Evergroove trivia, pt. 46

Fri, 11/25/2005 - 6:25am — stevenl

One of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters was a faculty member at Evergreen during the early years. I personally never attended any of his lectures, but according to TESC folklore this teacher frequently spaced out in the middle of his classroom presentations as if he was falling into a trance. Then one of the students would yell, "Too much acid, man!" and the instructor snapped out of the flashback with a jolt. TESC faculty are on contracts rather than tenure-track, and I believe this faculty member was not invited to have his contract renewed.

Kesey himself came to campus to visit once or twice. In the 1980s I had a chance to talk with Kesey at a conference, and he told me he always thought of Evergreen as "The school without chairs." Initially he was talking about furniture, but since the school didn't have traditional academic departments with department chairs, maybe he was giving me a double meaning.

Comments

Sat, 11/26/2005 - 12:18am — Robert Whitlock

I saw his commencement key-no

I saw his commencement key-note speech a few years ago. I really liked the story he told about deer hunting. He told about shooting a deer from so far away with a rilfe and a scope, that he was too far away to track it. He shot the animal, but it got away. He never knew if he killed it or not. I think the moral of the story was that guns are bad or something, kind of a luddite approach to things.

Later on I heard that the speech was virtually the verbatim text of an article he had published in the New Yorker some time previously.

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Thu, 07/12/2007 - 4:28pm — sky.cosby

who was the faculty member?

that was a member of the merry pranksters? I'm curious.

Fri, 07/13/2007 - 5:19am — stevenl

Since this is presented with

Since this is presented with the use of the term "folklore," I'm not real comfortable revealing the identity of this faculty member. This teacher's name came up when I talked with Kesey, who held him in high regard (pun intended).

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