EXTRA CREDIT

photo by Sabin Gratz

Heavyweights

by Sarah Tuff

There’s some trash talk, a rumble from the spectators, and a $2 bet going down. In a back room of a Burlington Thai restaurant, English Department Graduate Studies Director Mary Lou Kete ’86 introduces her colleagues, the Old Farts — professors Huck Gutman, Todd McGowan, Sarah Nilsen, Richard Parent, and Mike Stanton. They lean back confidently in their chairs. Then she turns to the Smarty Pants, a table of five English graduate students huddled in some last-minute strategizing.

On the card, the Buckham Challenge, a first-ever face-off between English graduate students and their professors. “It’s like the Harlem Globetrotters versus a local high school team,” says Kete, serving as “Quizmaster” with fellow faculty member Major Jackson.

“I’m hoping my team’s knowledge comes into play,” says grad student Corey Christman, who explains that the event is modeled after the GRE subject test in English literature, which many students would be taking in November before applying to Ph.D. programs.
 
“All of us have different strengths, so I think we have the whole canon down.” She pauses. “Maybe.”

Smarty Pants’ captain, Will Alexander, points out the win-win prospects for his team. “The worst case scenario is that they show that they know more than we do — and I hope they do, or we’re paying too much tuition,” he says. “There’s glory in the attempt, even.”

After both teams have piled up paper plates with spring rolls and Pad Thai, Kete welcomes the audience; she calls the event a “test of mental acumen and comprehensive knowledge of English and American literary and cultural studies.”

“And elephantine memorization,” adds a Smarty Pants.

“And elephantine memorization,” Kete acquiesces. “We’re lucky enough to have a team of the smartest, the brightest, the bravest faculty members.”

“The most available,” interjects Jackson.

Jackson curtsies when Kete asks him to distribute “the author paddles,” photos of literary luminaries fastened to wooden sticks. Walt Whitman, Joyce Carol Oates, Allen Ginsberg, and Chinua Achebe, among others, will signal to the quizmasters that a contestant knows the answer.

There are a couple of softballs lobbed in the first round, such as “She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her novel The Shipping News” and “She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her novel Beloved.” The lightning-fast Old Farts take the early lead as the audience grows ever rowdier. (Parima Thai is, without doubt, the only place in town where you’ll hear catcalls for Edith Wharton on this Friday night.)

As the questions get tougher, the teams get more animated in their pursuit of the Buckham Challenge title. At one point, Huck Gutman leaps from his seat to offer an interpretive dance of Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene.”

After nearly two hours of trivia, the quizmasters end the Buckham Challenge with “epithalamium” which the Old Farts nail as a complex wedding song. Jackson, whose undergraduate degree is in accounting, tallies the scores and calls for a drum roll. Plates of Pad Thai nearly leap off the tables with the drumming of some three-dozen sets of hands.

“The Old Farts, 395 points,” announces Jackson, pausing for a few polite claps from the audience. “Only to be outgamed by the Smarty Pants with 485 points!”

The room erupts in cheers. Says Kete, “This is only a tribute to the masterful teaching.”