Professors in the Ivy League apparently are somewhat aware of the problems facing academia. You usually don’t see them doing anything about it other than whining at conferences and writing editorial columns in the New York Times. Tenure is a great thing, sort of like being emperor of Rome while it burns down. No one’s gonna stop your fiddling (or publishing).

Francis McLellan, a Brown Ph.D. and Princeton’s former head Russian language instructor, evidently had a different experience as a senior lecturer than the professors did. Lecturers are to Princeton what migrant laborers are to, well, Princeton. And it seems as if four years of teaching elementary language made giving up women, possessions, and meat an attractive option for McLellan. In January he was tonsured Iosaf, a hieromonk in the Russian Orthodox Church. Now he’s archimandrite of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, a city just slightly less dangerous than Cambridge. Sexy monk results after the jump.

Admittedly not much has changed: professor beard easily became a monk beard, one funny hat got traded for another funnier hat, and his ugly brown robes were replaced by more staid black. On the plus side Iosaf now has a fancy cross and the equivalent of tenure because I’m not really sure how you fire a monk–aside from actually setting fire to him.

More impressive about all of this is McLellan is in position to be the Ivy League’s first ever Russian Orthodox bishop after only six months in the priesthood. According to multiple sources (and Wikipedia!) Russian Orthodox bishops are frequently selected from the archimandrite ranks, especially the heads of the Jerusalem mission. This should be celebrated by other grad students, but they’ll likely use this as more motivation to get out while they still can–epecially the engineering students as they’re already essentially celibate.