By: Jack Fisher
UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH – Monday evening, a class walked out following inappropriate comments made by the Anthropology professor Ed Hedican.
Jay Newman was in attendance and, immediately following the incident, wasn’t quite sure why he left class. “I woke up from one of the deepest class-naps I’ve ever taken” said Newman, “and there was a girl over to the right of me talking very loudly.”
“At first I assumed it was about the class, so I put my head back down. But then people around me started packing up, and I was like, “welp, I guess the class is done,” turns out it wasn’t.”
Students were applauded online for leaving the class following an encounter between the professor and a student who had an Educational Assistant to help him take notes. The professor in question, Ed Hedican, called the EA a “handler” (implying that the student was someone to be “handled”). Following the student’s departure from the class due to a consistent berating, the real hero stood up to let Hedican know that he had fucked up pretty bad.
Newman had fallen asleep about 5 minutes prior to the initial confrontation. “man, I don’t know, I normally like listening in class. The Prof we had for the first class last week was pretty cool. He talked about his cool experiences and what-not, but this guy was a total bore”
Ed Hedican was standing in for Tad McIlwraith, another Anthropologist who was away on Monday and Tuesday in British Columbia supporting an indigenous elder in court (i.e. real anthropology).
As it turns out, this is not a new conundrum for students in Ed Hedican’s class. John Fischer, a student who has had multiple classes with Hedican, said “oh yeah, his is one of the best classes to sleep in. When you wake up there’s a good chance he’ll still be talking about the dog he found on a reservation or what he had or breakfast. He almost always forgets to actually teach any real content.”
As for Jay Newman, he packed up his closed book very quickly and was able to get out of the class. As he exited the door, he encountered a large group of his peers congratulating the loud-girl who woke him up. Relatively quickly for someone who had recently been asleep, Jay realized that he had just actively participated in student activism.
“Sure I feel pretty good,” Jay said in a statement to The Modern Spirit, “I didn’t like the dude anyway, but, like, I’m just glad class ended early.”
As of Tuesday morning, Ed Hedican has been placed on leave as the University investigates the issue. Tad McIlwraith continues to be the best thing that ever happened to the Anthropology department at Guelph, and Jay Newman slept in on Wednesday morning – missing his 8:30am class – in the hope that there would be another walkout and he might get on the news for voluntarily not attending.
(if you’re reading this, he did make it into the Most Impactful News, but he was very wrong and lost 10% on the first midterm)
