HITCHENS BELLOWS AT STUDENTS, SOBS UNCONTROLLABLY
Christopher Hitchens is a visiting professor of Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research. This email from "Jeff", one of his former students, was sent to the faculty head, complaining about Hitchens' behaviour. Jeff is now in the witness protection programmme.

"My enjoyment of the Methods of Cultural Criticism course was spoiled by the fact that the man chosen to teach it, Christopher Hitchens, is emotionally unstable. He regularly turned up to 10am lectures smelling of drink; his speech was slurred and he was unsteady on his feet. Sometimes he would wear false whiskers or a hat of some kind.

He often burst into song in the middle of lectures; sometimes even in the middle of sentences: "History, too, might have endings and ironies that are simply inscrutable, or that do not yield to any known dialectic, and now I am the ruler of the Queen's Naveee." As he sang, he picked up a chair and waltzed around the room with it in the most extraordinary manner. After several minutes of this he stood rigidly to attention, announced that he had murdered his wife the previous evening, then collapsed on the floor sniggering.

I will never forget his tutorial on Said’s Orientalism. When we entered his office he was sitting in a revolving chair with his back to us. Suddenly he swivelled round and began doing Groucho Marx impressions. He was wearing a ball gown and had an unlit cigar in his mouth. When this embarrassing display was over he asked us if we would rather discuss Edward Said or sing Gilbert and Sullivan songs. When we chose Dr Said he sulked for the rest of the morning.

He was much given to emotional outbursts and violent, irrational behaviour; but above all he was paranoid. One morning he stood on a desk and asked us why we all hated him. No one said anything, but some of us began inching towards the door. Finally he lost his temper and began shouting and screaming. The sight of my tutor, red in the face and clearly drunk, shaking an enraged fist at his literature class was highly upsetting. "You think you can have a good laugh at my expense,” he bellowed. "But I make more in a week than you’ll see in your miserable lives. You make me sick.” Several minutes later we shuffled from the room in embarrassed silence. Hitchens lay crumpled in a heap on the floor and was sobbing uncontrollably.

Many people in the department ascribe his odd behaviour to drunkeness and encroaching senility. But they have missed the point: It's not the drink. It is my opinion that he crossed the frontier between eccentricity and full-blown psychosis some time ago, and should be relieved of his teaching duties before someone gets hurt."

- posted by Harry Hutton @ 9:19 pm