ASU - Socratic Elevator

One of the disadvantages of attending a huge school like ASU is supposed to be that the classes are too large. I never found this to be a problem. Dr. A____ was the chairman and most popular (especially with the women) lecturer in the Philosophy department. (Characteristically, the department professors loathed being chairman and rotated the position every few years). His lectures were so interesting and vivid that even non-philosophy students remembered details from some of them long after they had graduated. The one about the Phantasm Machine was recalled to me by a woman I knew years later who must have blundered into the class at random or perhaps due to coed word of mouth. 

Though this particular class was taught in an auditorium sized room that seated about four hundred students, I hit on the clever strategy of tackling Dr. A____ at the close of almost every class and following him to the elevator and then up in the elevator to the department office and then to his office door arguing about whatever he was teaching us. Basically, this was the same topic I had debated with the "good with youth" ministers back during my Junior High School years.

After many weeks of pursuing Dr. A___ to his office door we finally hit a wall. He told me that there was no way to get to where he was trying to take me without a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. He was also generous enough to tell me that he had been in Australia a few years before where he had conducted a very similar argument with the philosopher J.J.C. Smart and that they had arrived at the same stalemate. So, by the simple method of dogged pursuit I was able to prise a Socratic education from what was generally known as a party school.

P.S. There was one thing I did not like about Dr. A_____: On several occasions he lowered my grade because I didn't fill up enough blue books. Apparently there was no particular point I had missed, I was just too concise in my essay answers. Unfortunately this was before I was inducted into the Strunk and White cult so I lacked any authority to appeal to in my frustration. I just stopped taking his classes and consequently missed Aristotle.