The Most Awesome Interview Answer Ever

From the May 23rd Chronicle of Higher Education Careers section, talking about the search for a tenured professorial position:

Or there was the famous professor’s advisee whose dossier I loved: superb letters, fine scholarship, excellent teaching experience for a doctoral student. We asked her how sh might approach indifferent students. “Oh, they wouldn’t be indifferent to Marxist-feminist-postmodernism,” she said confidently, and was off: “We’d start the African-American history course by establishing that gender makes race.”

“Excuse me,” my colleague interrupted, “I don’t understand what you just said.”

She babbled on happily in code for a while.

“OK,” he persisted, “how are you going to persuade students of this?”

She was ready for us: “Oh, I’d have them read a short journal article, no more than 25 pages, that would make the case; they would be persuaded, and we could move on.” She crossed her arms, satisfied.

It almost seems like a special form of madness that someone like this could think that what they were just describing was teaching.

She didn’t get the job for obvious reasons.