Professor has yet to grade a single assignment
In an unsurprising move, Philosophy professor David Von Erich has yet to grade any assignments this year. Von Erich, who is in his 30th year teaching Introduction to Philosophy, said that he is “getting to it.”
“It’s difficult trying to assign arbitrary values to papers and the like.” Von Erich said. Von Erich, Marquette’s foremost Friedrich Nietzsche scholar, has been tenured for 20 years, and his extreme pessimism has scared away anyone who tries to have him change his ways.
“We’ve tried to take action against Professor Von Erich many times in the past,” Philosophy department chair Dr. Steven Williams said. “Whenever we have a meeting with him, he starts going on and on about how nobody has purpose and someday all knowledge will fail us. We usually end up calling the meetings then and there because everyone gets too depressed.”
Freshman Mary Neidhart said that when she went to check her midterm grade, all of her other classes had an actual grade put online. “For Philosophy, there was just a question mark put in for the grade. Like what does that mean?”
Neidhart added that when she went into office hours, all she saw was von Erich staring out a window. When she tried to communicate with him, his response was some variation of “Death is inevitable.”
“It really freaked me out,” Neidhart added, “Like I’m just taking this class because it’s required. I don’t really care about the content, I just want to pass.”
This isn’t the first time that Von Erich has fallen behind on grading assignments. During second semester finals last year, he said that grading had “slipped his mind” and that was the reason why he was only then grading the “get to know you” assignment he assigned on the first day of class.
“Whether or not I grade the assignment doesn’t matter. Nothing matters in the end,” Von Erich said. “If all of life is a candle, I’m just waiting for the flame to be blown out.”
