Dillon Hall Diaries: Emil T & The Pre-med Washout

Marriage and medicine weaved similar threads through the crystal ball of my youth. I could picture myself being married and therefore presumed that someday I would be married. Once in a while, like every blue moon or so, I even pictured myself being a dad. But I never, ever, pictured myself actually getting married. Too many variables would have to fall into place to lead up to my tying the knot. My thought was that if I could not wave a magic wand and - - ta dah! - - be a married man, it was unlikely to happen. But that was before I met Mary.

Similarly, I pictured myself being a doctor, most likely a pediatrician. When I was in high school I read "The Citadel" by A.J. Cronin, a novel about a young country doctor in Wales. That book greatly influenced me. If I could not become a pediatrician, maybe I'd become a general practitioner like Andrew Manson, the protagonist of "The Citadel," setting up a family practice out in some remote community. The obstacle to my dream was not being in possession of that magic wand. I could not imagine going through what it took to become a doctor, including achieving outstanding grades in college, then med school, followed by internships and residencies. Too tough, too long, too unlikely.

So maybe I wasn't thinking clearly in 1965 when I applied to Notre Dame and indicated an intention to major in pre-med. The Marquis thought it was a splendid idea and did his best to convince me to feel the same way. Being a salesman, he was adept at the art of persuasion. When ND accepted me, one of the priests at my high school told my parents that getting into the pre-med program (as opposed to most other courses of study) was truly a feather in my cap. The folks under the Golden Dome were not dummies, he said; they would not have taken me for pre-med if they didn't think I could do it. Once The Marquis heard that, there was no other path for me to even consider. Of course, my dad had never met Emil T.

Professor Emil T. Hofman was a legend in his own time. It's pretty safe to say that every single student at Notre Dame, not just those who had him for class, knew who he was. There were two pre-med programs at ND. One path initially took its students through the College Of Arts & Letters, the other through the College Of Science. Only those in the latter group, including me, had Dr. Hofman. He was "Emil T," and the road to medicine ran through Cushing Hall, where he taught freshman chemistry. It is difficult to reflect on my four years at Notre Dame without including Emil T in the playback.

Emil T arrived in South Bend as a student on the GI Bill in 1950. After serving as a teaching assistant for a couple of years while earning his masters degree, he began teaching chemistry at ND in 1953 and continued doing so for several decades thereafter. His class met three times a week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) and the section I was in was comprised of almost four hundred students. To say that Professor Hofman had a commanding presence as he lectured from the Cushing Hall stage would be a vast understatement. He did not need a microphone, as his baritone voice with a slight German accent could probably be heard out on the South Quad. My strategy for his chem lectures was the same as that for almost every other class I took: write down in abbreviated note form everything that the prof said for as long as I could keep up, and then try to make sense of it all after class. Sometimes I would be so busy trying to catch up, hoping that he'd pause to catch his breath, that I did not notice that he had left the stage and was prowling the large auditorium as he lectured. Even though he rarely called on students, it was chilling to hear him coming up my aisle. I'm sure the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

The most famous - - "infamous" is more like it - - aspect of Professor Hofman's class was the seven question quiz, sometimes referred to as "Emils," each Friday morning. I recall Thursday nights at the Grotto down by St. Mary's Lake, following hours of studying at the library. The place was so packed with students praying to Our Lady for good luck on the next day's Emil that it resembled the Saturday morning throng praying before a home football game. "Deliver us from Emil" was a phrase heard murmured by the supplicants. The quizzes were so hard and tricky that no amount of praying seemed to do much good. Each quiz was entirely multiple choice, and each question would have four possible answers. Our challenge was to pick the best answer from among choices "A," "B" and "C." We were to mark choice "D" if either (i) more than one of the first three choices were correct, or (ii) none of the first three choices was correct. I remember the first day of class, when Emil T was explaining the ground rules regarding the quizzes. Someone in the middle of the room got up and asked, if a student were to mark "D" for a particular question, how the prof would know for which of the two reasons the student had done so. It seemed clear to me that this student thought it was a bargain, courtesy of Dr. Hofman, to have one response for two totally distinct possibilities. Emil T replied, "I won't know, but believe me, it won't be easy for you." Truer words were never spoken. The quizzes were anything but easy. There were no bargains.

One piece of sage advice an upperclassman gave me was never to participate in the weekly "post mortem" rituals which took place in the Cushing Hall lobby after the Friday class was dismissed. In the post mortems the students would gather informally in small groups, before leaving the building, to discuss what answers they had given to certain questions posed in that day's quiz. As I found out, that was a sure fire way to ruin not only my Friday afternoon, but the entire weekend as well. Still, I usually could not resist at least eavesdropping to hear what some of my brainy classmates had to say. (I did not want to wait until the following Monday when Emil T, with kind of a sadistic grin, would go over the quiz.) The worst would be when I'd hear several students say with bravado that they had given an answer different from mine on a question that I thought was an easy one. Too many times it turned out that they were right and I was wrong.

By the time May 1966 rolled around I was convinced I was not doctor material. The future doctors had not broken a sweat in chemistry, while I had a lump in my gut every Friday. On the day of the final exam, Emil T entrusted his three TAs to administer an essay test. They passed out the blue test booklets, and the four hundred of us put our heads down and feverishly began to write. About four or five minutes into the test, a student got out of his chair, ripped up the test booklet with his hands extended above his head, and loudly proclaimed, "I just can't take it any more! I quit!" He flung the torn pages into the air and stormed out of the room. The rest of us applauded while the TAs put on their grimmest faces. I never found out if the guy who "quit" was actually a student who had been in Emil T's class all year, or if it was maybe somebody's roommate (in other words, a plant) who threw a make-believe tantrum on a dare. In any case, you might say I followed in his footsteps. During the summer I switched out of pre-med and enrolled in the College Of Business.

According to an excellent article by Brendan O'Shaughnessy which appeared in the autumn 2011 edition of Notre Dame Magazine, Emil T is still going strong at age 91. His retirement from teaching in 1990 was covered by the South Bend media. Since then he has remained active, with his new focus on philanthropic work for the people of Haiti. He has also, from time to time, assumed different responsibilities on behalf of the university. Of all the faculty and staff at ND during the years I attended, no person other than Ted and Ned (Fathers Theodore Hesburgh and Edmund Joyce, the top two administrators at ND) was better known or more highly regarded than Professor Hofman, and no one has been of more service to the school.

Back in the old days, the Readers' Digest used to have a column, contributed by different authors, called "My Most Unforgettable Character." When it comes to the teachers I had at Notre Dame, there are three, including Emil T, to whom I'd give serious consideration for the title of "My Most Unforgettable Professor." My guess is that a majority of the alums who once sat in his class would feel the same way.