“Usually, when tenure is denied, the applicant is allowed to remain in his position for a period of up to two years, in order to secure a teaching position elsewhere. It’s a common courtesy.” It is? thought Naomi, who’d never heard of such a policy, at Webster or anywhere else. “But was Professor Gall offered this option?”
Omar shook his head gravely.
“Summarily dismissed. Informed that his services would no longer be required from the end of the spring semester. No extension on the lease of his home. No means of redress or opportunity to challenge the decision. Just appalling.”
Just untrue, Naomi smoldered. She was thinking of all the warnings Gall had received, all the extensions he’d used. Her calf was howling. She wanted to get up. She couldn’t listen to this anymore, but it wouldn’t move, and so neither could the rest of her, and it was shooting numbness and pain up and down the length of her leg. She thought of her own long-ago sit-in at Cornell’s administration building: three days of action in protest of ROTC’s continued presence on campus, three days cross-legged on the red carpeting of Day Hall. She’d been wedged between her then-roommate Margo and her then-boyfriend Oskar, happy as a clam with only a bit of stiffness upon rising, at last, and making her way outside with the others, arms linked, singing “We Shall Overcome.” For this infraction she had received only the promise of a demerit of some sort, to be incorporated into her academic record, but when she happened to see the record itself, a few years later, in the office of her VISTA training supervisor, there was nothing in there about her activism at all. Policy? Or clerical oversight? She wasn’t sure whether she’d felt relief over this or mild disappointment, but she never said anything about it either way, because, by then, the personal fallout from the sit-in far outweighed the political; she and Daniel had become close in the course of that very action, and within weeks of its completion (its unsuccessful completion—ROTC would never retreat from the shores of Old Cayuga) she had told Oskar to go his own way as she went hers (hers being directly to Daniel’s bed). You could argue that the harm, the hurt, would come much further down the line, but as for physical impact, there was nothing. She’d been twenty years old, and slim, and flexible, and strong. Her legs had come through it all without a chirp of protest.
Not so this evening. Barely a half an hour into this…whatever it was—action? teach-in?—and she’d had to grab her calves and knead away at them to make them shut up, but that only seemed to have the opposite effect. “Sorry,” she whispered to the boy in front of her, who looked around as she nudged him with her foot.
“The college, of course, refuses to say anything about this. We have asked repeatedly for an explanation, but they will not respond.”
Naomi looked at him in amazement. She was not aware of any student delegation making inquiries into Gall’s tenure status. Why had no one told her the students from the protest wanted to see her? Mrs. Bradford—had she taken it upon herself to keep this from her? Naomi was seething. How could Mrs. Bradford possibly not understand how important it was, communicating with the students from the protest? Or…wait, maybe they hadn’t come to her at all. Maybe they’d gone to somebody else. Maybe they’d gone to Bob Stacek—that was possible. But why had she heard nothing about it? She had spent months entreating the Stump contingent to talk to her, inviting them to her office, personally setting up the chairs for the town hall meeting that never materialized, using both carrots and sticks to draw them into actual civilized debate, and Bob hadn’t seen fit to tell her that Omar and his gang were downstairs in his office? Repeatedly? But then she remembered that Bob Stacek would rather have walked over coals than sat down with student radicals intent on challenging a faculty matter. That couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t have. And then she thought of something else, something even stranger. What if none of what Omar was saying was actually true?
But then…how could that be true?
“Are these the actions of an open institution devoted to scholarship and creativity?”
“No!” said someone. More than one person, actually. There was a cluster down in front, all in agreement. Someone actually raised a hand, a fist. The fist was pale, the wrist bony. Naomi recognized the flannel from which it protruded, but the actual connection didn’t quite get made. I know that arm was as far as she could go.
“Fucking way,” someone else said helpfully.
“Our college is racist!” Omar cried. “It hurts me to say it. The truth is, I can hardly bring myself to say it. Or I couldn’t, until tonight. But then I was taken down to the basement of this house…” He shook his head vigorously, as if to dislodge the image. “The disgusting thing I saw. The desecration, of this building in particular. This building! Not the science building or the art enter! Not the alumni center!”
Which would have been…better? Naomi thought bitterly. She took the chance of wiggling a toe, and was rewarded only with streaks of quivery pain.
From outside, the siren again, but now growing neither louder nor fainter. The car was in front of the house, and not moving. The pigs had arrived.
“You might think,” Omar said, his voice solemn, “that this is an overreaction. Webster College isn’t some…superpower bombing its neighbors, or shooting a child in the street as his father desperately tries to shield him. It’s not some death-obsessed fanatic sending a kid to blow up a bus. But in my heart, I know it’s not different at all. And I’ll tell you something else. If we don’t stand up, if we don’t say, ‘This is wrong,’ if we don’t say, ‘Stop,’ then not one of us is any safer than that little child in the street, or the innocent person riding that bus. So this is what I’m doing today. It’s a very simple thing, but it goes beyond just standing on the sidelines and grumbling because you feel that something isn’t right. This is about stepping forward and raising your voice and showing that you see the problem and you’re not walking away from it. I am saying this for myself. I don’t speak for anyone else. I say, ‘This is wrong.’ I say, ‘This is unjust.’”
They clapped and cheered all around her, and it was so loud that Naomi let the deep and howling Ow that she had been pushing so hard against slip past her effort and out. Ow, Ow, her leg throbbed and raged, and Ow she said, in observation of that, but it turned out that actually saying it out loud didn’t help very much. The leg still throbbed and raged. There was no room to stretch, but she stretched anyway. The boy in front of her shifted; she could see his annoyance even in the posture of his back.
“Disgrace,” said someone behind her…or off to the side.
“Could you…excuse me?” said someone else. But it wasn’t someone else, it was her.
She had placed each hand on the shoulder of a neighbor and pushed herself up, but now neither of her two wonky feet seemed capable of bearing her weight.
“They’re asleep,” she observed, to no one in particular. The two people on either side looked up at her with curiosity, but did not seem particularly exercised about the situation, which was a grace note. “Sorry, I’m just, I couldn’t keep sitting like that. Old legs,” she said, illogically.
She put one down and tested it again. Her entire body shivered.
“President Roth?” somebody said.
Call me Naomi, she almost replied. It was her usual response to a Webster student. But they were all looking at her now. Omar was looking at her, and Chava. And, yes, clad in that all too familiar brown flannel shirt, her own Hannah Rosalind Roth. I know that arm. She knew that face as well—disapproving, determined.
“No,” Omar was saying, calmly, in response to something she had obviously missed. “No, it’s good. It’s right. She needs to know.”
“Well, thank you,” said Naomi, finding her voice as both feet found—finally and at the same time—the ground. “I appreciate the welcome, but I didn’t realize I was coming to hear you speak. I’m here because of what happened in the basement of this house.”
“Webster is a racist environment,” said a voice. Male, low. Naomi looked in its di
rection, but no one seemed to be owning the statement. A room full of bowed heads, avoiding contact. Omar was looking at her, but he listened with his head cocked slightly to one side and a half smile on his face, as if she were some precocious child about to say something adorable. It made her crazy.
“I’m offended by that,” she said. “Webster is many things, and I’d be the first to tell you that we have our challenges. No community is perfect. But inherently racist? Endemically racist? Absolutely not. And frankly, I’m also offended by the fact that whoever said that…” She paused to give him another chance, but whoever he was he didn’t take it. “Has chosen not to identify himself. No community can grow without honest debate, and no debate can be honest if people don’t own their positions. I hope you’ll think about that.”
“And I hope you”—Omar nodded, with maddening condescension, at Naomi—“will think about what you heard here tonight—without having made your presence known.” There was a deep rumble of assent.
“That’s right,” said a girl with a high voice.
Yeah, so much for honesty.
“I didn’t come here to attend a rally,” Naomi shouted. “I’m not here to infiltrate a meeting. I was summoned by campus security because a morally repulsive and criminal act took place in this house, and this house is the property of the college. What happened downstairs is a crime against Webster, and that means every one of us, myself included. And I’m expecting all of you to cooperate with the police as we attempt to identify the responsible party or parties. This community will not tolerate what I saw down there.” She stopped herself. She was alarmed at her own shrillness, which carried an unmistakable edge of something no feminist cared to be associated with, and that was hysteria. She was not hysterical, if only because there was no such thing as hysteria. It was a made-up thing, made up, moreover, by a man. She would not be pushed this far.
“I’m leaving,” said Naomi. “But first, I’m going to talk to the police outside, and offer them the assistance of our entire community. Then I’m going to tell the rest of the Webster community what’s happened here, and that includes the other students and the faculty, not to mention our alumni and parent communities. Because we don’t hide things like this, not if we’re serious about fixing all the problems in the world,” she said, somewhat archly, looking at Omar. “And when we figure out who did this, we won’t be hiding that either. So whoever’s responsible had better get ready to be publicly identified, prosecuted by the police, and, if they’re a Webster student, expelled. Everyone clear on that?”
It sounded authoritative. It sounded…well, presidential. The very opposite, she noted with satisfaction, of hysteria. But it only lasted a moment and then it was gone, and she was only herself again—wobbly on her legs and quite unsure of anything at all, especially the truth of what she’d just said.
Chapter Twelve
This Is the Place
Mud season (known in some other parts of the world as “spring”) would almost entirely preempt winter that year. The same cold that had settled in so early the previous fall, bringing the leaves down fast and hard on the Webster lawns and quads and bestowing extra discomfort (and nobility!) upon the Stump protest, would leave sheets of dense Massachusetts mud in its wake. The physical encampment—those tents and shanties and the no longer quite so luxe toilet trailer—remained in situ, but now the student movement on the Billings Lawn no longer seemed tied to the Stump. After the Sojourner Truth House incident the Webster protest expanded to consume the entire campus—dormitories and classrooms and naturally the administration buildings. Some critical algorithm had been reached with the joining of feces and hate language in the basement on Fairweather Road, some epidemiological tipping point attained, and by the time Webster College arose from its innocent slumber the next morning the entire campus was locked in a paralysis of outrage.
Overnight, too, every one of the movement’s missing elements had been located. The action that so recently lacked a name and a public leader now possessed both of these, as if someone had made a late-night run to the activist superstore and loaded up the van. The students, unlike the college’s own press office (which had barely progressed since the days of the Radclyffe Hall debacle), were fully capable of interfacing with the world, and by late morning, position papers were being distributed, and the new entity, Webster Dissent, had a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and a website, loaded with photos: the campus, circa 1955, in all of its pre-Sarafian maleness and Caucasian-ness, and the stalwart encampment (minus toilet trailer), and the grievously wronged professor, Nicholas Gall, and (she was shocked to see) the smeared abuse on the Sojourner Truth wall (well-lit images, and perfectly composed) and also, of course, the college president, Naomi Roth, whose highly unflattering image was accompanied by her office phone number and email address. Media inquiries were directed to [email protected] and interview requests for Professor Gall and the young, charismatic Webster student Omar Khayal (sophomore, anthropology major, hometown: Bureij, Palestine) were directed to an 800 number that, when Naomi tried it, went straight to a recording, instructing her to leave her name, number, and email address. The voice delivering that instruction? One she knew very, very well.
By Monday afternoon, poor Mrs. Bradford had been bedeviled by every news outlet she could personally have named, and many she’d never heard of. Naomi, sensing that to leave this tsunami of intense type-A personalities to her elderly assistant was hazardous—both to the college and to Mrs. Bradford herself—phoned Bob Stacek, the surliest person she knew, and deputized him to deal with these requests, an opportunity she figured he’d enjoy. From then on, Mrs. Bradford would forward the calls to Stacek’s office downstairs, and Stacek would inform one and all that the president would be unavailable until the trustees had met to confer about the situation.
Getting that very thing to happen was now Naomi’s primary concern. The board had not been due to meet until its annual gathering in March, when the usual priorities were Webster’s endowment and admissions profile, and the group seemed less than compelled to schedule an emergency session. Not every trustee shared Naomi’s sense of urgency about Webster Dissent, and one who did—the retired history professor Milton Russell—had been loudly encouraging a response best summarized by the words National and Guard. Webster, even without the college’s cooperation, was on the news and in the news. It was the news, part of any number of larger stories about race and intolerance, and the whole situation was boiling down to this: a 250-year-old college, a college still well remembered for its boorish, dim, and drunken male students, was refusing to come to terms with a changing educational and social landscape. Horrified, Naomi watched the Webster College of an earlier era reconstitute itself in descriptions by commentators and journalists, its homogeneity and conservatism untempered by the intervening years, as if the entire generation of post-Sarafian students had never set foot on campus. The college’s new critics—her new critics—were legion, riled up, and getting louder with each passing day. She felt trapped beneath the collective boot of a thousand angry people, all misinformed, all with intractable opinions, all out for blood.
And now, into the furor, with the deliberate step of a long offstage leading player, came martyred professor Nicholas Gall: “reluctant” figurehead. He was slight with a short but uncurbed afro, a narrow nose, and a mouth so small that it actually looked uncomfortable to speak through. Naomi, who had never laid eyes on the man she’d now thought of for a solid year as the anthropology plagiarist, couldn’t help but consider him disappointing.
She had taken to making a mental check mark each time she’d wished she could say what she wanted to say about Gall. No, Professor Nicholas Gall had not been denied tenure because he was a black man (check). That was absurd. No, it was not because his field of research concerned African and African-American material (check). No, the members of his department were not envious of his obvious rapport with students (double check—tenured faculty did not pine for students’ go
od opinion; dream on, students!). No, there was no resistance to the professor’s use of blues, hip-hop, Negro spirituals, and rap in his lectures—these things were part of folklore, part of anthropology (check). No, it wasn’t because some anthropologists perceive folklore to be a lightweight cousin to their own vein of study. (That had been news to Naomi when the whole mess began. Academics!) No, there wasn’t an evil Webster quota system for faculty of color. (She was all too familiar with the parallel accusation of racial/ethnic quotas in admissions, but this was a new one on her.)
You are totally, completely, utterly, categorically wrong, she had wanted to say, over and over and over again. But Naomi knew, and the college’s attorney took every opportunity to remind her, that revealing Gall’s plagiarism would expose Webster to very costly—very winnable—litigation. The trustees knew about Gall. It was necessary that they know, and it relieved her to be able to reassure them that she wasn’t out of her mind, but she worried every hour that one of the more impetuous types on the board would, while puffed up with righteous indignation, leak it to a civilian or—worse—directly to the press.
The matter was confidential: That was all. And as the days passed and the claims grew more inflamed, more paranoid, more batshit crazy, all she could do was make her mental check marks: check and check and check. No. (He’s a liar.) No. (He’s a cheat.) No. (He is not what he says he is. Not at all.)
But if Nicholas Gall was not what he said he was, who was he? Watching him on television, where he was often interviewed alongside the ardent, sweet-faced Omar, there was a flatness to his affect that riveted Naomi. The two men, both short, both slight, both similarly hunched, sat with hands identically gripping their knees, and arms identically braced. But Omar, for the most part, did the talking. He focused not on his own journeys across ideologies and the world but on his experience at Webster: the isolation he’d felt—academically and emotionally—until Professor Gall, the most brilliant and passionate educator he had ever encountered, reached out to him. To have that gift as a teacher and a human being, to be able to make contact across the professor/student divide, not to speak of the African-American/Arab-Palestinian divide, to impart ideas, offer comfort, forge such a critical link between human beings, it was a precious thing, sorely lacking in the world. Professor Gall was one of the most popular teachers at Webster College. His classes were routinely filled, and students often gathered at his home a few blocks from campus for meals and the kind of profoundly enriching out-of-the-classroom interaction that was both truly indicative of a great educational experience and sadly hard to come by. Professor Gall was also a noted authority on an area of folkloric study that intersected fields as disparate as religion, literature, music, history, and African-American studies, making it a rare and perfect example of that much lauded interdisciplinary multi-genric thing to which colleges (Webster among them) claimed such devotion. And all Webster Dissent wanted from the college, all anyone could want from the college, the administration, and President Naomi Roth, was an answer to their simple, honest question: Why?
The Devil and Webster Page 19