Fear, Tenure, and the Uncanny
Welcome, dear reader, to the dark underbelly of higher education—where deadlines are eternal, the faculty lounge is haunted, and the registrar’s office is a Kafkaesque maze patrolled by unseen forces.
In the spirit of academic rigor (and survival), I, good old Dr. Jarm, seek to define a taxonomy of the monstrous figures lurking in our institutions through the monsters of the genre so near to my heart: horror. These beings hold office hours, wield budgetary power, and occasionally burst forth from vending machines like a baby Xenomorph from a chest.
I have begun this journey:
The Campus Security Guard with Tenure: Jason Vorhees
Silent. Omnipresent. Deeply uninterested in conflict resolution.
Jason does not communicate via email, or at all. He simply appears—behind trees, outside protest zones, inside your nightmare of a group project.
He protects campus property with the same fervor a golem guards a cursed amulet. The walkie-talkie has long been replaced by a gleaming machete. Students whisper that he’s never blinked. Nobody's willing to check.
Tenured Professor of Chaos Theory: Freddy Krueger
Professor Krueger is loud, flamboyant, and specializes in the study of dreams, nightmares, and pedagogical boundary violations.
His one permitted course, Sleep, Memory, and Screaming, has no syllabus, only feverish vibes.
Office hours are held inside your subconscious. He leaves notes scrawled in blood-red ink: “Come find me… if you dare.” He has, uninvited, annotated your dream journal. He made it worse. Somehow it's now part of the curriculum
Department Chair: Michael Myers
Dr. Myers doesn’t speak. He simply stands—looming—in doorways, meeting rooms, and the edge of your professional confidence.
He’s been the department chair since 1978. Nobody recalls electing him. Nobody dares oppose him.
Faculty mysteriously vanish from the directory. No one follows up. His office hours are listed as "eternal," but no one's returned to confirm.
That One Grad Student Who Is Writing a Thesis on You: The Babadook
Always overdressed. Never emotionally stable.
The Babadook grad student haunts your peripheral vision, stares too long in seminars, and turns every Q&A into a confession.
Their apartment is a shadow-soaked shrine of overdue interlibrary loans and existential dread. They critique your syllabus in seven-page MLA-formatted emails (7th edition—incorrectly). You wake up feeling peer-reviewed.
Visiting Lecturer: Candyman
Dr. Candyman is ethereal, poetic, and utterly terrifying. You invited him once for a guest talk on "Narrative Hauntings," and now he's on every single committee.
He speaks in riddles and trauma theory. Students say he levitated during his seminar. You’re not sure if he's real, a ghost, or a tenure-track myth. You just nod respectfully and avoid reflective surfaces.
Adjunct Professor of Home Economics
He screams. He slices. He serves… something.
Technically, he’s faculty-adjacent. Teaches Intro to Culinary Dissection with a chainsaw. There is no textbook—only screaming.
No student has ever passed. No student has ever dared to ask what’s in the stew. The union refuses to acknowledge his existence.
Sure, these nightmare entities terrorize students and staff alike, but at the end of the day, they’re all somehow more responsive, more consistent, and less cryptic than the registrar’s office.
Sleep well, students.
I’m in your trashcan.