Teacher's Pets

THE SYLLABUS FOR PROFESSOR MICHAEL PETRIK'S criminal-justice class at New York's Nassau County Community College promised a course on "alternatives to prison." Little did his students know how far he'd go to teach his lessons. The professor, 30, confessed last week to helping two inmates escape from a medium-security prison in upstate New York. State police say Petrik provided the two, who were serving time for murder and robbery, with a tool to cut the prison's chain link fence, then drove them to Manhattan. Colleagues were predictably "shocked" that the professor had helped in the escape. At week's end Petrik was behind bars, facing a seven-year prison term with no sabbaticals, and one of the jailbirds had been caught. Give the prof an F.