by Kathy Plann

IN COLLEGE CLASSROOMS, as portrayed by Hollywood, there are no female professors. I also couldn't help noticing that in a sampling of films which span the past two and a half decades, [Jerry Lewis's "The Nutty Professor" (1963), "Animal House" (1978), Eddie Murphy's "The Nutty Professor" (1996), and "Road Trip" (2000)]-the male professors either date or want to date their female students. These socially inept profs. look for love in all the wrong places.They are exiles in the Siberia of intellectualism, and the degree of sympathy each movie elicits for the professor hinges on how he escapes the academic prison.

In the original "The Nutty Professor," Jerry Lewis plays a geeky chemistry professor who regularly blows up his lab. Though the calamities could suggest ineptitude, the movie encourages us to see them as the requisite side effects of genius, which naturally also include farsightedness and disregard for safety. The professor's genius, however, is not enough to fulfill him, something he understands painfully when, in the middle of class, one of his disgruntled student athletes stuffs him in a locker. Beautiful, blond undergraduate Stella Purdy stays after class to make sure he is okay, and the rest of the movie revolves around the professor's desire to connect with her and to gain acceptance from the students.

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