"Grumpy" ≠ A Personality

My Favorite Teacher

(“grumpy.” - Ben Meyer, 2016)

With teachers in the crosshairs of the culture war guns lately, I’ve been reflecting upon some of my personal favorites: the teachers who had strong personalities, yet nurtured and weren’t threatened by the personalities of their students. The most remarkable one for me was Dr. Ron Siebeling, a professor of Microbiology at LSU.

He was feared, he was legendary. Why? He taught “Immunology & Serology” and “Pathology:” two courses required of all pre-med majors. He scheduled these classes at 7:30 am on Mondays and Wednesdays. Senior-level science classes held twice a week at a notorious party school, with a huge Greek system. Hungover? Too bad. He didn’t give a fuck. Attendance was mandatory.

He was notoriously tough, grading harshly and non-negotiably. Yet he offered a light-hearted bonus question on exams. These were usually related to sports, in which I had zero interest. Once he asked a hockey-related question about a “hat trick.” Whugh? I just drew a picture of a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat with the caption, “Ta-Da!” He gave me 1 out of a possible 3 extra credit points.

Woe to the fraternity and sorority rich kids who wanted to debate him about their grades. At the end of class, they swarmed his desk like a scrum of journalists, waving their test papers and arguing their cases. He’d put his hand up, wordless, pick his pipe up from the chalkboard tray and insert its stem into his half-smiling mouth, and walk out of the lecture hall. (This was 1990, when chalkboards and teachers smoking in class were still a thing).

As a non-Greek, non-rich, scholarship/Pell Grant student, this thrilled me. Dr. Siebeling was gruff and unapproachable, so of course I had to approach him. Not to ask him to improve my grade, but to work with him. I ended up working on two ongoing studies in his lab: one that used dishwashing liquid to break up toxic spills in the Gulf of Mexico, and another proving Tabasco could kill pathogens in oysters. For the latter, I had to puree oysters in a blender, mix the goo with agar, and pour it into countless petri dishes. This, and a brief stint as an oyster shucker at a campus-adjacent bar, is why I cannot eat oysters today. I mean, I have, since, very infrequently. But I do not seek them out. I saw too much I can’t unsee. I’ll have the crab legs, please.

Dr. Siebeling was most famous for figuring out a way to treat turtle eggs (this was Louisiana, remember) with antibiotics so when they hatched they wouldn’t be carrying salmonella. I didn’t work on that study, but for his Immunology course, we created vaccines and injected rabbits and then titered their blood to harvest and measure the antibodies produced by the vaccines. (Vaccines work, in case you’re still wondering.) I asked the graduate teaching assistant what happened to the rabbits at the end of the semester.

“They will be sacrificed,” she said solemnly.

I proposed a mission to find homes for all the rabbits that semester, in preschools or as private pets. Dr. Siebeling said OK. I got the sense he was indulging my savior complex, but he was never condescending. When I enrolled in his independent study seminar, for the final debate he assigned me to defend the position of not using animals in scientific research. My pro-animal-research opponent was an older, “non-traditional” student, a former rich kid who’d returned to college following a history of rehab, odd jobs, and being kicked out of every private school in New Orleans and beyond. He was all right, he sold me Ecstasy for 5 bucks a hit. In our debate, he did that whole “Against animal research? Then don’t have a blood transfusion, organ transplant, etc.” I lost the debate. A different time, when being against animal research was considered outlandish and whackadoo.

I didn’t like Dr. Siebeling just because he was mean to people I hated at the time: rich, entitled fuckholes with BMWs and popped collars and bows in their hair. Villains from 80s teen movies. He was grumpy, yes, but his grouchiness had a purpose. He had a flinty shell but a soft, kind core, and a great sense of humor. He punched up, before that was a concept. He was scrappy, but also an authority. His fealty was to science: precision was not up for debate, care must be taken, but let’s have fun while we do this serious thing.

His labs at the end of the sixth-floor hallway of the Science building smelled of sweet pipe smoke and sweet-sour bacterial cultures. There was an easy vibe of going from standing intently the bench to sitting around a table in the hall drinking bad coffee. One year he took a group of students to the American Society of Microbiologists convention in New Orleans, holding court at a table at the Bienville House and paying for our cocktails. I played footsie under that table with a fellow student. I thought footsie was a thing because I’d seen it in movies and on tv shows. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know that you shouldn’t rub your foot on someone else’s foot without consent - or ever, really. I didn’t know this guy was gay. We ended up being really good friends who could both laugh at how dumb and creepy I was.

I vacillated between majoring in Microbiology and majoring in English, with English winning out only because I couldn’t stomach the idea of taking Calculus. I ended up graduating with a combined major in both, but decided to apply to graduate school in English. Dr. Siebeling wrote one of my letters of recommendation and, foregoing the usual secrecy around such letters, gave me a copy. It was all about how he’d tried his best to convert me into a Microbiologist, but goddammit I wanted to study English, and he was certain I’d fit right in at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison (I’m guessing because of its hippie reputation, and my visibly hairy legs and pits).

In the years after I graduated and moved away and aborted grad school plans for a career as an actor and writer, I visited him at his lab a few times. He didn’t take it personally that I wasn’t a microbiologist, or a Ph.D. in English Literature, and loved hearing about my weird life in New York and Los Angeles. It wasn’t until Dr. Siebeling died in 2003 that I learned he was world-famous for his research, not just infamous among striving undergraduates. Students and scientists came from all over to be a part of his lab, and it remains one of the most diverse and egalitarian work environments I’ve ever experienced. I wrote his widow a letter telling her how much I loved and appreciated him.

The last time I went to Disneyland, I noticed so many men wearing Grumpy (of the Seven Dwarves) shirts. They were pushing strollers, taking selfies, standing in long lines, eating soup out of sourdough bowls, staring into space, wringing Splash Mountain water out of their clothes, yelling at their kids or somebody else’s kids. Grumpy merch is a bestseller, for sure. I am not a “Disney Adult” by any measure, but what’s with the contrarian need to advertise your bad mood in “The Happiest Place on Earth?” I bet a lot of these men have told women to “smile more.”

Dr. Siebeling always wore white short-sleeved dress shirts and khakis, with a belt. He never, ever told me to smile. But he made me laugh, a lot. He made me smarter, more confident, and more willing to defend my position. I miss him.