How's it going?”
“At that point, I just figured he was pretty talkative and that I would have to pay a little extra attention to him during class, just to make sure he was on the same page as everyone else,” Morrow recounted.
“But I can honestly say that after that meeting we had last Thursday, he's not reading the same book as the rest of us. How that bodes for his paper on the book the rest of us have been reading remains to be seen.”
Other professors in the English and History departments with offices on the third floor also provided a description of a student talking loudly about a variety of seemingly unrelated things. These descriptions match the report on Taylor's shambles, though the frequency of bizarre, difficult-to-follow rants that all of these professors say they have dealt with recently makes it difficult to be positively certain.
When Morrow was finally able to convince Taylor to talk about his paper, it became clear that part of the meeting's function was to ask for an extension. “He would keep talking about Heart of Darkness in really weird ways in order to suggest the extension. Like, he pointed out that we started reading it two days later than planned on the syllabus, and then just kind of winked at me.”
According to friends, Taylor was encouraged to take all the time he needed on the paper and not go back to Morrow's office for at least 8 months.
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