Alliance for Antrim

by Thomas Lombard

  Chapter 5

  Nevin

  Earlier that day Nevin Reasoner sat at his usual table in the Rainbow Café.

  With a pencil poised on her order pad, the waitress fidgeted impatiently. The morning rush was under way and Nevin was taking too long to decide. As he continued to stare through the menu, the waitress started to tap the pad with her pencil. “What’ll it be today, Professor?” The waitress, Judy, tried to be patient despite the rush. Nevin was a frequent customer and good tipper, and she thought he was less snooty than other college professors who ate at the cafe. Nevin was always pleasant to her and the other waitresses, except that he seemed preoccupied today. One time he had been so absorbed in thought that he never noticed she brought him oatmeal instead of bacon and eggs. She could see that today was another of those deep-in-thought days.

  Nevin looked up absently, realizing the waitress was waiting for him to say something. “Hmmm, Judy,” he said. “I suppose you want me to make up my mind. OK. Let me have two poached eggs on white toast. I’ll have herb tea instead of coffee.”

  “You want bacon with that, Professor?” The waitress was a little surprised because he rarely deviated from his usual order.

  “No, I have decided to stop eating bacon.” Much as he liked it, he could no longer ignore the mounting evidence of the undesirable effects of frequent bacon consumption. It was not bacon’s dietary cholesterol that dissuaded him, since those effects were still debatable; rather, the potential harm from sodium nitrites persuaded him to beg off. It satisfied him to yield to a good scholarly argument, even when debating with himself. After today, though, he was going to have to make more than dietary changes in his life. “Judy, let me have the orange tea, please.”

  “OK, Professor.” The waitress slightly raised an eyebrow and made the correction on her order pad. Not only did he ask for tea instead of his usual coffee, he had already ordered a different flavor tea.

  Judy made the corresponding notes on her order pad and moved off. She always referred to Nevin as “Professor,” even though he once tried to explain to her that he was a Lecturer, not a Professor. To her it was no big deal. It was not a big deal to his students, either, who also called him “Professor,” but it was an important distinction to him—and to certain tenured faculty at Hempstead College.

  As a joke, Judy returned with hot water and a bag of peppermint tea rather than the two teas he ordered. Nevin stared out the window, ignoring the service. The waitress smirked as she walked back to the kitchen. She had bet her tip with another waitress that Nevin wouldn’t notice she had brought the wrong flavor tea. It was a good bet. Nevin was too deeply engrossed in his dilemma to think about tea or coffee.

  He had been a Lecturer for five years at Hempstead College. Five years was the maximum term of employment allowed for Lecturers who did not have a completed postgraduate degree. Last week a motion was made in the Faculty Senate to allow Nevin a one-year extension, but it failed by one vote. One side argued that Lecturer positions were intentionally limited to five years so that procrastinating graduate students would not avoid completing their degree. Even though Nevin was technically not a graduate student and was willing to remain the lowest paid teacher at the college, it pleased some faculty members that today he would be teaching his last class at Hempstead College.

  Nevin sipped his peppermint tea. He felt some consolation that many current and former students had rallied to his support. Regrettably, the five-year rule would prevail.

  Nevin had taught one course each semester for the past five years. It was always the same course—The Philosophy of Science—but he changed the content each time to match the interests of the students. He organized his course so that it incorporated knowledge and methods from several fields of science, and focused on pressing human problems foremost on the students’ minds: world hunger, nuclear disarmament, national economy, depletion of the ozone layer and other timely issues troubling to students. It was indisputably the most popular class on campus. For the past three years the class enrollment had to be limited to 80 students, matching the number of seats in the college’s largest lecture room. Nevin’s class was inevitably one of the first to fill up during registration week. For the past two semesters, it was even scheduled at the earliest hour of the day as a means to offset the high student interest. Many students still attended class sessions even after they had completed the course; some came occasionally and others with regularity, despite not receiving additional course credit. Voluntary attendance at an 8:00 AM class without receiving course credit was the height of inspiration for a college teacher, but that did not put off Nevin’s detractors.

  The waitress brought the remainder of his breakfast. Nevin placed the poached eggs on the toast, being careful not break the yokes, but soon lost interest in food as he drifted off again. He considered himself lucky that he had a teaching job at Hempstead in the first place. There had been a dispute among the various science departments over which professor was going to teach the Philosophy of Science course to incoming freshmen, which was a dreaded teaching assignment. Historically, this course was unchallenging and uninspiring to both teachers and students alike, and it was usually delegated to the junior faculty member. Due to a variety of circumstances, a vacancy opened for teaching this course and Nevin applied for it.

  Nevin had completed a Bachelor of Science degree at another college, and subsequently accumulated additional coursework and field experience covering a variety of physical, natural and social sciences. He had never earned an advanced degree and this initially worked against his application for the teaching position. Since there were no other candidates and the semester was about to start, Nevin was hired at the minimum faculty grade of Lecturer.

  Some of the older faculty members objected to his teaching methods. Among the reasons for their attitude was his refusal to have a formal syllabus and his radical departure from their own introductory science courses. Others bore a grudge against Nevin for the past embarrassment he had caused two tenured professors. The first of these incidents took place six years earlier, before Nevin was hired as a Lecturer, while he was auditing a sociology class as a special student. The professor used the Reconstruction Period after the American Civil War as an example of “anomy,” an anarchistic breakdown of law and order in a society. Nevin disagreed with the professor’s example, politely at first, pointing out that “anomy” represented complete chaos with the loss of government control which was not the case during this period of American history. The sociology professor, a man with twenty-five years seniority at the College, was taken aback by the correction. He was so annoyed that he ridiculed Nevin for wasting the class’s time. In defense of himself, Nevin articulately pointed out there “were no examples of ‘anomy’ in American history since the First Continental Congress. During the Reconstruction Era federal, state and local governmental bodies were actually emerging and asserting control, which carpetbaggers frequently manipulated to achieve position and wealth.” The professor retorted that maybe Nevin should be the one to teach the class, since he was so well informed—which Nevin proceeded to do, first by informing the class that the preferred spelling was a-n-o-m-i-e. The professor lodged a formal complaint seeking to have Nevin removed from the class, but an inquiry by a subcommittee of the Faculty Senate ruled that Nevin had acted in a scholarly manner (and, though not stated in the record, that his points had been correct).

  The second incident occurred two years later, just after Nevin was hired as a Lecturer. In his first week, he discussed the ethical pros and cons of extracting petroleum from sandy soil to ease the country’s mounting oil shortage (a process called sand fracking). One of the students carried this discussion over to her geology class and rebutted her geology professor, who had advocated that same extraction procedure that Nevin’s class had decided was environmentally unsound. This geology professor happened to be a part-time consultant for an oil company and eventually became the target of student demonstrations against
the growing practice of sand fracking. As a result, the oil company dropped him as a consultant. Blaming Nevin for this incident, he angrily cautioned other faculty members to be wary of this upstart Lecturer.

  Nevin dropped his napkin to his plate and got up to leave, his breakfast mostly uneaten. After paying his bill, he left the cafe. Judy watched him leave, noticing that he was not carrying his ever-present briefcase. He must have absent-mindedly forgotten it, she said to the cashier, but that was not so. When leaving his apartment earlier that morning, he gathered his briefcase with his class notes as usual. After a second thought, he flung it into a trash bin. For him, that was a rare impulsive act. His class notes were always impeccable and he never went to class without them, but today he left that behind as a silent, albeit impotent, protest against the forces that were changing his life. For Nevin, this was a rare concession to emotion.