Oink

by J. L. Newton

  I collected my materials and drove to campus, arriving at the Granary a little before noon and finding a shaded table that had a good view of the back door. Flows of faculty and students poured in and out, the largely male faculty in science easily identified by their uniform of striped, plaid, or polo shirts; jeans or chinos; and sneakers or sensible brown walking shoes. I took the top off the tuna salad I had purchased and began to eat. After twenty minutes, I’d finished my salad and had made some headway on revisions when Jenny Archer walked out the Granary’s back door. Tables were emptying by now, and Jenny found a table for herself next to the building. I threw my plastic box and fork into a recycling bin, gathered up my papers as if I were about to leave, and walked in the direction of Jenny’s table. I saw that she had bought herself two hard-boiled eggs and a bottle of water.

  “Jenny?”

  She looked at me with a puzzled air.

  “I’m Emily Addams. I attended the meeting about the grant for women in science and heard you speak. I was interested in what you said. Would you mind if I asked you some questions?”

  Jenny’s tight face loosened.

  “Sure. Have a seat.”

  “I was concerned when you said that a professor had passed off your work as his. You don’t have to tell me details about your situation, if you don’t want to, but I wondered if you could tell me, generally, how this kind of thing gets done.” I hadn’t noticed before how thin Jenny was. She had hollows in her cheeks, and her arms seemed bony. The veins stood out on them like tiny ropes. Does she have an eating issue? I wondered, looking at the two boiled eggs.

  “I’m afraid it goes on all over the country. You work in your professor’s lab on a project that he’s designed. You develop some compound or isolate some gene or make some innovation in technology on your own, and before you know it, he’s published it in a paper that, maybe, thanks you but doesn’t give you coauthorship.” Jenny cracked one of her eggs with a thwack on the edge of the table. “It’s a slave system. What you produce goes to the master. I wouldn’t mind his putting his name on my work if he would just give me proper credit. Graduate students have to publish to get jobs.”

  “That’s terrible.” Never having given a thought to graduate work in the sciences, I was taken aback. “Is there anyone you can complain to?”

  “Officially.” Jenny began to peel the egg, leaving the shells on a napkin she had spread neatly before her. “But I have very little money. I’ve borrowed to get through and I depend on my lab salary, which my professor pays. If I complained to him, he wouldn’t reappoint me and I’d be sunk. It would hurt my chance to be hired in another lab too.” Jenny’s gray eyes had taken on a haunted look. “And, anyway, he’s my major professor. I’m going to need his recommendation and connections to get a job after I finish. He’s on my dissertation committee too, and I’m almost near the end. I can’t afford to make him angry, though now, of course, he’s in a coma so I don’t know what will happen.”

  “It’s Peter Elliott, I assume.”

  Jenny nodded and bit into her egg.

  “Is there anyone you could talk to who might have influence?”

  “The people with influence have worked with Peter for years. They aren’t going to take my side. Besides, it’s a way of life in his lab. A lot of people know about it, and they just let it go on. Please don’t tell anyone what I’ve said.” Her brown hair was pulled so tightly in her ponytail that the skin along the sides of her face looked taut. Graduate student life had thinned and sharpened her like the edge of an arrowhead.

  “One word from Peter could ruin my career. And before the poisoning he’d gotten irritable.” Jenny folded the napkin with the eggshells into a small neat square.

  “What do you think that was about?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. He’d gotten paranoid about his notes. He made sure we all locked up our own.”

  “Would it have been the vandalism that made him so concerned?” I remembered how Tess had reacted to Save the Field’s threats.

  “That didn’t help.” Jenny folded the napkin into a smaller square. “But Peter had grown uneasy before that. For all his faults, he used to be kind of jovial. He’d joke about things. But that stopped this summer.”

  I wondered what had happened to Peter before Save the Fields had torn up the cornfield. I felt for Jenny. Graduate student life was looking rough, but, at the same time, I wondered how deep her relationship with Peter Elliott had gone. I also wanted desperately to ask her if she baked. I told her I was sorry and that I hoped we could address situations like hers in the grant. Her face lit up for a moment and then the moment passed.

  “I admired Peter at first because his labs get good results, and he’s always funded. I thought I’d found a kind of home. But it became more like a plantation. He just assumed everything belonged to him. Once, as I was eating lunch in my office, he came in to tell me something and helped himself to one of my boiled eggs without even asking. I don’t even know if he was conscious that it wasn’t his.”

  A thin young man with a well-trimmed beard walked up to the table.

  “This is my friend, Kevin,” Jenny said. “Kevin, this is Professor Addams.”

  I said it was nice to meet him. He too was thin as an insect, a tall praying mantis.

  “Jenny, if I can do anything for you, please let me know. I’ll be sure to bring this up in the grant meetings, but without using your name of course.”

  “Thanks,” Jenny said, tucking the other egg into her purse. “I have to get back.”

  She and Kevin left the table and walked away. They were the skinniest young people I’d ever seen. I wondered if they ate boiled eggs for dinner. It was doubtful that Jenny dined on corn bread, although given the grazing habits of her major professor, a napkin full of poisoned corn bread might be the perfect vehicle of revenge. I was aware, of course, that poisoning one’s major professor would not contribute much to finishing one’s degree, but I surmised that if Peter were to die or linger in his coma, Jenny would be assigned a new adviser. Maybe she’d get lucky. Maybe a different professor would let her keep her name on her own work. And what of her personal relationship to Peter? If they’d been involved, and knowing Peter, perhaps unsatisfactorily involved, how would that have figured in? And, finally, the detail about Peter’s notes. I wondered what had caused him to become so guarded. Perhaps it was Peter’s agitation about his work that Mei Lee had sensed and misidentified as a loss of interest in their relationship. These bits of information were tantalizing.

  * * *

  The administration building, Murk Hall, had been built in the 1960s, a five-story building with slit-like windows that vaguely recalled the computer punch cards of that era. It had been named after a previous chancellor, but folk legend had it that the construction workers had decided to call it Murk after Indian Creek, which sometimes filled with algae, giving the waters an opaque and greenish look. Murk was the site of many committee meetings, which, God knows, had their own elements of dreck and nontransparency, and I was headed to still another, this one called by the Office of Research—a powerful operation. Responsible for supporting and organizing academic investigations on campus, it had secured $340,000,000 in funds the previous year. Now, twenty-seven units reported to the office—exactly twenty-six on science and one on women and gender. Given the differences in the way scientific and nonscientific research were defined, it was a troubled marriage. The head of the research center on women and gender, a Women’s Studies colleague of mine, an anthropologist who worked on a lesser-known Chinese ethnic group, had a conference that day and had asked me to go in her place. I wasn’t keen on attending another meeting, but, of course, I couldn’t say no.

  As I entered the meeting room, the atmosphere was somber. The latest budget crisis was so severe that it was threatening to have impact not just on the women and gender unit, but on the scientific ones as well. The director of the office, a blond out of an ad for Ralph Lauren, wore a well-tailored navy suit an
d tie which would have looked at home in a board room. His lustrous black shoes appeared soft and possibly Italian. I wondered what kind of salary he was paid.

  “We’re facing another series of budget cuts and every unit is being asked to contribute. How should we respond?” The director looked at us blandly, as if he didn’t already know the answer.

  “We can’t take any cuts,” Collin Morehead barked. As in the Super Committee meeting, the extra folds around his mouth gave his jaws a massive, Cerberus-like look. “We don’t have enough funding as it is to do our work.”

  I remembered how Collin had taken the corporate line at the GMO panel along with Peter, and I also remembered that they had not appeared to be too friendly. Like Peter, he also worked on corn. Could Collin and Peter be rivals? I remembered Alma’s comment about those who espoused dog-eat-dog values.

  “What are our options?” the director asked smoothly. He wasn’t anticipating answers that might challenge the way things were. I sensed instantly that the center for women and gender was going to take a hit.

  How about lowering the salary of the director of the Office of Research? I thought. How about lowering all the other bloated salaries and privileges of the administration? What would he do if I had said that out loud? The argument that obscenely large salaries were necessary to get good people from afar was a complete fabrication in my opinion. People from inside the university were often better at administrative jobs than those brought to the campus at great expense. People from inside knew the culture, and knowing the culture and the people counted. They’d seen the track records of the departments in terms of service, mentoring students, and intellectual vibrancy. They knew the quality of small programs and of the people who made them work. People from outside lacked that knowledge, and the swollen salaries often brought in people who conflated “big” with “good” and were likely to identify productivity with numbers.

  But I couldn’t speak up and risk hurting my colleague’s center any more than it was already going to be. The center on women and gender was already regarded as an exotic effluence among the scientific units.

  “Shall we propose to raise student tuition instead?”

  The director’s suggestion was met with a hum of agreement.

  “We can also propose a cut in staff,” Collin growled with perfect confidence that his suggestion would be well received.

  Another approving hum confirmed that his confidence was not misplaced. I was boiling. Oh sure, I thought, send the staff packing despite their years of loyalty and double the workload of the lowest-paid employees—people, for the most part, who are already overworked, underpaid, and raising families. I scribbled on my notepad to cool my outrage. The privilege of many of my colleagues, their lack of attention to anything but their own work, their failure to see how their own projects were in fact sustained by the very staff they saw no issue in further burdening roiled my insides. I thought of Peter’s staff person, Yvonne, who was struggling to support three children and an aging mother on her own, and the words shot out.

  “Staff are already overburdened. We can’t just keep taking from those who support our work and make so little. It’s shameful and counterproductive. We should be cutting our own salaries, especially those at the top.”

  A man with a beard and two women looked at me with sympathy, but, for the most part, my remarks slipped by as if they had fallen into a large, quiet sea. I wished the bearded man would speak. Men often listened to other men, even when they espoused the same opinion as a woman whom they’d previously ignored. Many in the room understood ecology in respect to the natural world, but when it came to the interdependence of the human world, some appeared not to have a clue.

  “I think I have a sense of your feelings about this,” the director said, as he brought the meeting to a close.

  He didn’t mean my feelings, of course, or those of the few who’d given me a friendly look. More and more, an emerging culture was encouraging people to only care about their own interests. This was true even in women’s and in ethnic studies. As Alma and Grace both had complained, older faculty had made it possible for the younger ones to enter the university in the first place, but the culture of struggle and community that had won the young their places now seemed irrelevant to some.

  After the meeting ended, I left the room and decided to take the wide marble stairs. I was in no mood to be enclosed in an elevator with my colleagues from the meeting. On the stairs, I was joined by the man with the beard.

  “Quite a show in there,” he said.

  “Do you mean how they all jumped to cut staff and raise tuition for the students and ignored my suggestion about cutting salaries at the top?”

  “It’s the corporate model. They justify those salaries just the way Wall Street does. It’s a bunch of bull. But if you’re an academic in the sciences, now, given all the cuts in state and federal funding, you’re so hungry for money that you’re liable to be working with a corporation and attending to its interests.” Despite the beard, he had an open, friendly face with spokes of laugh lines at the corner of his eyes.

  “How bad is it?” Doing analysis of popular culture, as I did, did not require equipment or a lab.

  “Well,” he frowned, “nationally, biotech conglomerates are asking many of the questions. Taxpayer monies buy the labs and equipment, the conglomerates pay for some of the research, and then they try to patent the professor’s discoveries and take most of the profit. Universities can patent discoveries too—Arbor State insists on it—but corporations own most of the new technologies.”

  “Has it changed the way you work? By the way, what do you work on?”

  “I study the environmental effects of biotechnology, which the big bio tech companies aren’t interested in funding.”

  We’d reached the bottom of the stairs and were headed toward the front door.

  “It would cut into their profits?” I asked.

  “Exactly. Companies don’t pay for research that’s not in their own interest. They don’t make money on risk assessment. They do make it on biotechnology.” We opened the wide doors and left the building but lingered on the front steps, neither of us ready to end the conversation.

  “Research used to feel collaborative,” he said, taking off his glasses and cleaning them with a handkerchief from his pants pocket. “You’d talk to your colleagues about your work and kind of share ideas. But now that some researchers are hooked up with corporations, they’re afraid to share what they’re thinking about. I’ve known a few on other campuses who keep their notebooks locked up. Sometimes they have stock in corporations.” He held his glasses up to check for spots and then put them carefully back in place.

  “Do you know Peter Elliott?”

  His face took on a look of disgust.

  “Yeah, I know him.”

  “Is he an aberration or is he the future?”

  “God, I hope he’s not the future. He’s practically a lobbyist for Syndicon. I mean, given cuts in public funding, we’re all hungry for money to sustain our work. I know a guy who’d been approached by a company to do research and to turn over all discoveries to them, for a price. He would have been working for the corporation. Fortunately, the chair of his department wouldn’t let him go that far. We’re supposed to be finding new knowledge and technologies that will benefit the public.”

  “I’m in Women’s Studies, by the way. I’m glad we had this talk.”

  “Plant Sciences. Thanks for listening.”

  * * *

  I’d had enough of meetings for the day and decided on a greenbelt walk, although my amble, I had already determined, would serve a dual purpose. It would help me shake off my anger at the wrongheadedness I’d just witnessed at the meeting, and it would serve to further my investigation of Peter’s poisoning. I’d looked up Peter Elliott’s address and realized that he, too, lived off the greenbelt but over by the pond. I could easily arrange to pass right by his house at 30 Wild Deer Lane, and it occurred to me that I
might knock on Peter’s door and have a chat with Peter’s wife. I’d introduce myself as a neighbor and as the colleague who might have baked the fatal corn bread and ask about Peter’s health and see where that would lead. It was potentially embarrassing, and I wanted to avoid another awkward conversation like the one with Juan Carlos Vega, but I was so deeply immersed in the seeping effect of Peter’s poisoning that I was determined to give it a try.

  I set off along the greenbelt, walking along a path that ran northward to some open fields, then along the fields to the west, and south again to the side of a small pond. Wild Deer Lane ended in a cul-de-sac that opened onto the greenbelt path and number 30 turned out to be the house at the very end, one that I had often admired. It was made of a soft, peach-colored stone and had a Southwestern feel. Its upper windows looked onto the trees bordering the pond. I climbed its three stone stairs and rang the bell. The heavy wooden door opened, and Teresa Fuentes-Elliott appeared wearing a white sweat suit with a folded red bandanna holding back her rich brown hair. She was prettier in person than in her website photo.

  “Yes?” she said in slightly accented English.

  “Professor Fuentes-Elliott?” Teresa nodded. “I’m one of your colleagues, Emily Addams. I live nearby and thought I’d ring your bell since I was walking right past your home. I was the one who baked the corn bread found in your husband’s hand.” Talk about awkward conversations, but there was nothing to do, so I rambled on. “At least, it seems to have been my corn bread. I’m very sorry about Peter, and I just wanted to let you know that I ate that corn bread and so did one of my colleagues, and we didn’t get sick. Someone must have put something in the corn bread after I left it in Bauman Hall.”