DANBURY, CT—After decades on the run, Cornell’s Andrew D. White Professor-At-Large was located and taken into police custody earlier this morning.
The disgraced ex–faculty member, formerly known as Dr. Robert LeRoy, was forced from his position after a fierce parking dispute and went on the lam in 1965. Later that year, the vengeful Board of Trustees established its Professor-At-Large program, seeking to leverage the abilities of eminent artists and scholars to aid in LerRoy’s capture.
“The notorious Dr. LeRoy must never be allowed to profess again,” read an internal memo dated to the program’s start, which circulated alongside posters of LeRoy’s face captioned “WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE.”
In 1988, the search had its first lead. Jacques Derrida, a visiting philosopher and literary critic sponsored by the program, deconstructed an anonymously published article in the Middletown Press, noting both its self-defeating attempts to convey absolute meaning and its similarity to LeRoy’s earlier published work. However, with nothing outside the text to work with, the paper trail went cold—until a recent breakthrough by a forensic linguist, which finally led to the Professor-At-Large’s arrest at a public library in Danbury, Connecticut.
“This success is the culmination of generations of hard work,” proclaimed Robert S. Weiss, the ADW-PAL Program Chair. “Over the years, we’ve dispatched hundreds of agents trained in everything from comedy to jazz music to track him down. We suspected he’d still be teaching guerilla-style, which is why we recruited Jane Goodall—at least, until we got Toni Morrison, who pointed out our mistake. Anyway, clearly it helps to cast a wide net.”
The Board of Trustees celebrated the manhunt’s end by way of a faculty-wide email containing a reminder to all non-tenured professors that they could be next “if [they] step out of line.”
