“My professor can beat up you up!” is not a claim you’d normally make out on the quad. But if your professor is James Pfrehm, an assistant professor of German and linguistics at Ithaca College, it’s not such a stretch. And it’s probably true.
In his free time, Pfrehm is an amateur mixed martial arts fighter, as capable of locking an opponent in an arm bar as he is explaining German literature to a freshman.
In an “Inside Higher Ed” column, Pfrehm discusses how a creeping cynicism about his academic career led him to pull on a pair of gloves and climb into the cage, and how MMA and academia have more in common than most might think.
Read more at insidehighered.com.