APRIL FOOLS!- Professor Has a Whale of a Time With Pool Toy

Students walking through campus this morning were rather surprised to see a haggard, lanky man attempting to blow air into a huge inflatable whale. Upon closer inspection, it turned out this man was Dr. Geoffrey Whole, Pacific English professor and whale aficionado. 

Student-athlete Chiara Hurn, Speech-Language Pathology, ‘24, reports that she saw Dr. Whole on the DUC lawn as early as 7:00 this morning, while she was heading to practice. “I saw this huge, lumpy swath of blue plastic on the lawn, and at first I thought that maybe Student Life was setting something up for today. But I got closer and realized that it was a professor, and the piece of plastic was a life-sized inflatable whale. He was wheezing a little, and his face was all red. When I asked him if he was alright, he just nodded and continued blowing air into the whale.” After commenting about the strange incident to her teammate, who is an English major, Hurn discovered that the man was Dr. Whole. 

The Pacifican wanted to find out why a professor with such a busy schedule would take his time blowing up a life-sized inflatable whale. We reached out to one of Dr. Whole’s colleagues and friends, Dr. Korinn Basch, professor of literature at Georgetown University. Dr. Basch explained how an incident at a conference years ago changed her friend irrevocably. 

“In 2009, Dr. Whole was presenting his research at an interdisciplinary conference on early America, and I dropped in to see him. Now, you have to understand; Geoff is a new academic at this time. Important people in his field are there. This is big for him. But during his presentation, one of the scholars who was his advisor in his Ph.D. program stands up and starts bashing his work, heckling him. He tells Geoff that it doesn’t matter how much he publishes, or that he has a tenure track job, because he’ll never fulfill the promise he made when he started the program. What was the promise, you ask? Well, in our first year of grad school, Geoff and some friends had a small get-together. One of the friends dares him to buy his advisor an inflatable whale as a gift, since they both love the novel Moby Richard. Geoff doesn’t back down, and does it. Once it's delivered, Geoff’s advisor becomes enraged. ‘How could you buy me an inflatable whale without blowing it up?’ he asks.” 

Dr. Basch sighs. 

“Geoff thought that the incident with the whale was far behind him. And who wouldn’t think so? I mean the conference was in 2009, and the bet itself was all the way back in 2002. But every year since then, he’s been trying to blow up that whale.” 

After reading a moving essay on nihilism written by one of his students, Dr. Whole was persuaded and agreed to an interview as well. 

“I just…the air keeps escaping through the blowhole and I can’t go to another conference again until I do this. It just means a lot to me,” he said. As an act of gratitude for his gracious interview, The Pacifican gave Dr. Whole an air pump so that he could finally complete his task, and end the “madness maddened.”

Herman Melville, who started all of this nonsensical behavior in the first place, declined to comment, despite multiple attempts to contact him from beyond the grave.