The Duke and the Baron

Despite the cackles of gleeful freshmen eager to bestow a Medill F on their instructor, Intro to 21st Century Media lecturer Stephen Duke seems uneager to rectify the mistakes in the typo-ridden PowerPoint he forced his 180-strong class to toil through for 45 minutes Friday. The class’ Blackboard homepage, which features a low-res artist’s interpretation of Duke-as-Borg, remains devoid of an edited version of the PowerPoint though last week’s has long since been posted. It remains unclear if Duke is merely being obstinate or is overlooking the glaring errors due to his hapless love for guest speaker Ed Baron, with whom he traded inside jokes and lustful leers throughout the extra-long Q&A session which began Friday’s class. A starry-eyed Duke then tried to pick up where the Baron left off, only to find his poorly paraphrased summaries of the week’s reading so befuddled students that he fell back on the text’s own anecdotes. Unfortunately the Duke’s understanding of the economics of golden geese was no better than Veruca Salt’s, and he abruptly ended his presentation to scattered applause from an audience too tuned out to notice the gesture.