Inspired by “The Ghost Professor” by Craig Miller
Walk into any classroom, far beyond the empty desks and settled chalk dust, and you can hardly help but sense it, the lingering ghost of those who once taught at the front. Adored or feared, professors leave behind more than lesson plans and lecture notes. They leave behind the echoes of ideas, sparks of curiosity, and sometimes the burden of unfinished conflicts. Craig Miller’s The Ghost Professor distills this reality through the life of Dr. Gordon H. Kingman, a man whose teaching life lasted many decades, and whose adventures in time-traveling muddled the distinctions between history, memory, and legacy.
Kingman is not merely a time traveler. He is an image of what professors are at their finest: guides into the unknown. His travels back to 1920s New York or 1960s Greenwich Village reveal how teaching, as time travel, is never ever about facts and figures. It is about bringing students into new worlds, compelling them to view from fresh eyes, and lighting fires that may take years to catch.
But The Ghost Professor reminds us, too, of the less exciting aspects of university life. Aside from the escapades, Kingman grapples with the harsh realities of higher education today: fat administrations, fiscal illiteracy, political pressures, and the encroaching bureaucracy that seeks to snuff out actual intellectual curiosity. To many professors, these aggravations are their “ghosts,” remnants of disillusionment that future faculty members and students inherit.
But maybe the most lasting specter in the classroom is not disillusion, but influence. Each professor puts their stamp on something, if usually unintentionally. One careless remark can guide a student to an enduring fascination. One flaw in an assignment can spark a career. A kind word can revive faith when the classroom door opens to an unforgiving world. Kingman, in his own way, personifies this unseen touch. His “ghostliness” is not from being forgotten, but from being remembered in tiny, quiet ways by those he taught.
The metaphor extends itself: teachers, as time travelers, never quite see the effects of what they do. A lesson given today will not hit until years from now. A thought rejected at the moment may come back to the student when it is needed most. In this way, all classrooms are haunted, haunted not by ghosts from the past but by the incomplete narratives of impact.
And when professors retire, or die, what is left behind? Not the departmental memos or grading rubrics, but the immaterial legacies: the students who write differently because of them, the thinkers who question more profoundly, the citizens who view the world more richly. By reminding us of this, The Ghost Professor teaches us that every professor is, in a way, a ghost, present in unseen ways, years after they are physically absent.
The test, therefore, is not to be afraid of this spectrality but to welcome it. For in each haunted classroom dwells a reminder: learning is never merely about now. It is about the invisible, the shadows, the potentialities yet to be revealed.
