It seems like most of the rabbis and teachers I have known who were particularly friendly with their students (such as Jules Zentner, my best friend during my 20s, or Rabbi Aron Tendler) were also having sex with their students. This Michael Hunter professor is my former teacher at Sierra College. I loved the guy. We had a lot of great conversations after class. He was always upbeat and positive and funny and charming. He used to have flings with his female students. It would get whispered about by the hotties on campus but it wasn’t regarded as a big deal (though many female students had contempt for teachers who hit on them). A lot of the charismatic teachers at Sierra College had sex with their students.
I was innocent about all this until one hottie in my class hung out with me after finals in December of 1987. And after she told me about Michael Hunter, we saw him in the parking lot that evening making time with a cute female student, and suddenly everything fell into place. She says another favorite teacher of mine called her a bitch when she turned him down.
Sac Bee: Michael James Hunter, theater instructor and mentor, dies at 66:
The Sacramento theater community is mourning the death of Michael Hunter, a longtime instructor of film and theater arts at Sierra College, respected actor and director.
Mr. Hunter died Feb. 11 at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, Roseville, as a result of a subarachnoid hemorrhage. He was 66.
He is being remembered as passionate about film and theater as a professor and thoughtful, generous and gracious as a mentor to several generations of students at Sierra College, where he taught from 1976 to 2013.
“He leaned towards theater of substance,” said Martha Kight, a local theater performer and former student of Hunter’s. “He produced musicals because people wanted to do them, and he also felt that students should be exposed to them as well, but his heart really lay in the American classics. He liked to give the kids all kinds of exposure.”
Mr. Hunter also was a notable presence in the Music Circus box office from 1968 until 2014.
“If you didn’t have self confidence when you walked in as a student or employee,” Kight said, “you certainly did when you walked out.”
Michael James Hunter was born in Sacramento to James and Gloria Hunter on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 25, 1948. He grew up in Roseville, graduated from Roseville High School in 1966, attended Sierra College, and earned a bachelor’s degree in speech/theater at Sacramento State and a master of fine arts degree in dramatic art at UC Davis.
He became a full-time professor at Sierra College in 1976 and directed one or two plays a year on campus. He was also active in local theater in the 1980s and was a member of the National Guard and the stagehands’ IATSE Union, Local 50…
Mr. Hunter’s two previous marriages ended in divorce.
