obstrepero.us

(From the stories you may not have known about Pomona file.)

You may not have known that on October 30, 2000, a Pomona student named Jared Essig was arrested for shoplifting, I believe at Wolf's Market on Foothill. He used his phone call to call his roommate, J.B. Waterman, who in turn summoned Fred Sontag, the well known professor of philosophy, advisor to fraternities, and frequent bailer out of students in the pokey. Sontag and Ann Quinley (well known wearer of red shoes) went to the jail to spring Essig at about 3 A.M., and the events that followed were reported by the Los Angeles Times:

The dean went back to her office and Sontag drove Essig to his dorm to pick up some clothes. Essig started to give the professor nonsensical directions to the dorm. "This is my 49th year of teaching at Pomona," Sontag said. "I knew where I was going."

Essig grew more and more agitated because Sontag wasn't following directions, so the professor pulled into a parking lot, hoping to settle him down.

Essig, in what appeared to be a growing delusional state, pulled out the knife, Sontag said. "I said, 'Jared, give me that.' Normally, he would have. But in that state of mind, he was talking gibberish. I reached over to grab it and get it out of his possession."

That's when Sontag was stabbed in the neck, twice, police said. "Then I had to let him out of the car--he couldn't figure it out," Sontag said.

It was dark, so Sontag said he didn't notice how badly he was bleeding. He drove a few blocks to his office building, walked up two flights of stairs and calmly called Quinley at home. She wasn't there, so he left a detailed voice message that he had been stabbed and that someone needed to locate Essig to protect other students.

Then he phoned home. The line was busy; his wife was on the phone. So he walked down the stairs, drove to his house and had her drive him the few miles to Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center. By the time they made it to the emergency room, Sontag had lost three pints of blood.

Essig was later detained by campus security near Claremont McKenna College, one of Pomona's sister colleges, after telling an officer he had just killed Sontag and displaying the knife, police said. He remained in jail Wednesday night, awaiting arraignment on a charge of attempted murder.

- The Los Angeles Times, 2 Nov 2000

Somehow, the Pomona public affairs office managed to spin this into a story about about the superhuman grace and aplomb of Professor Sontag, as evidenced by the lead of that same article:

"My genes lack something," Frederick Sontag said Wednesday, bemused at all of the fuss over him in the hospital. "I don't seem to hold grudges."

That was why Sontag is more than willing to mend his relationship with the troubled Pomona College student who allegedly stabbed him in the neck on Monday. It was why he'd bailed that student out of jail on a previous occasion. It was why he'd found an attorney to defend the young man.

Sontag, 76, a philosophy professor at Pomona College since President Eisenhower's first term, is legendary on campus for his devotion to students. They seek him out with problems. They ask him, as an ordained minister, to officiate at their weddings. They keep in touch, by the hundreds, after they graduate. And he always seems to find the time, regardless of his teaching load or his work on two dozen books or his papers that probe questions such as whether God intended direct communication with man.

Sontag is exactly the kind of professor that small liberal arts colleges love to have, said Dean of Students Ann Quinley. But nothing could have prepared the professor's admirers for the magnanimity he displayed on Monday.

Hilarious. Straight from an admissions brochure to the Los Angeles Times. The fact that a student stabbed a professor twice in the neck, which the meddlesome police were calling "attempted murder," is presented as background to the real story, which is that Fred Sontag and Pomona College are great. I guess that's why we pay them the big bucks. And just for the record, Professor Sontag was legendary on campus for rather different reasons than "devotion to students," but I can't find any public sources to back up the rumors I remember so I won't recount them.

Myself, I didn't know Jared really, but I did have a meeting with him a few days before the stabbing because I was involved with some campus publication called The Asterisk and Jared had some kind of beef with the main student newspaper, TSL. At that time, he was already pretty jittery and hyperactive, and got angry at the drop of a hat. We just thought he was on cocaine.

Later, J.B. Waterman, Jared's roommate, wrote a letter to the editor explaining that there was "no moral logic to be made of the situation," evidently in response to an unwarranted outbreak of moral logic on campus, which I don't remember. TSL had an unusually funny article in the joke issue (which apparently isn't archived online), titled "Professor Stabbings Up Infinity Percent." ("At Pomona College, we value close, personal interaction between students and faculty," said Dean of Students Ann Quinley. "It is greatly discouraging when, instead of exchanging ideas and meaningful conversation, they exchange stabbings.") When Fred Sontag did not die, and nobody seemed to think the stabbing was a big deal, the whole thing became kind of a running joke. ("My genes lack something. I don't seem to write history papers.")

22 Nov 2005 01:39 PT - persistent link - trackback - 0 comments