Hey, it's back-to-school time! Boo! I know it's a huge disappointment to learn that Alice Cooper has the capacity to fib, but look on the bright side — you could be earning your diploma at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters!


I know it sounds thrilling to sign up for Colossus' "Siberian Landscape Oil Painting 101" and to have Psylocke as a gym teacher, a class I imagine resembles the music video for Eric Prydz's "Call On Me."

But really, Professor's Xavier's prep school is like Dangerous Minds with killer robots, mostly homicidal teachers, and no Coolio songs. Here are 10 reasons why the X-Men have no business being school teachers.


10.) Sometimes it's not even a school!

That's right! Depending on who's writing the X-Men, Xavier's can be anything from an elite Westchester County private school, a paramilitary commune for horny mutants to hang out and go on adventures, or a refugee camp. Hell, nowadays the X-Men have basically abandoned the prep school paradigm as they now live on a meteor in San Francisco Bay à la Sealand.

When the Xavier Institute decides mid-semester that it's no longer conferring degrees, can you transfer those credits to human schools? Honestly, that shouldn't even be your biggest worry because....

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9.) The school is frequently a smoldering crater!

Yes, this school blows up. A lot. And if we adjust the X-Men's comic book time to real-world time, the school is entirely destroyed like clockwork every couple years or so. No wonder Wolverine once opined, "Next time guys, we should just rebuild this place outta Lego."


8.) You must be pre-med!

I'm not making this up. Verbatim from the 1993 X-Men: Survival Guide to the Mansion:

Every undergraduate student will be required to spend seventy-two hours a semester interning in the Med-Lab. This will count as 23% of your final grade. Extra-credit assignments in the past have included such research essays "Designer Genetics" by Henry McCoy, "Why?" by Katherine Pryde, and "Binary Diagnostic Encoding" by Douglas Ramsey.


7.) Students die all the time!

It's true! Xavier's is perhaps the only school in the world where the mortality rate outstrips the graduation rate. I presume this is why everyone's forced to intern in the med lab.


6.) The teachers might brainwash your parents into sending you there!

In Uncanny X-Men #131, Jean Grey uses her psychic powers to brainwash Kitty Pryde's parents into making her join the X-Men. Sure, Jean Grey was secretly the evil Dark Phoenix at the time, but I find it hard to believe super-psychic Professor X was somehow oblivious to this.


5.) Your teachers are sometimes supervillains!

One time, Magneto gained access to Xavier's Institute by masquerading as the Buddhist special class teacher. On various occasions, Sabretooth and Juggernaut have lived on-campus and at any given time, at least 33% of the adult staff is unwittingly in cahoots with brainwashing supervillains like Apocalypse, Mr. Sinister, Onslaught, or the Shadow King.


4.) Xavier's Institute has the least accredited staff on the planet!

Barring Beast or Professor X, almost none of the X-Men have the credentials to be high school instructors. And if they did earn them, when the fuck did Iceman have the time to earn a degree in accounting? And if he did, why was he doing that instead of saving the world?


3.) The staff is populated with lunatic sex fiends!

On your average day, most of the staff dresses in some form of fetish wear and is engaged in some carnal imbroglio that would give the county inspector the vapors. This place is less of a school, more of a compound of demigod nymphomanics.


2.) The boathouse is dangerous!

This too is from the Survival Guide to the Mansion, a book that gives the Sentinels, Magneto, the Morlocks, and this banal warning about lakeside horseplay equal page space.


1.) Your teachers will try to sleep with you!

If you somehow avoid drowning at the boathouse, the headmaster may make a pass at you! Charles Xavier had the hots for a teenage Jean Grey, and let's just say that this out-of-context panel from Kitty Pryde's fourteenth birthday party isn't doing Wolverine any favors. You were born in 1882, man. Find a nice lady your own age.