Professor Ross Clark was awarded the 2013 Rotten Apple Award shortly after his HISTORY 263: People and Culture of Southeast Asia lecture on Tuesday, honoring his dedication to unpreparedness, disorganization, and teaching each lecture as if it were his first.
This award was bestowed upon Professor Clark after a flood of nominations indicated that he “expected his students to know ridiculously-detailed information about the readings that he never even covered in lecture,” “had not yet graded a single one of the six papers [they] had already turned in,” and “routinely rambled on about his troubled relationship with his father in lieu of actually teaching anything.”
“No one deserves this award more than Professor Clark,” said LSA junior Aaron Belhardt. “I remember one time, I asked him what the format of the upcoming test was going to be, and he just sat there for about 30 seconds straight, glaring at me. Eventually, he just said that was none of my business and asked me to leave his office.”
As part of receiving the award, Clark is expected to deliver an honorary “First Lecture” on a topic “relevant to the thematic or factual content implied by the course title.” Clark insists that his planned lecture on Gandhi will be even more inspiring than last year’s lecture by MATH 115 GSI and 2012 Rotten Apple Winner Eric Fitzburgh entitled “Derivatives: What Are Those Things Again? I Forgot.”
At press time, Clark was seen furiously scribbling notes onto a napkin on his desk just minutes before his lecture, saying that the date “completely slipped [his] mind” and that his new plan was to “just wing it.”
Originally published: April 2013
