EVANSTON — Northwestern University announced yesterday the hiring of a new USSR Studies professor, Gary Saul Morson. “We are pleased to be adding this brilliant, up-and-coming scholar to our faculty team,” said President Walter Dill Scott.

Morson, who was born in 1895, received his Ph.D. from Yale last year before, purportedly, teaching in Pennsylvania. Safely within Cook County lines, Morson confessed to The Flipside that his job there was only a cover for his true mission: finding communist spies. “It’s really quite amazing,” explained Morson. “Dostoevsky left us clues in The Brothers Karamazov that point us to enemies of the United States. The Russian classics have so much contemporary meaning.”

Morson’s dossier is replete with projects like this, and his ambition is only growing. “President Scott laughed when I told him I would like to teach a 600-person Russian literature class. I just answered that students who appreciate Anna Karenina are the rare joys in life, flecks of gold hidden among sand.”

Morson added, “Northwestern’s tuition is such that the gold-to-sand ratio is conducive to a large Russian literature course.”

Professor Morson said he is enthusiastic about participating in Northwestern’s rich traditions. “I can’t wait to Stroll Beneath the Archway, help students Paint the Pebble, and listen to contemporary music at Armadillo Festival Day.”