Tenure Track
Page 1
Tenure Track:
A Novel
by
Victoria Bradley
Copyright © 2010 by Writewell Publications. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
www.victoriabradley.com
For Larry, my mensch
“The only thing one can learn from history is that actions have consequences and that certain choices once made are irretrievable. As one can “forget” personal memories and by choosing what to remember—one selects what one wants to remember and leaves out the rest—so it can be done with collective memory.”
— Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters
Prologue
A Seminal Event
“Caution,” Dr. Donald Pfeiser warned, “Never, ever, use this form if ε ≠ 0!” To emphasize the dangers that could result from such a mistake, the esteemed nuclear engineer flashed the image of a skull and crossbones on his overhead Power Point. The 50 or so students listening to his dry lecture on particle reactor design dutifully noted this important point, so as not to make a fatal error of mass destruction in their future careers.
Most of the students were so engrossed in their note taking or efforts to stay awake that they failed to notice petite, freckle-faced freshman Jessica Hampton calmly walk down the center aisle at 10:23 a.m. One witness later testified to observing Hampton only because he found it odd for a student entering class so late to seek a seat right in front of the professor.
Hampton did walk all the way to the front of the classroom, but never took a seat. Instead, she carefully raised a 9mm Glock handgun and shot Donald Pfeiser strategically in the groin and abdomen, immediately severing his aorta.
Pow! Pow!
Dr. Pfeiser bled out within minutes, with the ominous skull and crossbones still projected above his dying body. Chaos erupted as students dove under chairs and anywhere they could to avoid getting shot in the windowless room with only one exit door. Perhaps thinking that the skinny young woman was no match for a couple of rugged, tank-sized athletes, two senior varsity wrestlers lunged almost at once to try to take her down. But the gun proved to be a great equalizer as Jessica Hampton dispatched both would-be heroes in quick succession, one with a shot to the heart, the other to the head.
Pow! Pow!
The next gunshot came quickly and only had one target. A few students who were watching from their hiding places testified that Hampton stared at the two fallen athletes with deadened eyes, then quietly placed the gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger, splattering blood and brain matter across three rows of seats and the south wall of the lecture hall.
Pow! For a split-second afterward, the stunned room was so quiet that every survivor recalled hearing the big hand on the ancient wall clock click into place, marking 10:24 a.m., February 14, 2007. Bloody Valentine’s Day.
Part One:
Present and Past
Chapter One
Present: A Test Case
“I don’t care if he dunks like Jordan, we can’t pass him if he failed his final,” Dr. Jane Roardan said firmly, but calmly. The outcome of this summer course meant the difference between the forward guard being academically eligible to play this semester or sitting out almost half of the regular season, presuming he could make eligibility for spring.
“Well, perhaps you can at least let him retake the final,” Athletic Director Doss pleaded, to no avail.
“Now you know with the fall semester beginning today, that would entail a retroactive grade change,” she reminded the sputtering A.D. on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry. I’m not inclined to play that game. I suggest you take advantage of all the fine opportunities we provide your athletes to help him retake the class and pass this time. Just apply a little basketball muscle to memorizing some historical facts and improving his writing skills.”
After a few more terse words, the conversation ended abruptly. Jane took a deep breath, trying to regain her composure. She sat back in her chair, silently fingering the strand of pearls around her neck, a long-ago anniversary gift from Mark. She rarely wore them to school, but they went well with the new pale blue suit she was sporting. The outfit hung nicely on her tall, 60 year-old frame, accentuating her short-cropped silver hair with a look of authority. Dressing the part helped give her an air of confidence as she tackled this new position.
She needed all the help she could get. Despite her firm, composed stance on the telephone, such unpleasant conversations always rattled her a bit. Dr. Roardan was used to dealing with coaches who wanted her to cut their star players some slack on their grades. This time it was easier than usual to refuse, since she was not the professor in charge of the class in question but rather the new History Department Chair backing up a fellow colleague. After 32 years as a professor of British and Women’s History at this university, it still chapped her how much the school placed sports above academics. The godlike status of athletes had only been exalted by the martyrdom of two mediocre wrestlers who had had the misfortune of meeting their end three and a half years earlier on what was now known as “Bloody Valentine’s Day.”
The reverence with which many students still spoke of the two young men, hailed by A.D. Doss as the finest examples of student athletes, successfully deflected attention away from less impressive facts, such as the paltry academic performances of most male jocks. For years Jane had listened with annoyance as Doss made the dubious claim of high graduation rates for the school’s scholarship players; a fudging of data she recognized as skewed by the women’s programs—especially the basketball team, which had maintained an astonishing 100 percent graduation rate for more than 20 years under the auspices of the country’s winningest female coach. The athletes with ovaries allowed Doss to create the allusion that sports enhanced education at the university. Jane knew better.
Jane wondered what her undergraduate mentor, Women’s History pioneer Gerda Lerner, would make of this post-Title IX development. Dr. Roardan’s eyes panned across the framed diplomas that aligned the dark-paneled walls of her tiny office — bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence, Ph.D. from Lerner’s alma mater Columbia—before falling on the signed photograph of Dr. Lerner that she often stared at for telekinetic inspiration. Gerda would know how to handle Doss, Jane told herself.
With her mind focused on athletics, another photograph soon drew Jane’s attention. Her hand fell upon the desk-framed image of a thin, bespectacled man, with a graying shock of frizzy hair, his arms around two teenagers—a similar-looking boy in a T-shirt reading “Super Geek” and a muscular girl dressed in a basketball uniform.
Jane’s children served as a fine metaphor for the split nature of the university. The fraternal twins had shared a womb and an environment, but had grown up to have completely different priorities—Dennis, of the mind; Dana, of the body. Athens and Sparta. History taught that Athens paved the way for the rise of western civilization while Sparta defeated its enemies with physical might, then faded into oblivion like hot shot athletes who peaked then declined at an early age. Jane feared the same future for her athletically inclined daughter, whose greatest wish was to play for the system that her mother so despised. Dr. Roardan grimaced at the irony.
Her contemplations of athletics and education were interrupted by another telephone call. Isobel, the department’s administrative assistant, announced that Dean of Students Gary Jones was on the line. “He sounds nervous,” she reported.
Jane had to stifle a chuckle. Despite his generally jovial manner when things were going wel
l, Gary was known to dissolve into a nervous wreck whenever something went wrong. It could be as minor as a report of students dropping water balloons on rival frat members, or as serious as a massive cheating scandal. He would react the same way, initially uncertain of what to do, and scared to death of any situation that might incur negative publicity for the school. With his rotund body and habit of constantly wringing his hands when nervous, the image of Piglet from the twins’ childhood books always popped into Jane’s head when she discussed a problem with Gary. Only his colleagues ever observed such nervousness, though. In front of students, he usually emitted an aura of extreme calm and control, save for profuse amounts of sweat dripping off his brow.
Jane took in a final cleansing breath as she picked up the receiver. “Hello Gary,” she greeted, trying to sound upbeat. “What can I do for you today?”
“Jane, we have a problem,” he sputtered.
“Already? It’s only the first day of the semester. What’s up?” she replied, trying to sound positive. Internally, she was quickly running through the list of issues that could possibly be a problem for both the Dean of Students and the Chair of the History Department, unless A.D. Doss had already snagged Gary to plead his case about the poor unfortunate student athlete.
“I need to see you right away,” Gary said, sounding agitated. “I received a call this morning from the mother of a female student, claiming her daughter has had an inappropriate relationship with one of your History professors.” Jane could envision the sweat popping out of the brow on the other end of the telephone as she tried to remain calm and reasonable.
Hot damn! Horndog finally got caught! She was torn between feeling gleeful that the most notorious letch on campus was finally getting busted, while dreading having to deal with the crisis, since the letch in question was in her department.
Rather than make it obvious that she knew exactly who the culprit probably was, she asked innocently, “Who?”
“I hate to tell you, but it’s Lewis Burns.”
She felt a sinking sensation in her stomach.
“Jane, are you there?” Gary queried.
“Oh, uh yeah.” She tried to shake off her initial shock. “What are the details? Is this just an overreacting parent or are we talking about something serious?”
“Oh, it’s serious, and they have proof,” he said. “This could be very bad, Jane. Very bad. But I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. Can you meet me here on the hour?”
She agreed, then spent the next 25 minutes trying to convince herself that this would all turn out to be a mistake.
No way. Not Lewis, of all people.
Jane told Isobel that she would be out for an unspecified amount of time. Walking out the door of the department’s administrative office, she passed beneath a security camera camouflaged by a sign reading: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it — George Santayana, 1904.” It was her favorite pithy response to obnoxious students who dared ask why they were required to take History courses.
She left Hammond Hall and quickly made her way across campus to the phallic limestone tower that housed most of the main administrative offices. The afternoon was sweltering, typical for the first day of classes under the hot August sun. The smell of freshly cut grass filled her nostrils. In the distance rumbled the faint sounds of weed whackers and leaf blowers used by the Spanish-speaking lawn care men who worked practically nonstop at minimum wage to keep the campus looking immaculate.
Just outside the main administrative building, she crossed the Commons—a large, grassy expanse where dozens of young men and women were lounging about, taking advantage of the sunshine to keep up their summer tans. Aah, youth. Skin cancer be damned. Let’s try to get as brown as those maintenance men we never acknowledge.
It was amazing to her how, no matter how much changed in the world, some things always remained the same. Throughout her career, she had found that college students from generation to generation shared a propensity for testing their mortality. They had the impulsiveness of teenagers, coupled with the sudden freedom of living beyond the watchful eyes of their parents. The more parental types said that something was bad for them, the more they wanted to try it. As one of her otherwise well-disciplined students once explained about his smoking habit, “Ya gotta die of somethin’, why not lung cancer?” Jane had frequently overheard the same comment about cirrhosis of the liver from obviously heavy drinkers. At their age, death from a slow, painful disease was far away and abstract.
As a teacher, she had always found this aspect of student behavior to be just an amusing curiosity. As the parent of two high school seniors, it terrified her. Many times she had heard Gary exhort to nervous parents during frosh week: “Mom and Dad, it’s time to let your children pursue their own dreams, even if they differ from your own.” Next year she would be one of those parents. Increasingly these days she thought about the twins whenever she observed students on campus. In just one year her babies would be in the same position as these young bodies roasting themselves on the Commons.
God help them all.
Ironically, concerns about the decision-making skills of college students had indirectly resulted in her current trek—concerns born of the darkest day in the university’s 150-year history. Maintenance workers had expertly covered the physical stains left by Bloody Valentine’s Day, but the psychological marks remained. Campus violence experts declared the school lucky, in that the death toll had been limited to four, but the incident had forever shattered the collective sense that this campus was a safe haven in a violent world.
Revelations in the days following the murders had been even more shocking. From the start, experts had been baffled by Jessica Hampton’s deviation from the typical profile of most campus shooters. For one thing, she was female. The notoriety of having been the country’s first female campus mass murderer led to huge media scrutiny of Hampton’s life. The presence of Donald Pfeiser’s skull and crossbones drawing overlooking the crime scene lent an air of the supernatural to the event, further fueling public fascination. Then the lurid motivation became public, revealed in a videotaped recording Hampton had posted on her Web page about one hour before the shooting. Police investigations verified the troubled student’s claims on the video.
It seemed that the 52-year-old Donald Pfeiser, married with four children, had been carrying on an affair with Jessica Hampton. It had not been his first, as it turned out. The tall, balding engineering professor had a long history of bedding students, both male and female. In the weeks following the shooting, numerous former and current students came forward with their tales of “Don the Juan,” as he was apparently known. Seventeen year-old, virginal freshman Jessica Hampton had simply been one of his more emotionally fragile conquests. As Jessica recounted in her video, he had approached her during the first week of the semester, as she sat alone at a popular coffeehouse just off campus. Shy and homesick, she had been easily flattered by the attentions of the older man, whose initial fatherly concern helped ease her into seduction. “He was in my pants before mid-terms,” she had testified with shame.
The affair had lasted throughout much of the girl’s first semester at college, until Pfeiser tired of her increasing clinginess and attempts to contact him over Christmas break. He had finally ended the relationship in late January, coldly advising Jessica to use the sexual knowledge he had conferred upon her to become more popular at frat parties.
The girl had been devastated, especially when, a few days later, a campus health center nurse informed her that she had contracted gonorrhea. The nurse later recalled how Jessica broke down in the examination room, crying and confessing exactly who had given her the disease. The veteran health care professional indicated a lack of surprise. Over the years she had seen numerous cases of unwanted pregnancy and disease caused by randy professors, but the center’s privacy rules prevented her from saying anything other than recording Jessica’s case as another campus STD statistic. However
, as many critics noted after the shootings, the nurse could have referred the clearly distraught student to one of the campus’s many mental health counselors. Instead, she had merely sent Jessica home with a prescription, a handful of condoms, three STD pamphlets, and the advice to learn from her mistakes.
The used, confused, and now diseased teenager quickly spiraled into a deep depression. Her roommate complained to their dorm R.A. that Jessica was acting “creepy,” not going to classes or showering, wearing nothing but sweatsuits, eating only junk food, and listening to “angry chick” music constantly. The R.A. did nothing other than lecture Jessica that she needed to get to her classes or face academic probation. The roommate effectively moved out, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s room down the hall.
Police found that Jessica did venture outside the dorm at least once, to withdraw the remainder of her summer job savings from an ATM, then walk to a nearby gun shop to purchase the handgun and ammunition. Her father had owned a similar handgun, which he had insisted she learn to use for her own protection against dangerous people like rapists. Her rambling video indicated that, in Jessica’s mind, Don the Juan was equivalent to the rapists her father had warned her about, “destroying innocence and spreading pestilence.” Even though Jessica’s STD was entirely treatable, she might as well have been afflicted with advanced AIDS. In her rapidly unhinging mind, her life was over.
Never in the video did Jessica say that she was planning to kill Pfeiser. Her purpose in leaving the document seemed more to warn other students to stay away from him and other similar predators. But few who viewed the video would ever forget the eerie words with which she ended. “Well,” Jessica had said blankly into the camera, “at least he won’t be able to give it to anybody else.”