We understand your pain.
* * *
When Lulu got up to her room, she was thankful Song wasn’t there. Song rarely got back from the library before eleven. Lulu removed the ball and chain from her ankle and stripped off her crawling clothes, donning a terry-cloth robe. Someone needs to teach those women how to dress, Lulu thought, flopping on her bed. All denim and flannel and unfortunate looking T-shirts with phrases like SMASHING THE PATRIARCHY IS MY CARDIO.
Lulu’s khakis were thoroughly frayed. This wasn’t an issue, of course. A ragamuffin appearance only reinforced her victim status. Her knees were in pretty sorry shape as well, even though she’d started taping them every day. Fortunately, she’d found a halfway decent day spa, and she slipped in there quietly every morning to get a massage and soak in one of their Jacuzzis. It was a few blocks from campus and pretty much off the beaten track. Her daily visits required missing several classes, but whatever.
Lulu giggled to herself thinking about what she’d overheard one marcher say, that she admired Lulu’s “purity of purpose.” What an idiot. But what was that phrase? Useful idiot?
The whole “suffering in silence” routine was playing out better than she could have imagined. Offered no specifics on which to grasp, her supporters were coming up with all sorts of progressive click bait on their own. One chick in the Daily said that Lulu’s silence was a “pregnant commentary on gender power imbalances.” Another marched with duct tape over her mouth in sympathy with Lulu’s silence. (It was a good visual on Snapchat but a dilemma for those who preferred to chant.)
In the beginning, Lulu had kept silent so she wouldn’t have to engage with these clowns. Now it was something more. Her silence was infused with meaning.
Perhaps the hardest thing, other than the toll this was taking on her body, was maintaining a tragic mien. Crawl. Peace. Crawl. Peace. Lulu did her best not to laugh when they started up with that. She was the one who thought that up. It was enormously frustrating that she couldn’t share what she was pulling off. God, she so wanted to tell someone.
It had been around day four she’d come up with the phrase Crawlpeace, using it as a Twitter hashtag. It was getting real traction. Lulu had never bothered with Twitter before, dismissing it as the realm of political nerds, but now she found it quite useful. Her Twitter bio simply read, “Student. Friend. Crawling for peace.” She diligently avoided specifics, instead throwing bumper-sticker memes into the ether and letting people think what they wanted. What she may or may not have meant by peace or anything else was left to the observer. Her last couple of tweets had been Unity = Disruption. #Crawlpeace and Change is the new normal. #Crawlpeace.
She boned up on progressive nomenclature, too, peppering her tweets with words like intersectionality, agency, and transmisogyny, all while really saying nothing at all. She let others create the narrative. This meant she was bulletproof, no matter how this played out. There was no story, nothing to defend. Let people project their own stupid issues. The nut jobs here have enough of them. Undergraduate culture was a petri dish of psychoses.
That she was, behind the scenes, falsely accusing someone had given her pause at the start. The feeling passed. Collateral damage was acceptable in every war, even if this was a war about which she didn’t particularly care.
She could have, though. Cared. If she were one of those strident fems, the butchy ones who were always angry about something, well, then collateral damage was easily justified for the greater cause. That she wasn’t a butchy fem and was merely playing the part seemed a minor detail.
This morning, when she’d checked her social media accounts at the spa, she had nine thousand followers on Instagram, up over a thousand from just the day before, and about five thousand on her new Twitter account. She’d decided to delete all the old frivolous social posts on Instagram, especially the duck faces. That was Lulu 1.0—Lulu 2.0 was a more serious affair.
Pulling out her phone now, she checked on the Reddit page someone had created about Crawlpeace. There were over seven hundred comments. Then she checked again on her usual socials—Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter … Holy shit. Sarah Silverman had retweeted her! Silverman had added, “So brave. Keep crawling, sister!” She even used the #Crawlpeace hashtag. Sarah Silverman had 12 million followers. Twelve freaking million. Silverman’s retweet had already been retweeted itself sixteen thousand times and had twenty-five thousand likes. Ho-ly shit!
Lulu fell back on her bed and squealed, kicking her legs at the air.
Fuck you, Shelley Kisner. You, too, Aubrey St. John.
Fuck all of you.
Milton’s in a Bind
MILTON TOOK HIS usual route. In the last few days, the stone pathways had been transformed from their natural slate gray to an explosion of bright colors. On many campuses, “chalking,” as it was known, had become a vibrant means of political expression. Pathways at schools like Oberlin and Wesleyan had become veritable chalk tributaries. Officially, Devon had a policy against it, although Milton knew this stemmed from aesthetic concerns more than anything else. He wasn’t about to kick the hornet’s nest over some pink and orange chalk. Besides, important speech issues were involved. As he would remind anyone who listened, freedom of speech was one of Devon’s core principles. Chalking was just how the students were exercising theirs.
Sometimes, of course, Milton had to make a judgment call. People like Foster Jennison needed to understand the full picture. For instance, just recently the Devon Republican Club had invited that conservative provocateur to speak on campus, the one who believed transgenderism was a mental disorder. After multiple threats of violence Milton canceled the event. Safety of the students had to come first. And really, the man was crazy. Devon was not obligated to confer its prestige on crazy people.
The messages covering Mathers all concerned this girl, Harris. Milton walked over ones saying such things as
Devon stands with survivors
and
Lulu for President!
Also #Crawlpeace was chalked everywhere. Catchy, he thought.
Milton had a growing admiration for Lulu Harris. Last night, he’d worked late and watched the procession cross Bingham from his office window. There was a religiosity about it he found moving. He could feel the poor girl’s agony as she crawled along in tattered clothes. Clearly, she had suffered a great trauma and was striking a chord with the community. The crowd must have been three hundred strong, and they followed solemnly behind her, chanting sometimes. Minutes after he could no longer see them, he heard the tortured scream all the way from East Quad. It was haunting.
Milton knew all eyes would be on him to see how he dealt with this. What a crazy year it had been. Just when one problem died, another sprang up. How could something like this assault have happened at Devon? This was an enlightened institution! This professor, Russell, it was the second time this year he was in the thick of it. Well, all that would be taken care of soon enough. Lulu Harris clearly wasn’t making this up. No, that was impossible.
Inside Stockbridge, D’Arcy intercepted him before he could even enter his office. “Sir, Stillman Weathers is on the phone for you.”
Milton sighed. He fantasized how much easier life would be if he didn’t have to deal with a board. Or alums. “I’ll take it inside,” he said. Shutting the door, he traversed the vast space of his office and picked up the receiver. “Stillman! How are you?”
“Not happy, Milton. Not happy at all. I’m in the middle of closing a deal and I have to field an angry call from Foster Jennison. It seems he was watching one of the morning news shows today, and his beloved university is getting national exposure for what? A new scientific breakthrough? Nobel Prize winners? No, for some goddamn girl crawling around in ripped-up clothes because we apparently have a faculty full of rapists! Christ, Milton, we just finished putting out a fire and now this. What the hell kind of show are you running up there?”
Milton blanched. People from the outside had a directness he found regr
ettable. “I understand your concerns, Stillman, I do. But this girl is free to express herself.” Milton picked up a pile of his messages and started flipping through them.
“But this is the same goddamn professor as before, right? Just get rid of the sonuvabitch. Then the problem of the girl goes away.”
“He’s been suspended. There is a process we have to follow.” One of his messages jumped out. George Carrillo from the DA’s office. Please call re Ephraim Russell. “And it looks like the DA is now interested. I just got a message.”
“The DA? Shit. More publicity.”
“Well, that cat’s out of the bag, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, but the legal process is slow, and the publicity will drag on. Just fire his ass and then he’s not our problem anymore. Need I remind you that most of Foster’s gift for the new houses is still only a pledge? A pledge, as in, the money is not in the bank. And I can tell you the man is not happy.”
“I assure you, Stillman, this situation is my top priority.”
“I can only assume it is.” Stillman hung up, leaving Milton staring at the phone.
There was a quiet knock at the door.
“Yes, come.”
It was D’Arcy. “Sir, Dean Malik-Adams would like”—Martika marched in around D’Arcy before she could finish her sentence—“a word.”
“There’s something you and I need to talk about,” Martika said.
“Go a—”
“It’s the Russell situation. We need to immediately convene the Title IX Tribunal to deal with this.” Devon’s Title IX Department reported to Martika, as it happened.
“Yes, Stillman Weathers just called, the DA’s office, too.” Milton waved the message in the air. “You don’t think we should let the justice system take care of this? There is an alleged crime, after all.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“We don’t want them involved. This is a university matter.”
“But a crime may have been committed, Martika. He’s not tenured. We could just fire him and let the legal system deal with it. In fact, that’s what Stillman wants to do.”
“We can let the justice system have Russell later.”
“Why?”
“Failure to act expeditiously in a case like this—one that’s receiving national attention—could easily land us on the OCR watch list, and I think you know what happens then.…”
“The OCR…?”
“The Office of Civil Rights within the federal Department of Education.”
“Oh, right.” He’d forgotten the acronym. The OCR. The people who could turn off the federal spigot. How many research projects would he have to kill? All those angry professors …
“You remember what happened with Beta Psi a few years ago…”
He did indeed. “But isn’t firing him acting expeditiously? What’s more expeditious than that? Plus, he’s out of our hair.”
Martika sat down on the couch. “I can assure you that the OCR won’t see it that way. They will want a faster result than the criminal justice system can provide, and they are watching schools like ours to make sure we have the procedures in place to deliver those results.”
Milton looked confused, so Martika continued. “Let me put it this way. Title IX allows us more … latitude in how to conduct things. Title IX procedures, as laid out by the government itself, do not constrict us in the same ways as the criminal justice system.”
“So what you’re saying is that justice might be served more…”
“Expeditiously. We can find guilt with a preponderance of evidence—fifty point one percent—which is far more straightforward than the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard in courts. We can’t send this bastard to jail—hopefully that comes later—but we can deal with him here in our own way, quickly. If the DA gets involved, the whole thing gets bogged down in discovery motions and evidentiary procedures and whatnot, and then we might not be seen as justified in firing Russell until there’s a guilty verdict. If we keep things in-house, we can do things our way. Fairly, of course.”
“But this won’t impinge upon Professor Russell’s rights in any way, am I correct? I mean there’s due process, right?”
“There’s a process.”
“What does that mean?”
“Let me put it this way. Professor Russell will have the same rights as everyone else who gets accused of a Title IX violation.”
Milton considered his conversation with Stillman. A quick resolution was certainly desirable, and Milton did just get Martika’s assurance that Professor Russell would be treated fairly. “Of course, the Harris girl may file a complaint with the DA. Then I suppose it’s out of our hands…”
“Woman.”
“What?”
“Harris woman.”
“Yes, of course. The Harris woman.”
“She hasn’t filed a thing.”
“How do you know that?”
“I have a friend in the DA’s office, so I took the liberty of checking. She hasn’t filed. Right now, all that’s happening is that the DA sees all the publicity and is trying to horn in. This is a potentially high-profile case and it happens this is an election year. They are welcome to have Russell when we’re done here.”
Milton weighed the pros and cons. His first instinct in any situation was to be cooperative. In his experience, that was almost always the best course. On the other hand, he worried deeply about tangling with the OCR.
As for the Crawl, despite his personal feelings, he was starting to have misgivings there, too. What Lulu Harris was doing was admirable, but not everyone saw it as the creative exercise of free expression that it was. Foster Jennison certainly didn’t, and Milton hated to think how much work would be involved making up for Foster’s gift should things go south. It could be done—this was Devon—but it might have a knock-on effect to the capital campaign. The development office would scream bloody murder. No one, including Milton, liked asking for money, and ground had already broken on the new houses.
He decided to table the Crawl issue for now. Russell was the more exigent matter. “Very well. Convene the tribunal as soon as you can make it happen.”
That will be easy, thought Martika, since she was the tribunal’s sole member.
“I will talk to counsel and have them tell the DA that we view this as strictly a university matter for now,” Milton continued. “Maybe that will hold them off for a bit. Of course, if the Harris … woman goes to the DA directly, it’s out of our hands.”
“Of course. Wise decision.”
Martika walked out and went to her own office, the one just down the hall.
The Summit
RED WAS BROODING, angry, but more than that he was panicked. This thing, the Crawl, was taking off without him, and he needed to find a way in. On top of that, his mojo, his status as the progressive leader on campus, had been totally hijacked by Jaylen Biggs, who was now having private weekly meetings with Milton Strauss. Jaylen thought his shit didn’t stink because the Af-Am boys scored that $50 million check. Red set that up! Now, he was watching the same thing happen with the Harris chick. The PSA was standing like idiots on the sidelines with their dicks in their hands.
Red had only met Lulu Harris once. She was doing the whole Manhattan rich-girl thing at that frat party, at least until she was fellating him on the couch like a pro. The girl was definitely a player. Now suddenly she’s Joan of Arc? Give me a fucking break.
He knew his skepticism hardly mattered. The true test of an idea was not its provable truth, but its utility. That’s Progressive Strategy 101, and the Crawl had big-time utility for sure. It had evolved very quickly into a national phenomenon. Red joined the procession every night, but mostly because he needed to be in the game. #Crawlpeace was trending everywhere, bigger than any hashtag the PSA had ever floated. Fucking New York magazine did a feature, even calling Harris “The New Face of Feminism.” It showed her crawling, from the front, with that thousand-
mile stare, exuding hopelessness, a small army of her people walking behind her. (Red briefly wondered if feminists wanted their new face to be one of such abject victimhood—what ever happened to Rosie the Riveter?—but that ship had clearly sailed.)
The exact nature of Red’s problem was becoming apparent, and it had been brewing for some time. The Progressive Student Alliance was born in the sixties. Originally a chapter of Tom Hayden’s Students for a Democratic Society, it was the first serious activist group on campus. There had been the Devon Democratic Club, of course, but they were about earnest editorials and genteel debates and all that polite crap. The times had called for direct action, not Robert’s Rules of Order. Growing quickly, the PSA was the only game on campus for committed progressives. They were a big tent for causes of the day … the ERA, acid rain, unionization drives … Vietnam, of course.
But over time, specialized constituencies broke out and formed their own groups. The greens, LGBTIAQ, the blacks and Hispanics—each now had a major campus organization. Going forward, things threatened to get even more granular. (For instance, there was grumbling in the trans community that LGBTIAQ had too broad an agenda and that issues specific to trans were getting short shrift.) All this left the PSA with a somewhat ambiguous mandate, and despite the overall rise in student activism, the PSA had been losing members steadily. When an issue became hot, students joined the organization that served that particular cause. PSA press exposure had declined as well. When they needed a quote, reporters seldom called the generalist. Red was forced to admit the PSA had become a half-assed group that mostly liked to get high.
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