This is Achilles, delivering his own closing remarks upon leaving Eretria.

Happy mid-December! Celebrate the end of classes with some pithy phrases your professors say that we call Closing Remarks. 

Bruce Robbins, Modern Comparative Fiction: “You don’t have to express yourself. People don’t give a shit, they never have.”

Randall Balmer, Evangelicalism: “Thank you so much for being interested and coming to this class. If you didn’t, I’d have to teach something boring, like comparative religion or something.”

Roosevelt Montàs, CC: “After this first semester, God is dead to CC.”

Sam Moyn, Historical Origins of Human Rights: “In times like this, I have to ask myself what would Jesus do, and he had to separate the wheat from the chaff. That’s why I use IDs on the exam.”

Aaron Ritzenberg, University Writing: “When you see me on campus, don’t just pull out your iPhone and pretend not to see me. It’s more embarrassing for me if I don’t remember you.”

Elizabeth Keenan, Music Hum, regarding what kind of spring Stravinsky was composing about: “A shitty one!”

Casey Blake, US Intellectual History since 1865: “Kurt Vonnegut once said ‘I’ve worried some about why write books, why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it’s been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with humanity’ … I hope the TAs and I have succeeded in poisoning you.”

Evan Neely, CC: “Don’t tell a classicist this, but if you read one book of Plato, you don’t really have to read any others.”

Red figures from Wikimedia