BOOK EXCERPT: When One Professor Ended My College Career — From "7 Rooms: One Family Inside a Cult"

My name is Edward Michael Francis. I'm the founder of CineMarch Media, an independent, ad-free media operation based in New Mexico, and the host of two podcasts: Marxists at the Movies, where I look at film, TV, music, and pop culture through a Marxist, queer and/or feminist critical lens, and CultFroggy, where I examine high-control group dynamics across institutions — from religion to education to the marching arts. No corporate backing, no advertisers, no filter.

Alongside that work, I'm writing a memoir — actually, two of them. 7 Rooms: One Family Inside a Cult is about the physical spaces of my childhood and the family dynamics that lived inside them. 7 Houses: Confessions of a Cult Hopper is about the pattern I didn't recognize until much later: that I spent decades moving from one high-control environment to the next, each one with its own rules about who I was allowed to be. The two books are companion pieces, and together they're the most honest thing I've ever made.

Most of us have a room we didn't get to leave on our own terms — a classroom, a job, a relationship, a version of ourselves we were pushed out of before we were ready. This excerpt is from a chapter in 7 Rooms about the semester everything changed. I had clawed my way back from academic probation at Millersville University, earned another shot, and signed up for the next round of classes. What I didn't know was that one conversation in one office at the top of one staircase was about to make all of it irrelevant.

Professor Houlihan

It was the fall of 2000, my third semester at Millersville. Freshman year had been, to put it charitably, a disaster — the kind of first year that leaves a mark on your transcript and on your sense of what you're capable of. I had ended up on academic probation, university-wide, GPA in the basement. But I had worked. Genuinely worked, in the way you only work when you can feel the floor giving way beneath you. By the end of that third semester, my GPA had climbed to nearly passing. The university took note. I would be given a fourth semester to continue improving. I signed up for my classes — including Solfege 3, the next step in the gauntlet — and I believed, in whatever cautious, provisional way I allowed myself to believe things, that I was still in this.

Sadly, that was never to be.

There are teachers who push you to grow, and there are teachers who push you to the door. Professor Michel Houlihan was both.

He was an Irish national — tall, stocky, shaved head, a pair of blue eyes so bright and electric they practically lit up the room without his permission. He dressed like he had a standing appointment with someone important: suit coat and tie, every single day, no exceptions. In the context of a music education program at a mid-sized Pennsylvania state school, he was either a man who'd taken a very wrong turn or a man who'd decided the rest of us had. Solfege and Harmony with Professor Houlihan was considered the first major gauntlet for the music ed degree at Millersville — the class that separated the students who were serious from the students who thought they were. If you yawned in class, he would stop whatever he was doing and fix you with those blue lighthouse eyes. "Why are you bored?"  The Irish lilt made it sound almost musical, which did nothing to soften the experience of being called out in front of thirty people for the crime of being human.

He would have you stand and sing solo. Impromptu and in front of everyone. And if you weren't perfectly on pitch, perfectly in rhythm — "Mister Francis, that was terrible. Start over, sir." The insult delivered in that same lilting cadence, all but lilting, like William Walton had written it for soprano and humiliation. The only thing that ever softened the man was chocolate. Bring him a bar to class and he was, by all accounts, a teddy bear for the rest of the session. His desk was never short on offerings. He had written the books we learned from, which he taught as though they had been handed down from somewhere higher than Penn State's publishing house.

Crossing Professor Houlihan was not an academic risk. It was a theological one. That situation became considerably more fraught during my sophomore year, when he was named department chair — while retaining his theory position. He was no longer just the most powerful person in the room. He was the room. 

I had passed Solfege 1 by the absolute, white-knuckle skin of my teeth. Semester two — Solfege 2 — was already proving worse. The problem wasn't the material, exactly. The problem was me, and what I actually wanted, and how badly I was refusing to look directly at either of those things.

Millersville was nothing if not picturesque. The pond sat at the heart of campus, and in my last semester I crossed it constantly — dorm to music building, music building to dorm, back and forth like a metronome that had lost the beat. The trees had gone full gold and amber, the wind working overtime to strip them bare, laying leaves across the surface of the water until the pond looked less like water and more like a stained glass window someone had dropped. They covered the ground too, yellow and rust and brown, pressed flat along the brick path that curved around the bank. The fountain pushed up a small, quiet arc in the middle of it all, indifferent to the season. A pair of geese moved slowly along the far edge, unbothered. For a moment it was genuinely beautiful — the kind of beautiful that feels almost aggressive when you're not in the mood for it. I was standing on the bridge one afternoon when I heard footsteps behind me. 

A fellow music ed student from my dorm — Paul — came to stand beside me on the bridge. Tall, stocky, curly blond hair, pale blue eyes, the kind of earnestness that made him simultaneously exhausting and impossible not to respect. In another life someone would have pulled him out of marching band and handed him shoulder pads. Instead he played trombone and tuba, and he asked questions the way other people cleared their throats: without warning and without apology.

"So," he said, both of us looking out at the leaf-covered water. "Do you think you're going to pass Houlihan?"

I didn't know if he was asking because he'd sensed I was drowning, or because he was quietly worried about his own grade and looking for company. Either way, the question landed exactly where it was aimed. I let it swirl around for a moment — the practices I hadn't done, the exercises I couldn't quite execute, the growing certainty that I was building toward a wall at top speed.

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe."

And even maybe was laughable compared to what actually happened.

The Solfege 2 final had three parts: a written theory exam, an audio final you recorded on cassette tape, and — the one nobody was looking forward to — a one-on-one session in Houlihan's office. The first two I choked through. I knew it while I was doing it, and I knew it after. But I showed up at his office at nine in the morning anyway, because what else do you do. The music department occupied a converted residential house on the edge of campus, all polished wood and repurposed rooms, the kind of building that still faintly remembered being someone's home. I trudged up the stairs slowly. His office was at the top of the landing.

There was nowhere else to go.

"Come in, Edward. Close the door."

I did.

What followed was something between an audition and a demolition. He walked me through a series of exercises I had never been asked to perform before, each one harder than the last, each failure building on the one before it until I was a barely-contained storm of adrenaline in a button-down shirt. Then he sat back.

"Edward. We need to talk about your future here at Millersville."

My body went cold.

"I feel that you are a constant complainer, and you aren't grasping some of the most basic concepts in theory class. I simply fear that most other teachers will not want to work with you. You don't have a cooperative personality that fits in an educational space. Have you considered performance or industry studies?"

He was asking me to leave. He was packaging it as advice, dressing it up in professional concern, but he was asking me to leave. And somewhere underneath the adrenaline and the shame, I knew he wasn't entirely wrong about what he saw. He just didn't know — couldn't know — that what he was looking at wasn't a failure of aptitude. It was a failure of fit. I didn't want to be there. I had wanted composition, had even dared to think it was possible, and my father had closed that door with the quiet finality of someone who'd made up his mind long before the conversation started. Music ed or no music degree. And so here I was, in a suit coat and tie–adjacent future that was never mine to begin with, being told by a man who worshipped his own textbooks that I didn't belong.

"No," I said. "Education is the only path for me."

Technically true. Technically.

He looked at me, and what he felt read clearly as disappointment. "Well. I'm not asking you to make any changes yet. But you might want to consider it in the near future."

I stared at him. My father's voice was already in the room, had been in the room the whole time: Music ed or no music degree. And here was Houlihan, on the other side of the equation, telling me that door was closing too. From where I sat, this stupid motherfucker was standing in the middle of the only future I'd ever been allowed to want, and he was burning it down.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I have to go."

I stood up before the tears could reach my face. Walked back down the stairs, out of the converted house, across campus, back to my dorm room. The middle of the day, no one else around. I sat with it. I tried to cry. I couldn't. Whatever valve controlled that particular release had been closed for a long time, sealed shut by years of learning that feelings were a logistical problem to be solved rather than a thing you were allowed to have.

So instead, I made a decision.

Fine. If that stupid jerkoff doesn't want me — fuck him.

The next morning, I went to the registrar and cancelled my classes for the following semester. Packed my things. Left Millersville. Moved back home.

It was a pattern I recognized without fully naming it yet — learned from watching the people who raised me: when something hurts you, cut it out immediately and don't look back. No grieving, no processing, no asking whether you might be throwing something away that mattered. Just the clean, blunt surgery of removal.

I never attended college again.

What I did instead was throw every fractured, redirected piece of myself into the only thing that had ever made the noise in my head go quiet. Drum and bugle corps. The 2001 Reading Buccaneers. A new cult to replace the old confusion, and one that, for a while, felt like it might actually be mine.

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