We thought you might appreciate this auto-correction, Professor Kahn. Photo credit: Matt Hayto

Dear Professors,

We hear you. Sometimes we under-hear you (read: 9 a.m. class), but when we’re very lucky, we overhear you! And not just while you’re weighing in on important international issues; we also hear those cavalier comments you improvise in lecture. And since we like what we’ve heard lately so much, we thought we’d share:

• Shamus Khan, while talking about how sports and games allow for the expression of rivalries in society without violence and fighting: “You’re not about to go do a physical, hostile takeover of Harvard. Although if you do, I will lead you.”
• Alan Brinkley, in response to question about the interstate highway act: “Destroying communities is something I know a lot about, being Provost for seven years.”
• Ruben Gonzalez, giving a metaphor for chemical equilibrium: “Has anybody been to that new Joe Coffee shop? It’s sort of like an equilibrium situation—there’re always 100 people in line, but it is a dynamic, changing 100 people.”
• Lucius Riccio, prefacing an Operations Research lecture: “Today we are going to talk about forecasting.  It is the fine use of divination, like Professor Trelawney’s class, in order to predict the future.”
• John Collins, in a metaphysics class: “In classical epistemology, it is assumed that every actor has unlimited access to his own internal thoughts, but in Jewish epistemology, your mother has access to your own internal thoughts.”