TEXT C I remember Max very well.
He had a Ph. D. from Princeton. He was a Chaucerian. He was brilliant, eloquent,
and professorial. He possessed everything respectable in a human being —a good
mind, a sound professional ethic, a sense of learning’s place in the universe.
Max was truly an educator, But there is one thing I haven’t told
you about Max: I hated his guts. Max was my freshman-English
teacher. And while he was, in a sense, everything I desired to be (that is, a
gentleman and a scholar), he was also a man who force-fed me for 15 weeks on
literature and grammar (and what a foul stew it was!) Today, I
am a college teacher myself, and have discovered that very few students are
encountering their own version of Max. This is not to say that
younger, up-and-coming professors are less erudite or well trained than Max was.
On the contrary, the scarcity of academic job opportunities has virtually
assured that colleges can choose from among the best-trained young scholars in
the world. Neither am I suggesting that it is impossible for a
student to find a genuinely loathsome professor. (I have enough personal
evidence that the potential for real animosity between teacher and student does
exist. We all have encountered the student who fantasized the most heinous
retribution for that despicable faculty member who dared give him a
C.) What made Max unique was neither his mental prowess nor his
propensity to be disliked. Rather, it was his aloofness. Max
didn’t "care" about his students. He wasn’t worried about whether they were
passing his course. He didn’t really seem concerned that most of them never
expressed a passion for the subjects of his lectures. And, most of all, Max
didn’t give a damn how his students felt about him. Chances are,
most students are thankful that "Maxish" professors are an endangered species.
Further, I’ll wager that many professors are proud and pleased they are not
Maxes (or Maxines). The reason is that, today, college teachers, individually
and collectively, "care" about their students. The explanation
for the decline in Maxish is not really relevant to my point, but one might
nonetheless speculate that a general decline in college enrollment, and
consequently in available teaching positions, has led some young professors to
believe that they have to be popular. The college classroom has
become, for some of these "hungry" young men and women, a battleground in their
war against job insecurity. Their weapons are a strong response demonstrated by
their students (in terms of attendance) coupled with ostensibly strong
acceptance (in terms of student evaluations Which actually measure little more
than the congeniality of the professor). The knowledge that
academies are more sympathetic to their students than Max was would be
heartening, indeed, except for one very curious fact: Max was the best teacher I
ever had. That’s right. The very best teacher I ever had was the one who didn’t
give a damn about me or anyone else, the one who never tried to make me feel
"comfortable," who didn’t even know my name. From the passage, we get the impression that the author ______.
A.thinks highly of today’s professors B.hates Max type of teachers C.likes aloof and uncaring professors D.regrets that Max type of teachers are becoming scarce