the 'drine-addicted broken lecturer

The brilliant-and-broken addict as fixture: Kenkle, the janitor with a low-temperature-physics doctorate at twenty-one and a court-martial at twenty-three, "broken at several strategic points," discoursing nonstop over his mop — and the students' flat suspicion that he's "hypomanic or 'drine-addicted or both." The wreck of a mind kept running on stimulants, doing graveyard-shift custodial work at the foot of the academy.