The new room

The semester started out great, so long as I was content to live vicariously. First, my daughter got tenure at a major university. Next, my son's girlfriend's documentary was nominated for an Oscar. Next, my most recent doctoral student got six job offers. I was on a roll until I tried to achieve something on my own — getting a classroom in which to teach COM 543 Medieval Allegory. The bad news, broken to me tactfully by our departmental manager, was that I couldn't use the elegant new departmental seminar room in East Pyne because somebody more important was using it on Tuesday mornings. As compensatory good news she promised to try to put me in one of the even newer and more elegant rooms in Chancellor Green, to wit, CHANC 107, in what must be called the east apse of this pseudo-ecclesiastical pile.

Of course Chancellor Green is still in parts a construction site. The subterranean levels, which include a coffee shop, the language laboratory and a men's room so new that the electronic urinals still actually flush, are magnificent. But the topography between the north exterior of the building and the still progressing Humanities Mansion toward Nassau Street, the landscape one must cross to arrive at CHANC 107, is straight out of "Blade Runner:" lots of mud, ice and jagged stone punctuated by various bits of rusting iron, grills, pipes, hoses — a miscellany of menacing debris.

I am a traditionalist. I love teaching in the old McCosh classrooms where D. W. Robertson boomed out his lascivious reading of the "Miller's Tale" and where even earlier Buzzer Hall once demonstrated trench warfare by marching across desks carved with the initials of alumni now defunct. Or was that the old Palmer? Whatever. But it is quite a thrill, too, to inaugurate a new Princeton classroom. In my mind's eye I can already see the brass plaque: "In this room, on February 3, 2004, Professor John Fleming uttered soporific remarks concerning the 'Psychomachia' of Prudentius."

I snuck in during break week for an early peek. It was not easy to find the room, which as yet lacks its indicating number, but it was worth the search. The seminar table, about a half-mile long, is especially magnificent. Around such a table as this must the robber barons of old have fixed the world market in copra, wheat, and sows' bellies. Here did they crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. Here did they partition Poland.

Yet when I arrived a little early for our first actual meeting, I encountered what is I believe technically called a glitch. Specifically, I discovered in progress a mini-confrontation between one puzzled early-bird student and three purposeful, grimly professional strangers who had just ordered him from the room. "We are the photographers," said their leader. Given the fact that they had with them enough lights, cables, and cameras to do a remake of "Ben Hur," I found this a superfluous remark. But to recognize their profession was not to know their purpose. For one mad moment I fantasized that I had at last been discovered, and that "Medieval Allegory Live" was about to be brought to American breakfast tables in three time zones. Hence you may appreciate the disappointment that augmented indignation when they instructed me to withdraw so that they could take pictures of a new, resplendent, and entirely empty Princeton classroom.

By then other students had arrived. There's safety in numbers, and I did not budge. "I'm sorry," I said, "but I teach a class here now." Entirely unimpressed, the colonel of the photography junta fixed me with an expression of pained incredulity such as that of the D.A. exposing a flimsy and fraudulent alibi: "Oh? You're not in the computer!" This remark, too, seemed redundant. Since I was at that very moment manifestly and empirically in CHANC 107, and since I am not a Dominican mystic habituated to bilocation, the laws of thought should have proved that I was not in the computer. I pointed this out, and stood my ground. My record for winning trivial contests in this institution is not all that bad. It is only on issues of any significance that I always lose. I hesitate to boast, but I invite you to check out what the Registrar has to say about my classroom at: http://registrar1.princeton.edu/classroom/Picture.cfm?BLD_CODE=CHANC&ROOM_NUM=107: "A photograph is not available for this room." John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. His column appears on Mondays.