A request for narratives concerning their most effective and most ineffective professors was sent to 222 graduates from Rollins College (Florida). The narratives covered a period of 26 years, from 1964 through 1990. The responses suggest three dominant characteristics shared by ineffective professors: (1) lack of passion for their subject matter; (2) inability to connect students to academic subjects; and (3) indifference or hostility to students. By isolating and focusing on specific behaviors that graduates linked with their professors' pedagogical failures and presenting those failures in isolation, the narratives bring to life familiar generalizations about ineffective professors and suggest strategies for improvement, even of good teachers, whose own practices may reflect some of the troubling practices. Narratives provided in each section of the paper collectively suggest that students, in spite of all their apparent detachment, want teachers to share with them a passion for their academic fields, and that students are most likely to become engaged in that passion under the guidance of people whom they care about and who, they believe, care about them. (AS)