Professors: A Vision of Madness

William Arrowsmith is a 42-year-old professor of classics at the University of Texas who smiles often, likes to shed his tie in class, melts coeds with his boyish good looks. He is the kind of professor, says a colleague, "who doesn't construe his life as one thing and his job as another—he wears his humanity on his sleeve." The gentle Arrowsmith also burns with the notion that education has been turning sour ever since the 5th century, and he is making himself one of the most caustic critics of academe in the 20th....