“Shopping Period” is the decadent time during the first two weeks of every Yale semester when students can enter and exit classes as the mood strikes them. For indecisive undergraduates torn between studying “Biophysical Spectroscopy” and the “History of the Opera Libretto,” Shopping Period seems like a necessary luxury. But for faculty, it can be a degrading return to middle school’s last-picked-at-dodge-ball dilemma.

Undergraduates have free reign to be as gauche as they please. It is acceptable, even common, for students to walk into a lecture midway through, listen to the professor utter seven words, decide they don’t care for the color of the professor’s shirt, and promptly waltz out of the classroom as quickly as they arrived. Becoming a celebrity professor takes a lovely accent, a fetching wardrobe, a naughty slide show with which to open, or at the very least, a bestselling book.

My life is like a dream now that I have a proper Woolfian Room of One’s Own, above an Oxfordian Gothic arch, and with its own green slate fireplace reminiscent of Charles Ryder’s hall of residence in Brideshead Revisited.

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