But while Mitchell finished teaching his class, his departure from The Times became the focus of considerable media attention.

On May 10, New York Magazine published a somewhat critical piece on the state of Mitchell’s career, examining his time at Harvard along with his Times experience.

Calling VES 173x “not an especially academic class,” the article also cited students who called Mitchell “extremely flirtatious.”

In the midst of a wide range of print and online pieces covering Mitchell’s resignation, internet gossip blog Gawker.com notably ran at least eight items on Mitchell between April 21 and May 14, including guesses as to his next career move and first-person accounts of Murray’s appearance in class.

On April 19, Gawker.com had published an item called “Film Critics Gone Wild: Ivy League Edition,” in which the gossip site reported a rumor about an unnamed “New York City film critic” involved in an impropriety with a student at the “prestigious school” at which he had been spending a semester.

One Harvard faculty member says this rumor had been taken seriously enough to provoke informal inquiries into its truth, but that these inquiries had concluded that the story was “simply fabrication” produced by “a person with a vendetta against The New York Times” and against Mitchell.

“They should call it Stalker.com,” the faculty member says of the site which reported the nameless rumor.

Carl Swanson, the New York Magazine contributing editor who wrote about Mitchell last month, says Mitchell’s now-abandoned position at The Times has made him a fascinating subject for many.

“Being one of the critics for The New York Times is a position that a lot of people pay attention to,” Swanson says. “Everybody knows who he is, everyone reads him.”

“As for the attention, well, I guess that’s what you get when you combine a very well-known journalist with the largest corporation in the Western hemisphere,” Turner writes.

All in all, perhaps it remains until next spring to see quite how Mitchell fits into Harvard’s complex academic structure. In the meantime, Turner cautions against wondering whether Mitchell’s successes mean that there are more faculty members like him on the way.

“Trick question: there is only one Elvis Mitchell,” Turner writes. “Maybe you should ask me again after cloning becomes widespread.”

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.