The door to Room 303 creaks open, stopping Professor Alex Duensing mid-sentence. Huy Tran, a 21-year-old electrical engineering major, is 10 minutes late for his first Composition II class of the year. He'd hoped to just slip in, but Duensing has got a question for him.
"What do you want from reality?" the professor asks.
"Um," says Tran, peeling headphones from his ears. "A cheeseburger?"
The students bust out laughing, and a smirk creeps across Tran's face. This isn't a normal class.
"A cheeseburger!" Duensing yelps, popping up from his blue plastic seat in the front of the room. He's so excited you half-expect a cartoon light bulb to appear above his head. "This can be done!"
The 32-year-old adjunct professor walks past the front row, past Tran and into the hallway. His students stay glued to their seats, shooting each other 'I don't fucking know' looks and giggling under their breath. Duensing has been in the hall for two minutes when he yells to Tran.
"You want fries with that?"
Half an hour later, a Whopper and a large fries are sitting in front of Huy Tran. And Professor Duensing, $15 poorer (he'd let the woman who ran to BK keep the change), couldn't be happier.
He's just created Huy Tran's reality.
The University of South Florida's Tampa campus sprang into action last week, a study in the controlled chaos of registration, book-buying and back-to-school jitters. If he wasn't Alex Duensing, Alex Duensing would have probably gone unnoticed, teaching his four entry-level writing classes in relative anonymity.
But when you show up for the first day of school wearing, from toe to head, brown leather shoes you took from your uncle's closet (sans socks), radioactive green polyester pants you bought at Salvation Army (hemmed short) and a billowing blue dashiki — well, people are probably going to look.
Duensing (pronounced Done-sing), a second-year English professor at USF, is proudly and decidedly unconventional.
He'll quickly tell you that he once turned in a photo for a poetry assignment while getting his MFA in Poetry at Columbia, but is hesitant to show his actual written work. He rides a scooter around campus, and that's when he isn't traipsing over its lawns with a four-foot bamboo walking stick.
In his classes, which are populated mostly by non-English majors filling a requirement, Duensing doesn't just want to teach the basics of composition. He wants students to ask the big questions — the philosophical quandaries that are argued in theory classes and over bong hits on campuses across the country.
Duensing believes fervently in the idea that students, and people in general, create their own realities. It's a philosophy that informs nearly all of his actions, including what he does in the classroom. Creating Huy Tran's reality by getting the kid a cheeseburger is perhaps the least literary example. But Duensing finds a way to work his fixation on the transient nature of reality into most of his lessons. It can be a double-edged sword: Duensing's page on ratemyprofessor.com lists his "easiness" as 4.9 out of five. But his teaching style also draws several ringing endorsements, including one that reads: "He is a great teacher, and makes you think, very interesting. Would recommend!"
"It's incredibly important that you, as writers, control your language," he tells his 11 a.m. Narrative and Composition class on a Wednesday morning. "It did wonders for Shakespeare."
The Bard, Duensing explains to his bleary-eyed students, coined almost 17,000 new words and new usages for old ones. "Bedroom, eyeball, bet," he quotes, enunciating the "t" percussively, like a bad Shakespearean actor. "When Shakespeare needed a word to express something, sometimes, well, he made it up," Duensing says. "I say we too have the right to come up with our own concepts and ideas … and name them."
In his three classes later that day, Duensing pushes his students to invent their own words. "I dare you to blow my mind," he challenges one group, focusing in on a girl half-asleep at her desk. "All of you."
Though he gets several submissions, Duensing is most taken with a word made up by John Moore, a 19-year-old sophomore majoring in business. "Hastire," Moore announces to his classmates. "It's the feeling you get when you see an ex kissing somebody else. Part-desire, part-hate: Hastire."
Duensing, elated with Moore's addition to the English language, assigned the student a thousand-word paper on the topic. "I'll need three sources, of course," he tells Moore. "You'll become the world's leading 'hastire' expert."
The homework for the next class is to come up with a word, write the definition, and post it to Wikipedia, a community encyclopedia on the Internet that allows anyone to write an entry on any topic. It's the perfect medium for a reality-questioner like Duensing. Once a word is there and defined, he argues, who can say it's not real? (Duensing, of course, has come up with a verb for the action of posting a made-up word and definition to Wikipedia; he calls it wikilexing.)
"He's pretty out of this world," Moore says after class. "Through high school, everything is so rigid. Then you get [to college] and you've got all these crazy teachers, but they make you think. It's what college is all about. He crosses the line to where it's not ordinary, and people get uncomfortable with that. But I'll remember him when I'm 50. And I'm gonna bust my ass for him on this paper."
Duensing, whose mother Lennie says he "came out this way," is a career collegian. He took nine years to graduate from William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J. (it was "part genius, part laziness, part sleep," he says) and took the job at USF after finishing his graduate work in 2004. The guy hasn't spent a year away from a campus since 1991.
But philosophizing as a student is different than doing so as a professor, and Duensing has encountered some challenges being in the front of the room. Two of his Composition sections are part of a pilot program called "Service Learning," in which community service is a part of the curriculum.
Duensing is the president of a non-profit "reality design" company called Nex Real Design, and was attracted to service learning because he hoped students would work for his registered 501(c)3. Duensing says the company, which has no full-time employees, is "at that stage just before it explodes." A website, nexrealdesign.com, was launched this summer and at this point serves primarily as a sounding board for a Duensing-created character named Nex Lelander. T-shirts, the site promises, will be available soon.
After a push from the English Department and a little self-reflection, Duensing made it clear to his Service Learning students that they could volunteer for any non-profit organization that they choose. But he expects that 75 percent will work with Nex Real Design in some capacity over the course of the semester.
For its part, USF's English department is skittish about Duensing's teaching practices — Director of Composition Joe Moxley declined to be interviewed about him for this story.
Duensing's approach may seem like madness, but is there a method?
He says his goal over the first two classes was to show his students a range of perspectives that they can use in papers throughout the semester. Composition II is intended to teach kids to write persuasively, and Duensing believes that you can't be persuasive without understanding an opposing — or created — point of view. "Once they have the flexibility of inventing new positions, they'll be ready to address alternative ones," he says.
Duensing is only in his second year of teaching, and admits that he sometimes gets so caught up in class that he forgets to handle some of the basics (taking roll, for example). Sitting in his windowless office, pulling at the wispy soul patch below his lip, Duensing looks, and sounds, as much like a student as he does a professor. "I have students who are not totally jaded yet," he says. "They believe in things like 'I want a less-negative world.' That's something they can actually hope for at their age. And it's something that I've never really given up.
"They believe that they can invent their world … and they're right. I want to give them the techniques, the perspective, to assist them in that quest."
At the end of a class on Wikilexing, Duensing splays out in a tan office chair, his long bangs dangling in front of his face. Maria Jose Subiria is the only student left in the room. As she packs up her bag, Duensing leans across the table separating them. "Was that OK?" he asks. "Was I weird? I mean, I made those words up."
Walking toward the doorway, Subiria tells him he was fine. "There are always loopholes," she says before leaving. As Duensing gets up to go, he looks over at the white board where he's written down a few made-up words over the course of the class — "Twik" "Jumore" "Isa" and "Wikilex."
If the professor has sparked these kids to go home, make up words and stake out some real estate on the Internet for their ideas, he's helped them create an intellectual reality. If not, the words on the board are straight gibberish. "I love leaving this stuff on the board," he says, and walks out of the room.
This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2005.