Real life does not imitate the joke

20 August 2008, 1828 EDT

There’s a well-known joke about a beautiful young student’s attempt to trade… um… favors for grades.

I suppose it’s inevitable that the real-life variant would neither cast a positive light on the professor nor, in all likelihood, end at all happily.

Scratch that; really unhappily.

… Good hearsay and war stories about the general phenomenon over at LGM.

… ~~He’s now considered a “missing person.”~~

… Back to the original suspected outcome: hiker finds body, presumed to be University of Iowa professor, in park.

… And it was Arthur Miller.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.