In 2001, then-VES Chair Ellen Phelan, a professional painter, was reportedly dismissed after concerns about the amount of time she spent in New York. And while Mitchell has earned what appear to be uniformly positive reviews from administrators and faculty, his celebrity perks did not come without a price.

J.D. Connor ’92, assistant director of undergraduate studies for film studies and a former Crimson editor, praised Mitchell’s teaching in an interview last month but said that the otherwise-successful film course “had all the initial administrative problems that one might expect from someone who is not by training an academic.”

And students’ generally positive remarks on the course have been tempered by observations that its workload was comparatively light and Mitchell’s lectures sometimes unstructured.

“There was concern about, let us say, the course’s free-flowing organization,” Germanic languages and literatures department Chair Eric Rentschler said last month. Rentschler has played a key role in the recent development of Harvard’s film studies program.

Gustavo S. Turner, the head teaching fellow for VES 173x, says the course has been “one of the most remarkable teaching experiences I’ve had at Harvard” in four years as a TF, but acknowledges the impact of Mitchell’s packed calendar this spring.

“It’s always tricky to work with professors with busy schedules, in or out of town,” Turner writes in an e-mail. “But it’s doable, especially if you have experience. Stock up on the Aleve, though.”

Michael Lawrence, VES’ undergraduate academic coordinator, says Mitchell has been “extraordinarily tough to get in touch with” as Lawrence prepared the course catalog, but he adds that this was not far out of the norm for VES’ many visiting faculty.

“It was a little bit rare that I didn’t even practically see him at all” this term, Lawrence notes. “But it was just a little tougher than normal.”

While VES is known for flexible scheduling, professors in Af-Am, the other department in which Mitchell teaches, have allegedly been held to other expectations.

The Af-Am department famously lost former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 to Princeton in 2001 after, West has claimed, University President Lawrence H. Summers questioned the amount of time the scholar had devoted to political work outside the academy and the recording of a spoken-word album, Sketches of My Culture. Af-Am faculty did not reply to requests for comment for this story.

In February, DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. said Mitchell’s unique career made him valuable to the department.

“We wanted to hire someone to teach film, but we also just wanted to hire Elvis Mitchell,” the Af-Am chair told The Crimson in an interview. “There’s nobody quite like him.”

There is no doubt that Mitchell’s unique position outside Harvard’s walls contributed largely to his course catalog appeal—most professors, after all, can’t get the star of Caddyshack and Lost in Translation to show up unannounced at their lectures. Students and faculty alike have raved about those guests, about his vast knowledge of the filmmaking world and about a unique, lively manner in the classroom.

Rentschler said last month that he hoped Mitchell’s popularity would make his film course next year a “feeder” for the VES concentration track in the field that will debut this fall.

PEANUT GALLERY