Читать книгу Where Drowned Things Live - Susan Thistlethwaite - Страница 7

When I was fifteen years old I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life. I had never before seen, or at least had not noticed, buildings that were evidently dedicated to a higher purpose, not to necessity or utility, not merely to shelter or manufacture or grade, but to something that might be an end in itself.

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

I turned and stomped down the hall. The flagstone floor of these fake gothic buildings made a satisfyingly loud sound as I trudged on down the long hall toward the conference room at the end of the hall. On this floor of the Myerson Humanities building, we in Philosophy and Religion occupied one side and History had the other. A big staircase bisected the building in the front. There was one creaky old elevator somewhere. Not really ADA compliant and I’d never consider riding in it.

One side of our hallway had faculty offices arranged from smallest to largest, Henry’s and mine being the smallest. The Department Chair, Dr. Harold Grimes, of course, occupied the very largest. On the other side, the department secretary occupied an equally small office, the mirror of my shared office, and then there were two empty offices, now used for very small classes, and a large conference room at the end where the meeting was taking place. Grimes had the showcase office, a semi-circular room with stained glass at the top that was inside one of the four turrets that anchored the corners of the building.

I clunked along, thinking that if the university really did attack us with more drastic budget cuts we could always defend ourselves by shooting arrows out of the narrow slits in our turrets. With the water in the water cooler and the snack machines in the basement, we could hold out for weeks.

Even as slowly as I was walking, I finally reached the conference room. Though the meeting had started at 3:30 and it was now nearly 4, I could not bring myself to open the door right away. As I lingered in the hall, I could hear the raised voices inside probably making points that had been made several times before, and surely would be again.

This was another area where I had discovered to my dismay that being a cop and being an academic did not differ substantially. Squad meetings were also endlessly repetitious. Of course, at squad meetings we’d had donuts to keep us going. No donuts at faculty meetings, or none that I had ever seen.

I finally pushed the heavy oak door open and shards of afternoon light spilled through the mullioned windows that lined the conference room on the west wall. The light shot directly into my eyes and poked at the headache that had been building since I’d first met with Ah-seong. It had been a long afternoon and it was going to get a lot longer.

Seated around an oak table fully thirty feet in length were the remaining full-time members of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Many chairs lined the walls, but there were three empty chairs still at the table. One because I was not yet seated in it, and the two others for the two tenured positions we had lost in the last two years.

Yes, of course, those courses were still taught, but just by underpaid adjuncts, the fast-food workers of the university whose ranks of cheap labor were growing even as full-time positions were cut or moved to more lucrative departments. I thought it was rather like playing at the ghost in Hamlet to keep the empty chairs pulled up to the table. Were they meant to echo a mute cry for revenge from those whose jobs had been murdered?

The head of our department, Harold Grimes, was standing at the head of the table, the filtered light behind him glinting off of his full head of white hair. This was an effect intended by Harold, as was keeping his suspiciously tanned face out of direct light, the better to hide the network of wrinkles direct light would reveal. He thought he was handsome and affected the clichéd horn-rimmed glasses, tweed jacket, leather patch elbows, pipe in pocket look so beloved of his generation of academic men. He really didn’t look too bad. Stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.

Harold was tall, probably now just a little over six feet as age took its toll on his height and contributed to his increasing girth around the stomach. His veneer of absent-minded professor covered a power player of some skill. He had survived to his nearly sixty years of age having published very little, and none of it of note, in a university where that should have finished him long ago. That it had not, and that he was, in fact, a tenured senior professor, was strong testimony to his palpable personal charm and to his ability to know and be known in the labyrinthine ways of power in the university.

Harold’s field was Ethics, a fact I tried not to dwell on because I found it made me laugh. It’s not wise to find your boss too funny. Harold was not a person to underestimate. Yet, in a weird way I was glad he was our department head. If anybody could protect us from the accounting sharks that ruled academic budgets today, Harold could. That is, if it suited his own purposes. I glanced at the two empty chairs. He hadn’t been able to save the ghosts. And an untenured professor like my lowly self who has not completed her dissertation is very vulnerable at budget-cutting time.

“Ms. Ginelli, so glad you could join us,” said Grimes, pausing to underline my peon status by not even using the customary faculty honorific of “professor.” He then waited, underlining my tardy status, until I had crossed the large room to take my seat.

Well, given my height I am not able to insinuate myself into a room in any case. I paused behind my chair for a minute and looked at him. I’m about an inch taller than he is and he really didn’t like the fact that I could look down on him. He was used to looking down on women (literally and figuratively) and on most men for that matter.

“Take your seat,” he barked out, having been pushed too far.

I could feel my job sway under me and decided I’d really better sit down.

Henry, my office-mate, swiveled his pseudo-Tudor conference chair in my direction as I took my seat, and with his back to Grimes crossed his eyes at me. Wow, this meeting must be excruciating for Henry to mug in front of Grimes, even discretely. Henry desperately needed his job. This must really be bad.

Grimes seemed to decide he had punished me enough and began pacing at the head of the table.

“As I was saying, at the Department Chairs meeting, Dean Wooster emphasized that the self-study is a way for all departments to have access to the creation of a curricular structure that befits the intellectual demands this twenty-first century have laid upon us.”

He paused for emphasis, not for comment. At least not from me. Anything I could truthfully have said would have further imperiled my job.

Hercules Abraham, Professor of Judaism, the most senior member of the department and the kindest man I have ever met, nodded his small, neat, white head from his position directly to Grimes’ left. I wondered what he was doing here. At more than seventy years of age, he was semi-retired and only taught a few seminars and tutorials. He had no committee assignments and was not expected to have to attend faculty meetings. He must be here voluntarily. I was stunned. I would have used any excuse not to be here.

Hercules spoke, his still prominent French accent making the words seem to flow.

“This is necessary, I believe, for in these changing times we have to adjust ourselves.”

As he spoke, his blue eyes peeked out from his wrinkled face radiating good will. He leaned his thin frame back against the high-backed chair and smiled at all of us, confident that he, Hercules, had helped our leader make an important point.

It would probably never occur to Hercules that this was bureaucratic claptrap. To him, it would mean we would all pull together and in the spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion to learning make this university a new Garden of Eden.

Hercules combined the innocence of a child with the wisdom of Solomon. He had been a four-year-old Jew in France when the Vichy government, far from trying to hinder the Nazi round up of Jews to send to concentration camps, was being positively helpful to their occupiers. Hercules and his mother (his father had fought and died in the French Resistance) had been hidden in the French village of LeChambon, the tiny mountain town in France where literally hundreds of Jews were saved by French Protestant farmers who became expert forgers and smugglers to fool the French government officials and Nazis in order to save Jewish lives.

Maybe Hercules believed in goodness because he had seen it. He just made me feel like I wanted to protect him, but in many ways he was also like a tough little French rooster, too thin and wiry to be eaten. And sometimes there was a suspicion in my mind that Hercules saw right through Grimes, but felt that by not directly challenging him Grimes could be brought to see what was right. If you grew up hiding from Nazis, you probably had a good idea how to hide what you were thinking.

I was too new to this academic culture to read it accurately.

But before Grimes could get his mouth open, Adelaide Winters jumped in with her customary bluntness.

“Is it a raid, Harold or can we ride it out?”

Adelaide Winters was Professor of Women and Religion and no innocent and nobody’s fool. At fifty, with slate-grey hair, an extra hundred pounds, and a laser-like brain, she was a formidable presence in any meeting. She gave off strong “take it or leave it” vibes. A former student in Philosophy and Religion had told me last year that when Adelaide had entered the lecture hall and approached the lectern, he had at first thought a “cleaning lady” had taken leave of her senses. He said, like he was proud of himself, that it had taken him only “three seconds” to realize his mistake. I doubted that he realized he was both a sexist and a classist for making that particular error. So I’d told him. He didn’t seem to appreciate it.

Adelaide was one of the few people I’d ever met who when they spoke, I was tempted to write it down. She always cut directly to the heart of any topic and her terse, laconic approach boded ill for academic claptrap. She and Grimes seemed to be long-time enemies, though I did not know if there had been something specific that caused that, or whether it was because they were so completely opposite in virtually everything they approached. You couldn’t miss the antipathy and it seemed like years in the making. And it had been, what, over twenty years?

Grimes, of course, was furious that the shadowy, intricate tunnels of rhetoric where he’d planned to lead us had been rudely exposed to the light of day by Adelaide. But he hardly showed it. His eyes, hidden behind his horn-rims and his face shadowed by the backlight, only swiveled to glance at Adelaide sitting well down the conference table, a ghost chair on either side of her. Perhaps she had chosen that seat to convey that she preferred the company of the dear departed. Or maybe she just liked the elbowroom.

Grimes drew himself erect and looked directly at her.

“There is absolutely no question of a raid. What we have here is an opening to explore the kinds of issues that you yourself deem so important. What constitutes knowledge? How is the content of the curriculum to be determined and what content is necessary for the well-educated, twenty-first century graduate.”

Now, I might be a new academic, but I knew baloney when it was being fed to me, in fact, to the whole group, in one large serving. Adelaide was right. What was going down was more cuts in the humanities areas. More faculty positions being given to economics and to the “hard sciences,” computer, math, physics.

Unless we could, by some miracle, come up with a coherent reason for our existence.

And there, we in Philosophy and Religion were publicly, embarrassingly split. And, as we knew only too well, the backlash against diversity, against women’s studies, black studies, against multi-culturalism, was being fueled by theatric political challenges to what was again being labeled “political correctness.” One of the two faculty members whose position had been eliminated had been a promising young African American guy whose scholarly specialty was African and African Diaspora Religion, including African American religion. There were no black studies offerings at all being taught this quarter. Would they ever be taught again? We had one cross-referenced class in Islam actually taught by a Muslim Scholar in another department. I was the “Christianist,” and heaven help the Christians if that were to continue as our only perspective on one of the world’s major religions. Adelaide held firm on teaching a very diverse array of women thinkers in religion, but when she retired? What then?

This was nothing new for the University of Chicago. Decades before, this territory had been staked out with the fierce intellectual fire of Allan Bloom, arch nemesis of all things not mentioned in Plato or Aristotle. According to Bloom, when we had starting teaching anything but the “classics,” we had abandoned American society to such ills as divorce and abortion and a host of other supposed moral decay. Those who felt that the idea that the “classics” represented disinterested “truth” in Western culture were countered by those who pointed out how these classics valorized slavery, the oppression of women and LGBTQ people and greased the skids for colonial exploitation for millions around the world. They were in turn dismissed as “hopelessly PC.” Adelaide brushed that aside as so much nonsense and kept on questioning. Grimes was sure truth was objective and he had the lock on it. I’d seen the reading list for his introductory class on Ethics. No women, minorities or “third world” authors need apply. And certainly no Queer theory ever crossed his mind.

Adelaide looked impassively at Grimes, but I noticed her hands on the table were clenching and unclenching, a sure sign of agitation in her. Grimes noticed too, but he plowed on.

“Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if this self-study enabled us to enlarge our department, given the kinds of substantive classes we teach.”

“Who?” Adelaide’s sharp voice cut through the room. The one syllable stopped Grimes like somebody had attached a chain to his axle.

“Who? What do you mean who?” he blustered.

“Look. Harold. If it’s not a raid then it will be a plant. And what gets foisted on to us depends wholly on who writes this self-study and who ultimately will determine the content. That’s what this discussion is about, isn’t it? You have somebody in mind to add to our department. Maybe you and the Dean together have somebody you’d like to add to this department and this self-study is the fig-leaf that will cover that maneuver.”

Whoa. Made sense to me, but also made me want to crawl under the table. When mastodons clash, the calves run for cover.

But I hadn’t reckoned with Donald Willie, Professor of Psychology and Religion. Donald verbally stepped between them.

“I think both of you are making good points.”

Maybe we should get a sign for the conference room door that said “Counseling Session in Progress.”

“I think we should do a self-assessment and I do think the whole department should have input. Can we turn this to a discussion of what sub-committees we would need here and who would be available for what? That way we can break through this impasse and move the discussion along.”

Donald’s voice came reasonably and softly from between his mustache and beard. He referred to himself as a “Jungian,” and as far as I could tell that meant he spent a lot of time on dreams and on the unconscious. Well, since this meeting was alternately traumatizing me and threatening to render me unconscious from boredom, I thought he was our best bet for cutting through to some kind of conclusion so we could get out of here sometime this week.

Grimes looked at Donald for nearly a full minute and everybody, including Adelaide, kept quiet. Grimes started patting his pockets, eventually finding pipe, tobacco, damper and the other impedimenta of the pipe smoker. I couldn’t help myself. I looked at the prominent “No Smoking” sign on the wall. Grimes didn’t seem to notice, however, and the fiddling didn’t result in a pipe to smoke. It resulted in a pipe with which to gesture at Willie.

“I’m sure that’s a very productive suggestion Donald and thank you for making it.”

With that the unlit pipe and the other equipment went back into his pockets and Donald was effectively dismissed.

“I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. What’s really needed as we begin this process is a survey of the students who take courses in our department as part of their overall humanities distribution requirement, which classes have been and continue to be the best subscribed, which group of classes produce the most majors and so forth.”

Grimes tapped a stack of papers in front of him.

“This is a set of guidelines on conducting the self-study; the guidelines are also on your faculty page on the website. Self-study, we believe, means nothing less than that we study ourselves.”

Adelaide snorted, but let Grimes continue.

A slight flush on Grimes’ cheek betrayed he’d heard the snort, but he didn’t glance in her direction.

“Let’s take this back, say, at least ten years.”

Grimes looked around the table expectantly, still standing, legs akimbo in his ‘captain of the ship’ stance. Nobody saluted the captain and nobody took him up on his suggestion, which obviously involved the most tedious kind of scut work, comparing years of online registrations and cross-referencing it with students who became majors and their cumulative class schedules.

“Can’t the secretary get us that kind of information? Why do you need to put faculty on it?”

Donald was not through being helpful.

Grimes adopted a pensive look for about five seconds and then shot Willie down again.

“As you know, Professor Willie, Mrs. Frost is our one remaining secretary for the whole department. She has her hands full now—I can scarcely add to her workload.”

Actually, Frost did nothing but work for Grimes, and much of the rest of the time she seemed to sit at her desk doing online crossword puzzles. She worshipped Grimes, of course, since he let her do what she wanted and gave her regular doses of his charm that he seemed to be able to turn on and off at will. I’d made the mistake of asking her to find me some pens and legal pads when I’d first joined the department and she had not even looked up from her screen. I’d had to ask Henry and he’d told me where the faculty supply closet was. The key hung on a hook by Frost’s desk. I didn’t ask her again; I just went in to her office and took the key off the hook without a word. Her thin shoulders, hunched over the keyboard, tensed when I did it, but she didn’t look up.

“I think,” Grimes continued smoothly, “that this initial research would be an excellent introduction to the workings of an academic department in relationship to the curricular needs of the university—I’m going to suggest that our two newest colleagues take this on and use it as a way to orient themselves to the whole ecology of the humanities division.”

Grimes gazed at Henry and then at me, not bothering to hide his smirk.

Henry looked as stunned as I felt.

Neither of us had finished our dissertations when we had been hired, and we had received many assurances from the Dean and from Grimes himself that the university was “committed to protecting the time of junior faculty so they could complete their dissertations.” Finishing what was effectively a book length research project along with coming up with six classes per year, never having taught before, was already daunting enough along with the committee work we’d already been assigned.

Basically, we made up our classes as we went along, and we often asked each other how far ahead of the students we were in the material for a course. Sometimes it was a matter of hours.

I’d managed to get off a couple of unwanted committees as a rookie cop by suggesting we spend money. Police departments always had hidden pockets of money to spend, and actually so do humanities departments. Worth a try.

“While I think that’s a possibility, Dr. Grimes, I might suggest that we re-direct slightly and assign one of our graduate students to this project? We do have a budget for graduate student stipends.”

I looked at Grimes with what I hoped was my most academically neutral face. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Henry looking at me gratefully. Henry moonlighted at a convenience store in the suburbs four nights a week to help support his family, a pregnant wife and 2-year-old son. That was strictly forbidden in our contracts, supposedly because we were instructors and needed to focus on our dissertation work. Right.

Grimes brushed off my suggestion like he had dismissed Willie. Twice.

“No. That won’t work. We need those few dollars for other projects, Professor Ginelli.”

‘Nice try,’ his voice conveyed.

“We’ll start with you and Professor Haruchi gathering this data by . . . .”

He bent over his IPad and scrolled over a few screens.

“Let’s say, November 14.”

That was less than a month away.

And Adelaide, Donald, and even Hercules just sat there and let him get away with it.