The Shakespeare Requirement

by Julie Schumacher

  “What kind of appointments?”

  Fran squinted at the screen. “Let’s see. The red ones are usually mandatory or urgent: info session for new chairs and directors; convocation; faculty cabinet; humanities council; faculty appeals board; university caucus…”

  Fitger had the sensation that he was listening to his obituary read aloud, including a detailed account of the things that would kill him. “Wait a second.” He leaned over her shoulder. “That info session, in red. Is that today?”

  “Hang on. Yup. Today. Mandatory session for new chairs and directors at eleven-thirty.” It was two-fifteen.

  Something crashed to the floor in Fitger’s office.

  Peering through the Plexiglas divider, he saw his rotary fan, which, having fallen forward out of the window, was thrashing like a rabid animal among the remnants of the Campus Scribe on the rug. “Shit.” He opened the door to Fran’s office and sprinted around the divider. After yanking the fan and its extension cord from the socket, he wrenched the dictionary from its place on the sill and slammed the window against additional wasps, thereby sealing in the heat and the sickening-sweet smell of insecticide.

  Fran watched from the doorway.

  “I want someone to explain to me,” he said, “why a university would renovate and air-condition half of a building.”

  “Talk to the facilities people,” Fran said. “Or to your friends upstairs in Econ. You have a wasp on your arm.”

  Fitger looked at the wasp, which stung him. Even at that moment, his electronic calendar, P-Cal, which indicated that he was free every day, all semester, was filling up.

  TWO

  For forty-two years, Dennis Cassovan had carefully sidestepped all things controversial at Payne. He had arrived on campus in 1968, an introverted, anxious assistant professor who had evaded the draft due to a spindly right leg—polio, contracted at the age of four. The senior faculty had warned him, soon after his hire, against becoming embroiled in “student-centered unrest”; overwhelmed with teaching and nearly sleepless following the birth of his son—a squalling, furious, elfin creature, all mouth and fists—Cassovan had kept his head down, spent every spare second on his research, and been awarded tenure and a contract for his first book by the end of the war.

  Over the years, austere neutrality had become a character trait and a default. Aloof but unfailingly civil, Cassovan had accepted as inevitable the cultural shifts in the discipline in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. He had tried to be open-minded when dealing with the department’s theorists (though he wished they could write); the creative writers (though he wished they had standards); and those who would fill their syllabi with sociological studies, television shows, discussions of sexual mores, food, politics, animals, fashion, and popular culture. Cassovan assumed that students benefitted from a breadth of electives and from scholarly perspectives beyond his own—as long as these whimsical alternatives didn’t threaten the core.

  Because what, he asked himself, carefully scrolling through the course catalog for the first time in a decade, were English literary studies without the core? A curriculum lacking the foundational works—from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf—was a hummock of flesh without a skeleton; it was shapeless, absurd.

  Lincoln Young had been right about the department’s new Statement of Vision: the document, purported to be an outline or overview of the department’s purpose, was distressing proof that Cassovan’s laissez-faire attitude toward his academic unit had come at a cost. After Lincoln handed over his time card and slumped out of the office, Cassovan had spent the hours he normally would have dedicated to refining his syllabus to a squinting consultation with his computer screen. The proposed new SOV made no mention of Shakespeare but referred in broadly meaningless terms to inquiry, professionalization, engagement, and a multiplicity of perspectives in a globalized world. It might as well have been the SOV for the Department of Health Sciences or Phys Ed. Should the Statement be subjected to a vote and approved, the result would be a scattershot curriculum almost entirely devoid of tradition or history, and the undergraduate student majoring in English would no longer be required to take a course—not even one—in the works of Shakespeare.

  Cassovan closed his eyes for a moment, feeling ill. The very marrow of the discipline would be expunged. He had to hold himself partly responsible: during the year he had been on sabbatical, he had scarcely glanced at the daily deluge of e-correspondence or the minutes of meetings. But now, e-mail by e-mail, he followed a months-long electronic rabbit trail which revealed that, in addition to electing Fitger, a hodgepodge of exhausted colleagues had collectively assembled this impossible document, as if dragging a one-legged blind man through multiple layers of the committee system. Perhaps the intent had been to obey some bizarre directive from above, but the outcome was, for the students, an irresponsible freedom. No need for the English major to familiarize him- or herself with Chaucer or Milton, let alone Spenser or Donne, all of whose works had been discarded in an earlier purge; now Shakespeare himself was to be lobbed, like a tidbit of refuse, into the bin.

  And what might Payne’s young literary scholars study instead? Bracing himself, Cassovan returned to the course catalog. Upcoming classes included Aliens and Outlaws, Marxism 2.5, The American Soap and the Telenovela, and The Literature of Deviation. How was a student to make any sense of it? Shakespeare was the cornerstone, the fountainhead. To allow an undergraduate English major to earn a diploma without studying Hamlet and Lear, and either Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra, was, on the part of the faculty, an abdication: Read whatever you like! We aren’t here to offer intellectual guidance! Our field is a come-what-may experience. Anything goes!

  And as for the bugaboo of “relevance”: to allow a student to believe that the value of a work of literature depended on its superficial resemblance to his or her life! Cassovan pulled the yellowish blind in his window to block the afternoon sun. He had hoped, by this time of day, to be heading home to a single-serving prepackaged dinner, which he preferred, after long habit, to eat at room temperature while listening to the BBC News on the radio. But something would have to be done about the department’s egregious error, the ultimate responsibility for which lay, of course, with its newly elected chair. Cassovan had no compunction about opposing Fitger, who had refused to respond to a second message sent via P-Cal, and who moreover had attempted, several days earlier, to behead his senior colleague with a window screen.

  Cassovan turned off his computer. On the other side of his office door—the poster of Shakespeare providing a scrim of privacy from pedestrian traffic in the hall—students were chattering, strolling, laughing, fretting, flirting, and endowing the air, all over campus, with a galvanic charge. If Fitger’s intention was to sweep beneath the carpet of oblivion the heart of the discipline in which Cassovan had long labored…No: Cassovan had taught at Payne for more than four decades, and he was not at a loss for strategies and resources. The arms are fair, he thought, when the intent of bearing them is just.

  * * *

  —

  Roland Gladwell, BA summa cum laude Cornell, PhD Princeton, had made it his business to familiarize himself with the architectural blueprints (requested during the renovation) of Willard Hall. In idle moments, even after the renovation was finished, he unrolled the plans and made notes about poorly or underutilized portions of the building. The second floor—his own department’s domain—was now well designed and elegantly appointed. But both the first floor and the basement (absurd that English should have two floors, even if a sizeable portion of the basement was taken up with heating systems, storage, and janitorial supplies) resembled a series of animal pens, with classrooms jutting willy-nilly into faculty offices, doorways opening onto bricked-up closets, and, in an obscure corner of the basement, a mysterious windowless space designated (Roland had checked the blueprints twice) as a “breastfeeding lounge.”

  Fallow area
s were being identified via careful research: Marilyn Hoopes had reported back on English’s literary magazine office, which—given that the magazine was defunct—was clearly unused. Roland made a note in the right-hand margin of the plans. He hadn’t expected to end up at a midsized, middlebrow university like Payne, its brick posterior overlooking a sluggish, Midwestern river. But he had been on the wrong end of his advisers’ favoritism at Princeton, and so had settled on Payne as a stepping-stone, a strategic interlude during which he could sharpen his administrative skills before making his way back to the Ivies or the Big Ten. This plan had become more difficult when Payne, like a listing ship, began its steady descent in the national rankings. Under the misdirected leadership of the previous president, tuition had risen almost 40 percent, much of the increase paying for a bloated centenary celebration (“One Hundred Years of Payne”), a cluster of new athletic facilities, and the grossly inflated salary of a football coach whose team had lost sixteen consecutive games. More than half the seats in the overpriced stadium were permanently empty, but Coach Klapp remained a popular figure on campus, easily recognized for his bouncing jog, the whistle that rode the paunch above his blue sweatshirt, and his well-paid underdog’s grin.

  To be forever marooned here, Roland thought…No: impossible. One’s only recourse, when the waters of mediocrity began to rise, was to construct a personalized life raft—which at Payne was not about scholarship or teaching, but about power, authority, status, and the ability to raise funds. The university’s president, Nyla Hoffman, had recently made these priorities clear. Hired as a corrective to her spendthrift predecessor, Hoffman had a PhD in psychology but had never taught, having spent several decades in the private sector. Recruited from an inscrutable job with a high-security firm that no one at Payne quite understood, Hoffman had the personal charm of a KGB agent, and was basing her “much-needed reforms” on a thorough distrust of both professors and students. Ill-prepared for the maelstrom of university politics, she had hired an army of administrators—vice provosts, assistant vice provosts, associate deans, duchesses, dukes, footmen, jesters, earls—whose job was to reward and “incentivize” potentially profitable departments and allow the others to wither like juiceless fruit on the university vine. Roland had no objections to this philosophy, which required department chairs to think like CEOs. He had already demonstrated his own ability to “cultivate community partners,” making sure to share the news of his conquests with the relevant bureaucrats over his head—i.e., the tag team of administrators who had their hands on the spigots through which the perks and finances at the university flowed.

  Ergo, his cordial invitation to Dean Philip Hinckler, to whom he had extended the offer of a coveted “first look” at the Economics Department’s exquisitely renovated space. The dean had claimed at first to be busy, but Roland pressed him, suggesting a variety of dates and couching the invitation as a personal favor. “An opportunity for me to thank you,” he said, “to express my appreciation for everything you’ve done.” In truth, the dean had been nothing but a pain in the ass during the renovation, posing worrywart concerns and generally behaving, whenever Roland had attempted to speed things along, like a clog in a drain. But here he was now, chatting with Marilyn Hoopes in the outer office. Roland stashed the blueprints away and opened the door.

  In his early sixties, a man with a doughy physique and a breathless, repetitive way of speaking, Dean Philip Hinckler was prone to semi-sentences that expired, half-finished, in rhetorical cul-de-sacs. At university events he could be counted on for meandering, circuitous speeches about the benefits of a “broadly diverse education”—in Roland’s view a steaming, politically correct pile of shit, because why would students want to spend almost $40K per year to read a few history books and take a weaving and a racquet-ball class and call themselves well-rounded, if there was no career or financial payoff at the end? They would all be better off acknowledging this basic truth, Roland thought, but Hinckler, who had risen from the undifferentiated swamp of the Music Department into the deanery, preferred to stick to the fuzzy, traditional script he’d inherited—in effect, to pretend. The two men shook hands. They strolled into the hall so the dean could appreciate the donor plaque (Marilyn Hoopes skillfully pointing to several particularly distinguished names), and Roland conducted a brief tour of the technology-enhanced classrooms and the chair’s new executive suite.

  “Beautiful job, Roland,” the dean said. “It’s well, it’s just…” He handed Roland a tissue-wrapped parcel. “Here. A little housewarming gift. I see you don’t have one of these, so—” He glanced around at Roland’s wood-paneled fiefdom. “In any case, congratulations.”

  Roland thanked him and set the parcel aside, but the dean insisted that he unwrap it. Roland tugged at the ribbon and then—good god!—revealed a paperweight figurine of the Payne University Prairie Dog, official school mascot known to the students as “Pup-Dog” or “Pup.” Roland had a personal grudge against Pup, who could be counted on to sway its furry lascivious hips and make digging motions with its foreshortened paws during football and basketball games and other functions. Once, during a convocation, the grinning rodent (presumably a disgruntled student, securely disguised) had stood beside Roland for an official photo and stroked the chair’s buttocks, a gesture impossible to interpret as accidental. Why the university would have chosen for its mascot a nondescript pest that spent the bulk of its existence hunting for insects underground was beyond Roland’s considerable understanding. The dean’s unsightly gift, a six-inch toothsome bronze replica, was nattily dressed in a tiny blue cap and gown.

  Roland was about to consign the mascot to an obscure spot on a shelf, but the dean picked it up, examined it, and set it, somewhat roughly, Roland thought, at the edge of the desk. Were Phil Hinckler’s wrinkled suit and puddin’head smile a strategic facade? This was a possibility Roland would consider later. Right now, it was noon—the campus prerecorded bells, mechanical and yet still out of tune, were tolling twelve—and Marilyn Hoopes was delivering lunch: arugula and shrimp salad, beef carpaccio, cheese, and a selection of truffles wrapped in gold foil.

  “Roland, this is a…I wasn’t expecting…It all looks absolutely…,” the dean said.

  Marilyn set up a wooden tray—several meaningful inches lower than the surface of Roland’s desk—and asked if the dean would care for a glass of red wine.

  Well, certainly, yes, thank you, he would. Phil Hinckler smiled and spread a napkin over his lap. From Roland’s window he could see the grassy center of campus and the pedestaled monument to the university’s founder, Cyril Payne, whose family had made its fortune on medicinal powders and anti-itching solutions over a century before. Undergraduates were said to observe peculiar midnight rituals at the base of this statue, sibylline ceremonies involving Hula-Hoops, kazoos, and a Pied Piper–like parade whose participants, even or especially in the depths of winter, wore only hiking boots and gloves. On the front of the statue beneath Cyril’s bewildered expression was his dispiriting death march of a motto: PERSEVERE.

  Ah, well. The shrimp looked terrific; and he might as well enjoy it before Roland got around to whatever request he had in mind. It was bound to be something substantial: in Phil’s experience, the caliber of the blandishments (the Oregon pinot noir was impressive) was directly related to the size of the perk to be discussed.

  God, he was tired of being dean. He had accepted the position six years before, stepping up into the ranks of the administration feeling pleased with himself and vaguely flattered. But the administration at Payne had swelled to such an extent that even in the provost’s and the president’s offices it was hard to keep track of the various sub-jurisdictions—deans and assistant and associate deans were as common as nobles in pre-Soviet Russia. Worse: two months after he moved into his new office, his faculty position in the Department of Music (Hinckler was a professor/instructor of the French horn) had been eliminated. It was as if, sec
onds after being lured away from his home village, he had watched it torched and then burned to the ground. With no tenure line remaining behind him, he couldn’t go back to teaching music; and, given his lackluster fund-raising skills, there would be no climbing the ladder, either. Unable to retire—divorced, he had two teenage sons who despised him and who would soon require an expensive education—he was stuck. The deanship had become a waiting room to nowhere, a little purgatory unto itself. The major part of his job was saying no to faculty members in search of resources for their departments. But then there were faculty like Roland Gladwell—crowned head of a department with a superabundance of money courtesy of private and corporate donors, as well as an obscenely low faculty teaching load and a suite of offices more luxuriously appointed than the provost’s—presumably greasing the wheels in order to ask for something more.

  Meanwhile, the cheese was superb: creamy but not runny, with just a hint of peppery tang on the rind. What was the name of that cave-aged brie he loved? Janet had bought it for him once…Was it Red Rock? Grass Rock?

  Roland coughed, clearing his throat, and they engaged in a little ping-pong match of preliminary conversation, ending with the usual grim prognostications regarding the Payne U football team. And then, yes, here it came, the list of items on the Econ brag sheet, Roland praising the cutting-edge work being done by his brilliant faculty, whose research was of extreme importance to one and all. This was standard fare—the chair extolling his or her unit—and Phil Hinckler nodded, his mind periodically drifting off in search of the name of that wonderful cheese. He would have to remember to ask Janet what it was called. She remembered everything, and had a mind like a steel trap. If she had entered academia not as a member of the staff but as a professor, she would have been running the university by now.