In August 2021 a mysterious package from Sarasota, FLA.
Dr. Archer hurried up to her tight apartment in Chelsea with the thick envelope in hand and tore it open at her dining table, and revealed a legal document she had been wondering about for months.
She knew that a beloved university professor had left her something in her will. She expected a modest gift – perhaps enough money for a chic dinner, or one of the bead bracelets that the professor liked to make by hand.
But then Dr. Archer, 49, saw the number on the last page – $ 100,000 – she thought there had to be a misplaced decimal point.
“I really believed, to be honest I read it wrong,” she said. “I remember that I followed the song with my finger and made sure I understood how many zeros it was.”
Around the same time, 30 other people throughout the country received similar letters, commissioned by a professor whose class they had followed years earlier.
Prof. Cris Hassold had art history at the New College of Florida for more than 50 years, and had carved an influential but complex inheritance. She referred her students like her children. She hired them to clean her house – a disturbing Hoarder’s hollow. Sometimes she humiliated them in class.
But the students who knew her best described her as a unique power of good in their lives. ‘The cult of cris’, as someone described it, lives on in her 31 favorite students, who inherited her intensity, her peculiarities and ultimately her life horses.
A background of the counterculture
New College, a small public Honors College in Sarasota, on the Gulf Coast of Florida, was known for attracting gifted students who could not afford a private school for free arts, but who were looking for a rigorous course tax in a relaxed, sunny environment.
It became a center of contraculture where courses for gender studies quickly followed and students were barefoot on campus, experimented with drugs and organized sex parties.
Courses were demanding. Professor Hassold removed textbooks and assigned 150 pages weekly lecture from dense, primary sources of writers and critics such as André Breton and Rosalind Krauss.
In the dining room of the age-old old Caples men’s house, which looks out on palm trees and the lively blue hues of the Sarasota bay, Professor Hassold would pull the shades and exclude the sun for focused darkness. A dozen students each semester would sit around a table for hours and discuss the post -war femme fatal or analyze the brush strokes of a painting.
Andrea Bailey, 47, who is now director of American Women Artists, a non -profit organization, had faith in her ability to write about art -until she registered for one of the art lessons of Professor Hassold in 1995. Mrs Bailey held a particularly destructive assessment of her view of a Van Gogh painting.
“Her conclusion that the woman in ‘The Straw Hat’ is an aristocrat is just wrong,” wrote Professor Hassold in Mrs Bailey’s academic file on December 8, 1995. “I don’t understand how she could have read about the works and had so confused.”
The students who were not intimidated by the wilting style of Professor Hassold were the most likely access to her inner circle.
Dr. Archer is now university teacher Art History and Gender Studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She remembered that in 1995 she entered one of those poorly lit sessions as an ambitious but directionless first -year student and Professor Hassold saw behind a stack of oranges she had harvested for the students in her surrealism class.
“Doesn’t your family eat all the oranges?” A student asked.
“I don’t have a family,” said Professor Hassold.
“You are not married?”
“What would I do with a spouse?” Professor Hassold, who grew up in Louisville, Ky., Falled in her southern drawl. “That would just be a pain in the neck.”
The offhand remarked remained with Dr. Archer. “It was a bit like the most amazing moment I had ever had,” she said. “She’s just herself. It was a kind of woman I had never met before.”
A house that revealed a secret past
The professor and her students strengthened their bond during long, informal dinners.
About potstickers in the cheesecake factory or French onion soup at a local bistro, professor Hassold loddelde with them about rival art professors or remembered adventures with old friends in New York. She expressed hid about her conviction that New College lost its liberal, counter -cultural spirit – a shift that would be pronounced more decades later.
Professor Hassold was always digging the ambitions of her students.
“What do you want to do and how do you get there?” Her students remembered that she asked. “Who do you like to read? Where do they teach? They teach abroad? How do you save the money to go?”
These dinners, Dr. remembered Archer himself, “were these nice spaces where you could imagine a life for yourself without limitations.”
However, many students wondered why Professor Hassold never invited them to her house.
Ryan White, who registered as a first -year student in 2003 in the film Noir by Professor Hassold, would understand. After he became close to her during the semester and the following years, she asked him to help her mow her front lawn – an apocalyptic jungle of ferns and bushes – and clean up in her house.
Mr. White, 45, who now runs an established New York City knife -grinding companyReminded that it was a ‘nightmare’.
Eating cans, muffin cans, office supplies and a library of art history books messy around every corner of her house. Piles of paper ground on her bed. A guest bathroom had been made useless for ten years because papers boxes prevented the door from opening.
Her neighbors had complained and welcomed Mr. White and other students to clean up her property and deliver lemonade as a gesture of gratitude.
“I will ever need this,” would say Professor Hassold as she held an old article, Mr. White perhaps one about the impact of Stéphane Mallarmé on Cubism.
“You haven’t seen it for 40 years,” Mr. White respond.
Katie Helms, 47, Van Kingston, NY, who graduated from the new college in 2003, gained insight into Professor Hassold after they had fallen into a deep conversation about their parents.
Mrs Helms, now a business consultant and doctoral student in education, has made the habit of reading the hundred-page assignments of Professor Hassold several times, making it one of Professor Hassold.
One evening when she drove to dinner, Mrs. Helms said, Professor Hassold remembered home from the University of Louisville to discover that her mother had already thrown away her daughter’s possessions. Since then, Professor Hassold has been holding everything.
It was probably only one factor behind a hamsting problem that eventually made her house unlivable. Instead of saying goodbye to the Detritus, Professor Hassold built a second home on her property.
“She wasn’t very good at leaving, or people, going,” said Dr. Archer.
“She adopted us”
The youngest of 12, Mrs. Helms received little attention. That changed when she met Professor Hassold. For the first time, Mrs. Helms felt unconditional acceptance for everything, from her smoking habit to her strange identity.
“I will never get the kind of recognition from my parents I received from her,” said Mrs. Helms, her voice wriggled with emotion. “I think of her almost every day.”
When their time ended up in the classroom of Professor Hassold, many students worked for her as teaching assistants and visited her for career advice. When they later returned to Sarasota, they would make dinner plans with their old mentor.
Such as Dr. Archer it said: “She had a collection of students in the same way as she had endless collections of books.”
Professor Hassold retired in 2016 at the age of 85. In her last years she told some of her former students that she was planning to leave them behind when she died. She didn’t have much family except a brother and a few nieces. This was not a woman who lived luxuriously beaten Toyota Corolla and cycle through a modest wardrobe. The students were touched, but they didn’t expect much.
“She had no family, but we were her family,” said Mr. White. “She adopted us and we adopted her.”
Bittersweet endings
In April 2020, Professor Hassold had a stroke in the supermarket and collapsed.
In July of that year, while she made some progress in her recovery, a fall on the bathroom floor left her Hospice care. At the height of the Coronavirus Pandemie, deposited from the world, Professor Hassold died on July 15, 2020. She was 89.
Her former students held a virtual memorial service, cried and laughed at Zoom while they shared stories. Many made jokes that they had secretly hoped that she would die in class, her happy place. But they comforted that she died before a new university became unrecognizable.
In the years after her death, Gov. Ron Desantis van Florida Set his sights on transforming the school in a bastion of conservative values. School Closes his gender study program And began to recruit students from Christian schools. The students of Professor Hassold knew for sure that she would be shocked about how it changed.
In August 2021, the former students of Professor Hassold received a package of legal documents that unveiled its biggest secret. She had collected an estate of $ 2.8 million and shared it among 36 people closest to her – of whom 31 were former students, according to documents shared by Steve Prenner, the performer of her legacy and a former student.
Some students were shocked, especially those who could not remember when they last spoke to her.
Professor Hassold had assigned the money on the basis of how close she had been to each student, and how much she believed they needed the money, according to the former students. The payments varied from around $ 26,000 to $ 560,000.
Mrs Helms used part of the approximately $ 26,000 she received to help her recover from surgery. Other former students used the money for a deposit on a house, to travel or just to pay debts and to cover their bills.
It was suddenly logical, Ryan White thought when he opened his letter, why she worked until she was 85, lived so economically and sometimes hid himself. It was partly the era after depression in which she was raised, as well as her fierce independence. But maybe she had saved all the time with her students in mind.
“She wanted to give away as much as she could,” said Mr White, who also received around $ 26,000.
After Dr. Archer had opened her letter, she stepped into the Manhattan and bought a bottle of sherry – a tribute to her professor Hassold, who liked to drink it.
She thought of what she could do with the $ 100,000 that the letter promised her – opening a savings account, perhaps buy a house one day and is committed to her career in the academic world.
For Dr. Archer felt the money as a message from her mentor:
“Here is something to help you be you.”
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