You’re class shopping, the night before you realize you’re about to miss the 7 a.m. draft the next day for ACES registration. You’ll casually poll friends, try your hand at what new evaluation gizmo Duke Student Government is peddling this semester and key one professor’s name into RateMyProfessor, or maybe Google. Google considers it for a second—or 0.16 of a second—and hands you a Duke.edu page where your potential professor is profiled in all his academic glory.
He’s got a background in intellectual property law, it says, or maybe it’s a molecular biologist you’re eyeing. His headshot sits embedded in the upper corner of the page, looking down at you in a friendly manner. This man is in his 40s, if that, with professorially crinkly eyes, vaguely luminescent skin, a crisply ironed shirt and an 80-percent-full head of hair.
You choose the course. Probably not because of the mildly attractive headshot set against that marbled background, but you’ve chosen him nonetheless. The future course forgotten as you finish out the remainder of this semester, you troll his Web page later, to confirm the location of the class or stalk his previous writings.
Finally, you walk into class, this latent image of a chalk-in-hand middle-aged adonis, shamefully preserved in your mind, and you see: a wizened specimen of a professor, posed frailly behind a podium, microphoned so the lot of you can just barely hear him. He’s been aged many years—like a police sketch drawing of a kidnapped girl, except not from 5 to 16 years old, but from 40 to 65, it seems. His jowls sag beneath his chin, glasses slipping gradually down his nose as he orates. His hair clumps in downy tufts across his scalp.
You’ve been deceived. Just like Paul Rudd was deceived in “I Love You, Man” when Mel Stein showed up to their diner date, several decades the senior of the pic he’d posted on Friend Finder. “It’s an old picture,” he says. Yeah. It is.
After class, you move to endorse headshots of professors that are at least 20 years outdated.
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