单项选择题

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 fgrce-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 expresaed a passion for the subjects of his lectures. Arid, 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, c011ege teachers, individually and collectively, "care" about their students.
The explanation for the decline in Maxism is not really relewnt 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 here 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 academics 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.
Max could be best described as ______.