October 16, 2017:
Let me give you an idea of how fucked-up our chaperone was.
His major interest was the undergraduate coeds on our trip, one in particular who became his live-in lover for a time. The night they got together he abandoned my GF and two other young women in a seedy section of Rome long after dark and long after multiple bottles of wine, so that as they walked their way back to our hostel it was like running a proverbial gauntlet of aggressive, threatening Italian street boys who were more than thrilled to find them without escort. 'Cos I guess his dick comes first, which, I'm guessing it probably did.
He baited my GF and her mum, who met us in Paris for a day. "Do you ever lie to each other?" — drunk on wine, naturally. It was typical of his sense of amusement to identify and exacerbate relationship tensions between others. I expect he imagined himself to be "mischievous", when in reality he was just a shit.
The event which most characterizes him in my eyes was this. There was a student on our trip who was extremely socially ill-adept — somewhere far along the Asperger's spectrum I think. He was deeply isolated: no-one wanted to travel with him, least of all me, wrapped as I was in my own issues. Behind his back, Mr. Chaperone gave this kid a naughty nickname, which stuck. Many surreptitious giggles ensued. That is so deeply flawed on so many deeply flawed levels.
I'm ironically labeling him a "chaperone", but that was not remotely his actual function. He was the school Philosophy prof, a former Jesuit, erudite, profoundly disinterested in being useful to students, a petty and shallow man who played favorites and schemed and skeeved after the female undergraduates. He was habitually drunk and even when he wasn't he affected an ironic posture behind which he refused to be helpful outside his chosen clique. Everyone I respect detests him. From time to time some of us still talk about his uselessness. It's a hobby.
In today's world he'd be #MeToo'd out of a career. He lived at just the right moment.
Fuck him to death and hell and back.