I remember getting an email on a cloudy full day in the fall my first year of law school at Chicago-Kent. I believe it was October. The message was from a professor inviting us over to his home for fun and drinks. I had never received this kind of invitation before from another law school teacher. It was rather bizarre and strange, I thought. However, I quickly remembered that he was the orbiter of my grades which were the gatekeeper to my career. I figured that I better be there if I was smart.
The Invitation
When I arrived in his apartment in Humboldt Park or thereabouts. Immediately, I felt uncomfortable. He lived in a humble apartment with a walk-up flight of stairs. It was very dark, as dark and gloomy and lame as the day outside from what I remember. We didn’t venture very far into his home though so I cannot say if that kind of feeling cast over the whole place. It didn’t seem like much more than a one or two my bedroom apartment. In fact, it was about the size and kind of place that most of my classmates and I lived in around then as I witnessed.
And that is when I began to identify the problem. He was acting more like our classmate than the teacher of the school that we all went to at that time, or employee really, to be more precise. We all gathered in his family room. I think his dog walked in the room. There were around a half dozen of us students of mixed gender. I got the feeling that that was the point. He started offering us beer which I thought was extremely inappropriate and strange. Then, he began sort of going around the group asking about our lives, personally. This was all after we had just played football at a nearby park and he had very smoothly asked us all back to his place. Again, this kind of federalization at all levels was completely foreign to me. I continued as to not cause a scene. Frankly, and I think a lot of women know what I mean, I didn’t want to be the one to give a creepy guy the creepy eye and call him out on this inappropriate conduct, because then I thought he would get defensive and then adversarial. He could have taken it out on me months later with my grades and he could have talked shit about me for years and ruined by career that way, by poisoning my well. He kept passing out alcohol to all of us though so I kind of forgot, I guess I was just drunk at my teacher’s house. However, this guy kept persistently asking us about our lives and that’s when I started looking at his.
The Professor’s Behavior
He was a very pudgy man. He had a baby face, almost cherub. He also had a very self-deprecating way of talking about his life, and frankly his love life, so often throughout this day and in class even that made me very uncomfortable. I thought he kept taking shots at himself in a way as to generate some kind of feeling of sympathy towards him that creeped me out, especially since I thought he had that he had established he was single, asked if we were, and kept passing out alcohol in his private residence with no one else around- at least from what my memory serves me.
He did this in his pudgy. self-deprecating routine as he went around the room and I again noticed that around the room there were no other employees there from what I remembered. He also had no wife or girlfriend around. Nothing besides the sad prop of a seemingly lonely man, a dog. I’d remember him invite over students and say he only got to hang out with the dog and I shuddered. I began to wonder what the hell this event was designed to accomplish.
To be honest, in my opinion, it couldn’t be more obvious that he was trying to come onto someone in my class and using these events as a sort of funnel. You know it when you see it and that’s what I saw, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe you wouldn’t see it that if you were there but some of the facts that I just pointed out make it hard for anyone to suggest that I don’t have a reasonable basis to reach this conclusion. Plus, it’s not arguable that this was totally inappropriate to begin with and maybe that’s also why I don’t remember a lot of other teachers doing this.
And as disgusting to me as it was to see this loser who never really practiced law, what from what I remember, use the legal system – that I adored and was paying him and the school a lot of money to attend – corrupt it by using it as a farm league for his perverse events and desires (for instance, I remember him out of nowhere broadcasting to my torts class that he didn’t have as much sex as he liked and it almost made me vomit because it was transparent where his mind was from my perspective as he looked out into the class from what he said and from how I remembered him acting in his own home) it gets even worse, because here’s the thing, it’s not just creepy and inappropriate and unprofessional, it invokes fraud and corruption and here’s what I mean by that.
Fraud
When honest students attend law schools or other institutions, they pay a lot of money to go to class, take exams, and get grades and degrees based on a curriculum and established syllabi. When dishonest teachers use a secret syllabus (who will or will not pass their illicit exams), they defraud everyone by using these measures – instead of the agreed-upon ones that students understood when they signed up and, more importantly, paid tuition to go to these schools – to award grades and degrees and thereby defraud all students of the original benefits of the bargain.
Corruption
Sexual harassment in such schools is a matter of public corruption that should establish criminal liability. Let us not forget these schools are proxies of the state. They award degrees that the state uses to measure who should be a lawyer. They are needed to take the bar exam in fact, if that law is still current. Therefore, when dishonest teachers use their secret syllabi to award grades (and water-up or -down everyone else’s grades in a proportionally dishonest ratio), they are corrupting the legal process by which who becomes a lawyer, the kind of the layers we have, and the law itself. When else should criminal liability attach?
Why I Began Looking into This
I began considering this issue when I watched the movie After the Hunt. Putting aside how that movie makes this story incredibly socially relevant, it made me reflect on my past experiences with teachers. It occurred to me that there is no incentive for anyone to do anything when this creepy shit happens. If the victim comes forward, they are immediately in a multi-sided war with the perpetrator and the public. If honest bystanders do anything, they are opening a can of worms none of us would want. This Catch-22 could explain why these events are only brought up years later, when the victim has more strength, but also when the damage is already done and the creep is long gone.
Therefore, I began looking at this problem from the point of view of a lawyer. I have a long background in investigations, those with and against the government. We all know those creepy teachers who act like they’re just our self-deprecating drinking buddies as a way to creep into our lives or those outright animals who view the classroom as a farm league for their love life (pardon the baseball references) and throw big, public parties for students ostentatiously, but what is a lawyer to do? I think: investigate.
Operation Secret Syllabus
Don’t you know? It’s always about the rules! There should be a policy governing such relations. Therefore, our team at Gadfly City is launching an investigation, Operation Secret Syllabus, to Identify first those schools that don’t monitor this issue at all.
Sunlight is always the best medicine and the first remedy we should reach for gadflies believe. Plus, sometimes just by asking someone something, you tell them that you are watching them for something else, and it’s good that we do that. It’s good that they know they’re being watched. Gadflies are flying everywhere.
Please fly over and subscribe to Gadfly City on YouTube and follow our reporting of Operation Secret Syllabus. We will report to you regularly on this topic from that channel. If you have any tips or information on this topic, or on the issue generally of any toxic or abusive graduate or post-graduate teacher, then please send a message to info@gadflycity.com and we will confidentially respond to you. Is a creepy teacher trying to come onto you? Let us know! There is strength in numbers. Gadflies fly together.
William O’Brien
Facts About Our Creepy Torts Teacher
- He was passing out alcohol to students in his home.
- He was asking about our private lives and pathetically telling us about his at the same time.
- It was not a public event.
- There weren’t other staff there.
- There weren’t other family or friends there, especially a girlfriend or wife, just his lame dog.
- He must have been alone with a student in his house without anyone after drinking because we all left in different directions from what I remember.
- I don’t know what happened next.
- He’s still teaching law school.
- As far as I have seen, he has never practiced, at least law that is.
