Breaking: Introductory Feminist Theater Professor Wants You to Call Her Cheryl

A tale as old as time: you’re sitting in your first seminar for a new course and need to ask a question, but you stay silent because you don’t know how to address your professor. Should you call them Dr., Professor, or Mr. or Ms.? How do you pronounce their last name? Should you go with the classic “excuse me, Professor” or should you just yell “I have a question” into the void until your professor acknowledges you?

For students in this introductory feminist theater class, that classic conundrum wasn’t an issue. Professor Rosenblume, teaching the course “Ladies of the Stage: How the Vagina Monologues are Reshaping American Theatre,” immediately made it clear; she wants the class to call her Cheryl.

Rosenblume, a knit poncho enthusiast, wants students to know her seminar is a multi-current stream, with information flowing organically between all who inhabit the classroom space. “I need them to know I am with them, I understand them. I am here to learn from them. Mostly they are here to learn from me, but I am also here to learn from them.” Less important for them to know, she felt, was her reputation for giving out D's because students didn’t “dig into the unspoken truths of the text.”

Lizzy Wang, a College freshman in the course, told UTB that she has mixed feelings about the Professor. “Up until last week I thought Cheryl and I were on the same page, she seemed pretty chill. But then she yelled at me in front of the class for not agreeing that the witch hat in Wicked is a phallic symbol. Now I don’t know where we stand.”

Another student in the course who requested to stay anonymous had similar concerns. “When I asked her why she gave me 50% on an assignment I worked really hard on, she told me the world was filled with so many truths, but that the truths I put on the homework were not the ones she was looking for,” the student said in an interview outside Williams Hall.

A recent UTB study found that although 90% of the class refers to the professor as Cheryl within seminar, only 20% use “Cheryl” outside the class. A whopping 60% refer to her as “fucking Cheryl”, with the additional 20% opting for either “Dr. Rosenblume” or simply “that demon.”

Rosenblume hopes the rest of the year will continue on the positive note it started on. “I’m looking forward to really getting to know these guys, becoming good friends, and teaching them to regurgitate my opinions on their journey through the great world of the theatre.”