The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Wait.” She wondered if she had missed something. Were they still talking about her single-ness? Or had they ever been? “Wait,” she said again. “What is?”

  But Francine seemed to have entered a different space. Her face had changed. “You know,” she said, after a moment, “I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about this.”

  Naomi caught her breath. “Of course. I didn’t mean…” But what didn’t she mean? She’d had no idea that there was a “this” at all. “Whenever you’re ready. Or never.”

  “Never’s good!” Francine said lightly. It was from a New Yorker cartoon they’d laughed over once. No, Thursday’s out. How about never—is never good for you?

  “Yes, never’s perfectly fine for me.” She got to her feet. “I’ll be off then. Are you going to Timothy’s for Thanksgiving?”

  Timothy was Sumner’s son. He was married with a four-year-old and a newborn, and lived in Darien, Connecticut.

  “Yes. Just a day trip. If eighty-four is clear, it shouldn’t be bad.” But 84 wouldn’t be clear on Thanksgiving Day. Francine looked resigned. “And you?”

  “Me and Hannah at the Stone House,” she said happily. Hannah would have to come home for Thanksgiving. “And next week, I’ll bet you anything the students will all have returned to their dorms.” There was a sharp knock at the office door, and Leanne, not waiting, opened it and stepped inside, carrying three files and looking balefully at Naomi. Too late for anything to be done about that. Naomi took the files with as gracious a thank-you as she could muster.

  “I’m not a betting man,” Francine said.

  Chapter Eight

  Permission to Enter

  Sometimes people ask me what it was like to grow up in the middle of a war, and they are surprised when I tell them that most of my earliest memories were of very peaceful, happy things. My mother was a nurse who worked with babies and small children, and my father was a mechanic. I also had a brother, five years older. Of course, even in periods when there was no fighting, we were constantly in conflict with our neighboring country, but as a child somehow that just becomes the way things are in the background, and my life was about my family. We were Muslim (in Bureij, everyone was), but looking back I don’t remember religion being a big part of our lives. Even when the first Intifada began our lives seemed to go on as before. My brother began school at a UN (UNRWA) school. Later I would join him at the same school.

  Naomi, who was reading this in bed, set down the pages of Omar’s application essay to take a sip of her tea. The past tense references to his family members did not, of course, bode well. But she could already see what Francine had meant. From its first sentence, it was about as different from the typical Webster admissions essay as it could be. Stage fright at the piano recital? Tutoring the autistic girl down the street? She set down her mug and braced herself.

  It is very difficult to talk about what happened, and I do not feel it to be appropriate in this application context. I am a result of what happened to me, but I am not only what happened to me. One day, that was in every other respect a normal day, my brother and father died, and my mother could never recover from this. After she died, I was very lucky to meet a man with the American NGO working for schools in Bureij. He asked me, would I be willing to leave Palestine to go to the US, if it meant I could never return. I had to think about this a long time, but finally I decided: yes. If I could really go, I would do that. I don’t know if that is what my father and mother would have wanted, so I struggle with that. But I made the decision to go.

  I came to the US through PRM (Bureau of Population Refugees Migration). I was placed in Milwaukee to undergo resettlement counseling. After this I was sent to Houston to live with a foster family, and try going to an American school, but my English was not strong enough to support this. Finally I met through my foster mother a woman in Oklahoma who knew a Lebanese family willing to host me, and for the year I lived in Oklahoma I spent days at the town library trying to learn and think about what had happened already in my life and what I wanted to do in my future. Only then do I feel ready for attending an American university like Webster College.

  In Gaza I had hoped to go to University of Palestine to study law and judicial practice. I still would like to pursue international law as my career, but I also want to learn American history and art and culture.

  I have made my decision to apply to Webster College from reading its brochure and researching about the college on the computer at the library in Arkoma. I have a big mind that wants to learn everything and hopes to meet many people from different parts of the world who have all different ideas, because I think that talking about ideas, even if you disagree with others, is the best way for every one of us to share the planet we all live on. I hope to be lucky enough to attend the school if you will grant me the permission to enter.

  Naomi put the pages down and lay there, feeling the cold in her feet and hands, even under the quilt. The temperature, on the eve of Thanksgiving, had dropped once again, and she was reassured beyond words that the encampment around the Stump appeared to have been abandoned as the students dispersed to hearth and home. Hannah was home, too, down the hall and still asleep at eleven a.m., which (after her nights under the stars) was just as Naomi wanted it. For herself, she was looking forward to a quiet holiday, marked only by leisurely sessions with the New Yorker (the backlog stack was now nearly a foot tall) and real time with her daughter.

  She set the essay back into the green folder, extracted the reader’s card from the inside cover, and read the summary notes at the bottom. Like every Webster application, Omar’s had had two readers—one who signed his comments JG (this was Joseph Gill, one of the lifers in the admissions office and Francine’s stand-in when she had to be away from campus) and FR, Francine herself. Both had filled their comment boxes with raves—the intelligence, the spirit, the humanity. It was as if the magic of this boy, his pure yearning for education and life itself, had risen off the page and embraced his unworthy evaluators. “Incredible kid,” Francine had written. JG had ended his notes with: “I cannot remember ever having been so moved by an application. My top priority for the year.”

  Naomi herself had not looked at a student’s application folder since Neil Jones-Givens’s, back in 2006, and she couldn’t help thinking about that essay now. Neil—or Nell, as she still was at the time of her Webster application—had vividly described her breast binding and attempts to make the men’s cross-country team, in beautiful prose, so very different from Omar’s careful wielding of what was obviously a second language. Trauma and trauma, as different as traumas could be, and yet both still were traumas for young and sensitive human beings. Omar had lost his family to a war that no one could really understand, whether they were on one side of the world making free with their opinions or on the other, just trying to live. Nell—Neil—had only wanted to make a place for himself. Both had wanted a safe space in which to think and learn. Neither had meant harm to anyone else.

  But even Naomi recognized that there were serious discrepancies between the two cases, and they were going to be a problem. In either gender Neil had been a fine student, only losing his footing briefly at the height of his crisis. Omar, though—Omar had not been faring well academically. Not well at all. Ascertaining this had required no personal visit to a dean, nor to anyone else; as president she had access to every student’s transcript, though she’d only made use of that access twice (once, indeed, for Neil Jones-Givens, and once to see whether Hannah had managed to pull out an A from her very challenging Political Thought seminar last spring—she had). This time the result was not so reassuring.

  Omar was running a C– average, but that in itself was not the worst of it. He was only a sophomore but he had already failed two courses (European History and, surprisingly, The Politics of the Middle East), and he had barely scraped through another four with D’s. In fact, the only marks above a C he’d earned (and these were what had pulled his average up to C–) were th
e two A’s from courses in the Anthropology Department: Music and Folklore in American Culture (that had been his freshman seminar the previous fall) and Magic, Myth, and Religion in the spring. Currently he was enrolled in a third: Folklore and the Supernatural. The professor in all three, it shocked her not at all to discover, was their troublesome plagiarist, Nicholas Gall.

  She and Hannah had a quiet Thanksgiving dinner: tofu vegetable loaf, but everything else defiantly traditional, down to the marshmallow-studded sweet potato casserole, and concluding with a pecan pie they made together. Hannah, despite her virtue in matters of animal flesh, was downright hedonistic when it came to desserts, and Naomi made sure to lay in a supply of her daughter’s favorite ice-cream flavors, complete with various syrups and sauces. Back from the barricades, Hannah seemed grateful for the warmth, and she was happy to spend whole evenings on the sofa in the upstairs den with a bowl of ice cream in her lap and a blanket over her shoulders, clicking happily away at the remote control. When she could stand it, Naomi joined her, though not even Webster’s domination of reality TV competitions could make those shows watchable. “You’re kidding,” she said, when Hannah embarked upon an America’s Next Top Model marathon.

  “My brain is on vacation,” her daughter informed her. “It is vacating.”

  About the protest, Hannah tolerated very little discussion, in spite of—or more likely because of—her mother’s extremely keen interest. She volunteered nothing and parried most of Naomi’s questions, dispensing only a few shards of useful information. Yes, the conditions at the Stump were challenging, but nothing compared to the way most people on the planet lived. No, she did not find it morally problematic to attend her classes, work in the library, eat dinner at Radclyffe Hall, and then join the others at the encampment on the Quad; the point was not to debase oneself before an ideal, but to physically embrace a principle, to bring one’s energy and strengths to an achievable goal. Everyone at the Stump had reached an individual decision to make the stand they’d made—Naomi, of all people, should understand and respect that. And surely she could see how the denial of tenure to a prominent and beloved African-American professor was a grave symbol of the state of affairs on their campus, the poisoned fruit of the poisoned tree that was Webster today. What the tenure decision implied about the institution as a whole was heartbreaking but accurate: What was happening to Professor Gall was the thin edge of a wedge that was comprehensive institutional racism and intolerance. The students at the Stump were prepared to stand their ground until the college lived up to its own stated principles, Hannah assured her mother.

  Naomi, of course, refrained from saying that the college already had lived up to its own stated principles, the ones regarding academic integrity. As for the tenure decision itself, the matter had been resolved, and wasn’t going to be unresolved, ever. She might not have spent her years in academia preparing herself to be a college president (unlike some she might have named), but the job, she had quickly learned, was basically a game of Whac-a-Mole. You didn’t have the luxury of going back to contemplate the wisdom of having swung your mallet, because the next crisis was already exploding somewhere else, and you had no time to spare. Comprehend the problem, hear the grievances, get advice, and then decide. End of story. She could just keep doing that, she supposed, unless she managed to fuck something up so badly that her critics (and she had always had them: too soft, too weird, too Jewish, too incompetent about finance, too female, too “intellectual,” too not-a-graduate-of-Webster) would seize the mallet right out of her hands, and whack her instead. But that hadn’t happened so far. And if she was lucky, really very lucky, and very, very careful, it wouldn’t happen now.

  “And Professor Gall is on board with all of this?” she asked instead.

  Hannah had looked at her mother with scorn: It had insulted her, this question. Each and every one of them at the Stump was a sentient, principled, and committed young person, acting at the behest of his or her own conscience. Was this Naomi-mom speaking? Or Naomi-apologist-for-a-profoundly-compromised-institution?

  Wisely understanding that neither of these was the right answer, she backpedaled.

  “I respect your integrity, Hannah. I always have. I’m very proud of you.”

  “And yet, you refuse to do more than give the impression of hearing me.”

  She wanted to argue with that, but her daughter was right, and she herself was a dreadful actress. What fascinated her most, she decided, was not that Gall had done what he’d done but that so many people seemed to care so much about his tenure status. Rare indeed was the professor who attracted the kind of passionate support this one was now enjoying, on the Webster campus and beyond, and crowded as his courses were, she doubted that more than a fraction of Webster’s student protesters had actually enrolled in them. And what about the students from other colleges, near and now far? What did a barely published folklorist from Webster represent to a Yale student or a Hampshire student, or a delegation from Bard, all of whom were now apparently in situ around the Stump? What had he told these people to make them leave their lives and come here?

  Naomi knew what he hadn’t told them. He hadn’t told a single one of them that he was being removed from Webster because he’d broken the college’s brief and succinct Honor Pledge in its entirety: I affirm that I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this work. And she, of course, could not tell a single one of them, either. Not even this one.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to Hannah. “I’ll try harder. I will.”

  And then, sensing that it was the best she could hope for, she joined her formidable daughter on the couch for as many episodes of America’s Next Top Model as she could stand.

  With virtually no students on campus, Naomi’s own days were gloriously empty of tasks, weighty or mundane, and she luxuriated in her New Yorkers and the nearness of Hannah, despite her daughter’s preferred entertainments. Her only act of presidential business was to fix on a date for lunch with Robbins Petavit, the Webster alumnus who taught at Amherst. Petavit had sounded distinctly unenthusiastic about the notion of a dedicated reunion for Webster graduates of Native American ethnicity, and even less enthusiastic at the prospect of heading an advisory committee thereto, but in the end he had said yes.

  On Saturday night they hosted Francine and Sumner for dinner and an evening that culminated in a series of increasingly cutthroat Scrabble games. On Sunday, as if to drain the last possible drop of their togetherness, they drove to a multiplex south of Worcester and saw two movies in a row.

  And then it was time to take Hannah back. She walked her daughter across the Quad, and they picked their way silently around the deflated tents and the snowed-on tarps, neither of them saying anything about it. At Radclyffe Hall the lights were on, and housemates who’d already returned were in the kitchen mulling cider, which smelled wonderful, but Naomi gave Hannah a hug at the door and made herself leave. She walked back alone, feeling both sweet and sad, relieved that the holiday had passed without too much conflict, about the protest or anything else, and yet already wondering whether she’d been wrong not to force a more air-clearing dialogue on the subject while they were together.

  The next morning Naomi rose in her once again empty house, dressed, drank her coffee and read the Times, then stepped outside to find that the Stump protest had, by some breathtaking alchemy, thoroughly reconstituted itself. The students, who beat their own arms for warmth, or hugged, or blew on coffee, were greeting one another like any other Websterites returning from vacation. The tents and tarps were resecured, and new covers had been stretched over the frozen ground, delineating the separation between occupied and unoccupied territory. And there was more—more of everything: tents and people, tarps and plastic sheeting. Overnight, all of this had happened. It had happened between her walk home last night and her waking this morning. And, if the encampment itself wasn’t enough to be processing on a frigid winter morning, the very first news van could now be sighted on the f
ar edge of the Billings Lawn. It was as if the volume on the entire undertaking had suddenly been turned up, and Naomi, stunned and utterly livid, couldn’t stop herself from wondering whether Hannah was in there, too.

  Chapter Nine

  The Ur-Rule

  After Thanksgiving, the Quad was never free of them again. The ring of protesters around the Stump grew, spreading outward like a nautilus. The press office began taking calls from Hartford and Springfield, then from Boston and New York. In Naomi’s own office the callers were parents and alumni, first curious, then concerned, and then irate, demanding to know her intentions and requesting an explanation as to why she hadn’t personally bulldozed the Billings Lawn—Because I’m not a fascist dictator, she’d wanted to yell at them—sending the kids back to their overheated dorms and the classes they’d competed so hard to attend in the first place. It was maddening. But it was also—now that people well beyond Webster were beginning to watch—very, very delicate.

  The three-week period between Thanksgiving and Christmas break was a widening gyre. She canceled most of her nonessential appointments (including, annoyingly, the lunch with Robbins Petavit that she had just scheduled), and arranged for a conference call with the trustees, just to keep everyone up to speed and everything out in the open, and by now she was speaking regularly to the college attorney about the evolving situation. This was no longer Rosa, her comrade-at-arms during the Radclyffe Hall affair; Rosa had gone west, following her husband to UC Irvine, where he’d been offered an endowed chair in the economics department. Her replacement was a straight arrow named Chaim Wachsberger, who made what she already knew officially plain: She could make no reference to or statement about the reason for Gall’s denial of tenure. The privacy of the tenure process was absolute, and any implication that the professor had committed plagiarism would be a violation of that—a violation that opened them up to a very winnable lawsuit. She could say that the process was complex, careful, responsible, and rigorous. She could say that decisions were reached with a broad range of factors in mind. She could say that the tenure was a longstanding and intrinsic part of academia, and its principles were understood by those who submitted to the process. But she could not say that Nicholas Gall had broken a rule. He had broken, in fact, the ur-rule, the one that tolerated no mitigation. And he had done it knowingly, and with full awareness of what might—what should—happen as a result.