Professor LaPorta

Lebanon, NH: Professor Rafael La Porta lay unconscious last night in the intensive care unit of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. His wife, Evita; his children; and Pat Fox kept vigil around the clock. Meanwhile, plaintive Microsoft Outlook “Gym” appointment reminders and instant messages from Mamma went unanswered.

The exact circumstances surrounding La Porta’s injuries are still unknown. The Tuck Profit commissioned forensic investigators from National Geographic’s “Seconds from Disaster” to attempt to reconstruct the events leading up to the tongue swallowing. According to these experts, La Porta (i) entered an otherwise empty Barclay lecture hall, (ii) fell from the second step to the side of the lectern, (iii) cried “Oh, no!”, (iv) impaled himself on the nearby overhead projector, and (v) swallowed his tongue. Gator soon found La Porta and, after wiping down the chalkboards and emptying the trash, called paramedics.

Students had mixed reactions to the tragic news. When told of the sequence of events, Hannah Breul noted that "it was pretty much what happened in every Corp. Fin. class last year – well, except for the tongue swallowing.”

Others suspected something more nefarious. “It was a suicide attempt,” Ranjot Singh opined. “We all know he was dreading the start of his core class, which is invariably a letdown after the scintillating discussion, widespread participation and overall coherence of his International Corporate Finance fall elective.”

Proponents of the suicide theory note that the incident follows other purported suicide attempts, including reports that La Porta wore his portable microphone into a bathtub last December in an apparent attempt to electrocute himself before last year’s core class began. Yet, others note wearing the microphone into the bathroom may simply have been an inadvertent encore of the professor’s hitherto most noteworthy stunt.

Regardless of motive, the Dean’s office was scrambling to find a replacement for La Porta. One dean, who wished to remain anonymous but who speaks really loudly, direly predicted, “CORP. FIN. IS GOING TO BE EVEN WORSE THAN USUAL...IF THAT’S POSSIBLE. JESUS, WHAT IS THAT INCESSANT RINGING?!”

Attention immediately turned to La Porta’s grieving wife, Evita, as a potential substitute because being married to a Tuck professor pre-qualifies the spouse to teach at Tuck. Other candidates include Aaron Burgamy, whose intuition would allow him to easily relate to the bottom third of the class. The failsafe solution currently is to let the class proceed without an instructor and have Matt Waterbury, T’06, return the day before the final with an Excel template that will reduce the difficulty of the exam to something approaching a paint-by-numbers kit.