Quote:Columbia University will ‘review’ weird antics of quantum mechanics prof Emlyn Hughes, who stripped onstage

Teacher showed photos of 9/11 and Hitler. Told students they needed to clean their minds to understand physics.

By Christopher Brennan AND Tina Moore / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Tuesday, February 19, 2013, 7:08 PM


Professor Emlyn Hughes gave his Columbia University students a bizarre performance Monday, stripping down and rapping. The university said it will review the lecture.

Columbia University is investigating the antics of a nutty professor who stripped down to his skivvies and delivered a bizarre lesson in quantum mechanics, the institution confirmed Tuesday.

Columbia Assistant Vice President Robert Hornsby said administrators “are currently reviewing” Prof. Emlyn Hughes’ off-the-wall behavior during class Monday.

Students were bombarded with projected images of the collapsing Twin Towers and Nazi Germany as Hughes stripped down to his underwear and rap music played.

The whole incident was caught on camera and later posted on the student website Bwog.

During the five minute display, two people dressed as Ninjas blind-folded two stuffed animals and then impaled one with a sword.

After, Hughes explained to the class that they would have to “strip raw” and “erase all the garbage” from their brains to properly learn quantum mechanics.

“I thought that the 9/11 thing was a little offensive,” said freshman Andrew Stoughton, who said his dad worked in the World Trade Center but was late to work Sept. 11.

“I try to take it with a grain of salt, like, okay, it's a personal tragedy for people but it's also a historical event that needs to be contextualized,” Stoughton said. “Walking that line is tricky and I think he misstepped.”

RELATED: VIDEO: PROF STRIPS IN BIZARRE LESSON

On the other hand, Stoughton said, “I was definitely paying a lot more attention than I usually do.”

Freshman Jared Greene agreed that the lecture kept him “awake,” but thought the class “might have been in poor taste.”

That said, the frosh thinks it’s “misguided” for the prof to get “flak for trying to make a lecture more interesting.”

Freshman Mariam Gulaid said she was just confused.

“I wasn't thinking about it in an offensive or non-offensive way,” she said. “I was trying to figure out what was going on.

“And then I saw Hitler talking to a kid and I was like ‘What?’” she said.

Most students reacted to their professor’s behavior by laughing and taking pictures.

“And then it was quantum physics for an hour,” Gulaid said.

The performance was not Hughes’ first classroom stunt, according to the Columbia Spectator, a student newspaper. In fall 2011, he showed science students nude photos of Woodstock attendees.

(02-24-2013, 04:58 PM)Virtual Bison Wrote: I was looking for a link to The Onion here.

(02-24-2013, 08:39 PM)Armando Ramos Wrote: These physics guys all seem to have the same Gollinesque sense of hyper-inflated self-importance.

Quote:The strategy of Frampton’s defense team was to present Frampton as a brilliant man out of touch with day-to-day life. They called in a psychologist, who pronounced him unusually gullible without, however, diagnosing a mental illness. The judges sent their own doctor, who declared Frampton normal. A total of three psychological evaluations were presented at the trial, and two agreed that he had the traits of a narcissistic personality — an overblown and unrealistic image of himself. One concluded that it did not constitute a pathology, while the other suggested that there were pathological aspects to his narcissism that led to gaps in his understanding of reality.

Fidel Schaposnik, a physics professor at the National University of La Plata, which, along with the University of Buenos Aires, had offered Frampton a visiting professorship to help get him released from Devoto while he awaited trial, said of Frampton: “He’s a typical person trained at Oxford. He knows he’s part of an elite and can’t imagine such things would happen to him.” Indeed, Frampton sees academia’s denizens as creative misfits who deserve special protection. “People who are socially inept can nevertheless be the most creative people,” he told me one afternoon on the telephone. “It’s very important that they can’t be fired. This is the genius of tenure.”