The last gift of a teacher for his students: his economies of a lifetime

In August 2021, a mysterious package from Sarasota, Florida, arrived at Nicole Archer’s mailbox in New York.

Archer rushed to his tight Chelsea apartment, with the coarse envelope in his hands, and tore it at the dining table, revealing a document she had wondered for months if it would arrive.

She knew a dear college teacher had left her something in her will. I expected a modest gift – enough money for a special dinner, perhaps, or one of the bracelets of accounts the teacher liked to make at hand.

But when Archer, 49, saw the number on the last page – $ 100,000 – thought there could be a decimal point out of place.

“I really believed I had read it wrong,” she said. “I remember following the number with my finger, making sure how many zeros there were.”

Almost at the same time, another 30 people across the country received similar letters, sent at the request of a teacher whose classes had attended years earlier.

For over 50 years teaching art history at New College of Florida, Professor Cris Hassold built an influential but complex legacy. She referred to her students as her children. He hired them to clean his home-a disturbing homes of accumulative. Sometimes she humiliated them in the classroom.

But the students who knew her better described her as a unique good force in their lives. “The cult of Cris,” as a student described, lives in the 31 favorite students who inherited their intensity, their peculiarities and, in the end, their economies of a life.

New College, a small public college in Sarasota, on the Florida Gulf coast, was known to attract talented students who could not afford a private art school, but who sought a rigorous workload in a relaxed and sunny environment.

He became a counterculture center, where gender studies courses rapidly filled and the students walked barefoot on campus, tried drugs and organized orgies.

The courses were demanding. Hassold hated textbooks and gave 150 weekly reading pages from dense primary sources written by authors and critics such as André Breton and Rosalind Krauss.

Andrea Bailey, 47, who is now director of American Women Artists, a non -profit organization, was confident of her ability to write about art – even enrolling in one of Hassold’s art classes in 1995. Bailey kept a particularly severe criticism of her interpretation of a Vincent Van Gogh painting.

“Its conclusion that the woman in ‘The Straw Hat’ is an aristocrat is simply wrong,” Hassold wrote in the Bailey academic archive on December 8, 1995. “I can’t understand how she could have read about the works and gets confused so much.”

Students who were not intimidated by Hassold’s scathing style were the most likely to be admitted in their intimate circle.

Without letting

The teacher and her students strengthened her bond during long informal dinners.

Between dumplings at The Cheesecake Factory or French onion soup in a local bistro, Hassold talked to them about rivals art teachers or remembered adventures with old boyfriends in New York. She expressed discontent with her belief that New College was losing her liberal and countercultural spirit – a change that would become more pronounced decades later.

Hassold always investigated the aspirations of his students.

“What do you want to do and how to get there?” Her students remembered her asking. “Who do you like to read? Where do they teach? They teach abroad? How do you save money to go?”

These dinners, Archer remembered, “were fun spaces where you could imagine a life for yourself without restrictions.”

However, many students wondered why Hassold never invited them to his home.

Ryan White, who enrolled in Hassold’s Noir Movie class as a freshman in 2003, would understand. After approaching her throughout the semester and in the following years, she asked him to help her cut the grass of her garden – an apocalyptic jungle of ferns and shrubs – and to pack the interior of her house.

White, 45, who now drives a knife sharpening company in New York, recalled that it was a “nightmare”.

Food cans, muffin shapes, office supplies, and a library of art history books clutter all the corners of their home. Batteries of papers spread throughout the bed. A bathroom of guests had been unusable a decade ago because boxes of papers prevented the door from opening.

His neighbors complained and welcomed the effort of White and other students to clean his property, offering lemonade as a gesture of gratitude.

Katie Helms, 47, from Kingston, New York, who graduated from New College in 2003, gained a new view of Hassold after they had a deep conversation about their parents.

Helms, now a business consultant and a doctoral student in education, made a point of reading the 100-page works of Hassold several times, becoming one of his favorites.

One night while driving for dinner, Helms said Hassold recalled that he had returned home from Louisville University and found that his mother had played all her daughter’s belongings. Since then, Hassold has held it all.

Probably this was just one of the factors behind an accumulation problem that eventually made your home uninhabitable. Instead of getting rid of the rubble, Hassold built a second home on his property.

“She was not very good at leaving things, or people, leaving,” Archer said.

“She adopted us”

The youngest of 12 children, Helms received little attention as he grew up. This changed when he met Hassold. For the first time, Helms felt unconditional acceptance for everything from his smoking habit to his queer identity.

“I will never have the kind of recognition of my parents I had of it,” said Helms, his voice embargoed. “I think of her almost every day.”

When her time in the Hassold classroom ended, many students worked for her as educational assistants and searched her for career advice. When they returned to Sarasota in his life, they made dinner plans with their former mentor.

As Archer put it, “she had a collection of students the same way she had infinite collections of books.”

Hassold retired in 2016 at the age of 85. In her last years, she told some of her alumni that she planned to leave them something when she died. She didn’t have much family, besides a brother and some nieces. It was not a woman who lived luxuriously-driving an old Toyota and using a modest wardrobe. The students were touched, but they didn’t expect much.

“She didn’t have a family, but we were her family,” White said. “She adopted us, and we adopted her.”

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