Anyone who’s ever spent an evening (and then some) with Christopher Hitchens, drinking and talking about books and politics late into the night, knows that his scholarship is as prodigious as his thirst. Is it any wonder, then, that the rabble-rousing Vanity Fair and Nation writer has now added college professor to his résumé? Hitchens, a visiting professor in the graduate program at the New School, is teaching a class on the American canon and its evolution from the English canon. But it seems the school’s fluorescent lights and windowless classrooms offended the senses of the Falstaffian journalist, so he worked out a deal with Borgo Antico, a nearby restaurant-bar. Now his students join him for classes there, where all may indulge in Hitchens’s twin passions, books and drinks, together. “Which is how a lot of literature got committed in the first place,” says Hitchens, who often starts class by buying a round. A word of warning to Hitchens’s students, though, lest they expect him to be a pushover at finals time: “I am,” he insists soberly, “a tough grader.”