A Beard Cut Short: The Life and Lessons of a Legendary Professor Clipped by a Slip of #MeToo

by Todd Neff

Overview

John Rubadeau's long, white beard; homeless-guy wardrobe; and penchant for dirty jokes belied his lofty status as one of the most popular professors ever at the University of Michigan. He taught writing in Ann Arbor for more than 30 years. The cover of his course pack read: "Grammar: the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you're shit." 

In "A Beard Cut Short: The life and lessons of a legendary professor clipped by a slip of #MeToo," a former student tells the crazy, touching, inspiring, and often funny life story of an eccentric, influential professor. John caught dogs in Wisconsin, sold insurance in Indiana, raised pigs in Tennessee, counseled soldiers in Germany, and had his apartment bugged by the Romanian secret police. He lost a young wife and two baby boys. He was born poor and stayed that way most of his life. But, on his own terms, he met with extraordinary success. 

"A Beard Cut Short" also shares John's key lessons on writing, teaching, and life - lessons that have inspired generations of students to watch out for comma splices and follow their dreams. The story is capped by an investigation of an unjust firing that's a case study in how the misappropriation of #MeToo, a vital social movement, can hurt both the unfairly accused and the movement itself. 

John Rubadeau's (in)famous Grammar Review is included as a special bonus.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780982958384
Publisher:	Earthview Media
Publication date:	12/08/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	261
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Todd Neff is a writer based in Denver, Colorado. His latest book, "A Beard Cut Short," is a biography with a good deal of investigative reporting about John Rubadeau, hisformer University of Michigan writing professor. His prior book, "The Laser That's Changing the World," tells the story of the inventors and innovators who saw, and ultimately realized, the potential of lidar to help solve a dizzying array of problems -- perhaps most prominently, vehicle autonomy. His first book, "From Jars to the Stars," shows how Ball Aerospace came to be and then managed to blast a sizable crater in the comet 9P/Tempel 1. It won the Colorado Book Award for History. He covered science and the environment for the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado, and taught narrative nonfiction at the University of Colorado, where he was a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at CU. He graduated from the University of Michigan and with a master's degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Denver, November 2018

1. Quid Pro Quo

2. Rough Start

3. Real World

4. Love Lost

5. Flight, New Life

6. At the Cumberland Gap

7. Constanţa and Atlanta

8. Nobody Eats Parsley

9. Two at Purdue

10. The Human Condition

11. No Joke

12. Fired

13. Retired

Epilogue: Ann Arbor, July 2019

GRAMMAR REVIEW

Acknowledgements 

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

Rubadeau was an outspoken man of a previous era who taught so long the culture changed around him. As a result, the book is a captivating document on how the language of teaching (and language itself) has changed over the decades, and the ways in which a certain type of larger-than-life educator, once common, has mostly ceased to exist.

-- Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2021-04-08
A dismissed writing teacher has his say in this nonfiction book.

John Rubadeau is known, among other things, for his beard. “If there were another simple-yet- precise way to describe John’s beard,” writes Neff, a former student, “I would use it. But it’s a Santa Claus beard, one that he already had back when I was a sophomore in college. He was about as old then as I am now, and although his sideburns were still dark, the beard was already white.” Rubadeau taught writing for over 30 years at the University of Michigan, where his classes were legendary for their profanity-laden humor and frank craft advice. After Rubadeau was fired by the university at the age of 78 for unspecified inappropriate behavior, Neff sat down with his former teacher in order to compose a writing rule book. As the author relates in the introduction, the project quickly morphed into a hybrid work: part biography, part style guide, and part defense against the accusations that led to Rubadeau’s termination. The portrait that emerges is of a boy with a rough childhood who grew to be an inveterate searcher and freethinker, whose love for teaching was ultimately hampered by the unorthodox way in which he went about it. Neff draws Rubadeau with great affection, as here where he describes the teacher’s process of deciding whether or not to use a certain word in a novel he was writing: “At lunch, John polled an impromptu usage panel of lunch-shift waitresses on the meaning of ‘chemise,’ thereby putting as much time and energy into the definition of this single item of clothing as had been devoted to any word in any novel in the history of English literature.” Neff believes Rubadeau’s firing was unjustified, and he never really takes a critical view of his subject. Even so, readers can suss out the story behind the individual claims: Rubadeau was an outspoken man of a previous era who taught so long the culture changed around him. As a result, the book is a captivating document on how the language of teaching (and language itself) has changed over the decades, and the ways in which a certain type of larger-than-life educator, once common, has mostly ceased to exist.

A poignant, if uncritical, work on life and writing.

Kirkus Reviews