“But…I thought he made a point of meeting with the Native American students. He was so involved with the recruitment.”
“Well, that’s just it.” Petavit put down his burger. “I wasn’t recruited. My Native heritage wasn’t part of my application, and I came from a public school in Connecticut, not a reservation. I was very open about my affiliation at Webster because it was a non-issue for me, and everyone in my family. And I joined the Native community here and that was fantastic. But Webster didn’t come to me; I came to Webster. Because it was a great college and not too far from home. And I didn’t get into Yale,” he added, grinning.
Naomi smiled. “Sorry.”
“Ah.” He put up his hands. “Easy come, easy go. But, if I’m really being honest, I was also curious. I grew up knowing about our relationship to Webster College, and that meant something to me. It meant something to my father, I can tell you. He’d always thought of it as this place that had once been ours, and it was taken away. When I got in, it was a powerful thing. And he was very proud, visiting me here. Sadly, he died before he could see me graduate.”
“That is sad,” Naomi said. She thought of her own parents, traveling to Ithaca for her graduation. She and Daniel had declined to take part, in protest over that ROTC chapter. She’d denied her mother and father the pride of watching her graduate, she realized now with a shudder of regret.
“He went out to the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation the summer before my senior year. He’d been Native American his whole life, but he only really got interested because of my studies at Webster. He was actually reading along in two of my Native American studies courses, trying to get two educations out of one tuition, I guess.” Petavit smiled ruefully down at his hamburger. “So he decided he wanted to go to a powwow—the first he’d ever attended, isn’t that rich? And on the second day there a drunk driver hit him. End of story.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” she told him.
“I was furious. I mean, I was furious because I preferred being furious to being sad. Which is the wrong move, by the way. It took me years to get back to the being sad part. Years and one of Amherst’s legion of therapists.”
“So very many to choose from.” Naomi sighed.
“Why else would they call it the Happy Valley?” He smiled. “Anyway. At that time, Native American studies at Webster was already on its way to being one of the best in the country. I didn’t know that when I came in, and I didn’t know I’d end up gravitating to Native American history. History, yes, but not this, specifically. I credit the department with that—or I guess I should say the program, it wasn’t a full department then. But I had excellent teachers and they helped me realize where my focus should be. I did my graduate degree at Berkeley and I came back to join the faculty at Amherst.” He paused. He looked a bit sheepish. “You know, I just realized that you didn’t actually ask for my life story.”
“I’m glad I didn’t have to. I’m always interested in how people end up where they do. I didn’t have a clue that I’d be a college president one day, I can promise you that. I thought my life was going to be one long Peace Corps stint. And yet, here I am: Simon Legree in the corner office of Billings Hall.”
“Oh”—he smiled—“that’s only till they get to know you.”
Naomi nodded. This was the problem, of course. They never did get to know you.
The waiter took their plates away. Petavit asked for coffee.
“Can I ask what you hope to accomplish with this…gathering?” he asked her. His hair, she noticed for the first time, was gently graying. It was so subtle she hadn’t noticed at first. Her own once black hair was now aggressively silver, impossible not to see. It occurred to her that she didn’t know his age. She only recalled that his graduation year had been in the ’70s. Like hers. Older? Younger? At their age it seemed to matter less.
“What I hope…is to acknowledge the history of this connection. And honor the experience you’ve had. I think it’s a distinct experience.”
“Oh, it is,” he said carefully. “I’m just not sure that Webster wants to know how distinct it is.”
She nodded. She wasn’t sure either, but she decided to err on the side of principle.
“This is an intellectual community. We deal in truth here. Or at least, we strive to. Sarafian acted out of the ideals of his time, and I’m no different. I don’t want to lose Webster’s stories, good or bad. I’d like to hear them and preserve them. That’s all.”
He seemed to consider this as he stirred sugar into his black coffee. Then he looked at her. “Those first years after Sarafian started bringing us in. Very, very rough. You understand?”
“Sure. The Indian symbol.”
“That was a big part of it. Getting here after two centuries and having to watch white boys cavort around the football fields, all done up in paint and feathers and acting like a war party from The Searchers? Not so good. One of the first things the students did as a group, after they get here, was take that on. Those guys got hit really hard.”
“But Sarafian agreed with them,” Naomi said, loyal to her predecessor. “He didn’t have to hear it more than once. And to describe what he got from the alumni as ‘resistance’ doesn’t begin to convey how ugly it was. It didn’t die down for years.” She had opted not to tell him that alumni still came up to her after speeches and at reunions to demand the return of the Indian symbol.
He nodded. He drank his coffee. “And what ground would you like to see covered?” he asked. He reached down into a leather satchel that leaned against his chair and retrieved a legal pad. He took a pen from his jacket pocket.
“It’s entirely up to you,” she said, but she couldn’t help rattling off her own list even so. Programming from the Native American studies program about Webster’s Indian Academy years. A concurrent exhibition at the college museum. There was a Webster grad, an Ojibwa from Ontario, who’d made an independent film a year or two before—could they show that? Maybe something about the position Webster occupied in Native American studies, on a national scale, and the position it occupied in the general landscape of Native American higher education. But mostly, she reassured him, she’d want to hear from the alumni themselves. What had it been like here? How had it changed them? “The story of Native Americans at Webster, generally,” she finished lamely.
“The story of Native Americans at Webster,” Petavit repeated. He read this sentence in his own handwriting, and frowned at it. “I just don’t know if it will be what you want it to be. I don’t know if it will help you”—he gestured at the window—“with that.”
“It has nothing to do with that,” Naomi told him, hoping it was true.
Part IV
Fumble
Chapter Fourteen
No One Is
Blaming You
The lawsuit to which Steven Bishop of MSNBC had so casually referred turned out not to be a lawsuit at all but an intended lawsuit, which was a lot like a real lawsuit except for the fact that it did not actually exist. An intended lawsuit had indeed been announced by an attorney Naomi recognized all too well, given his habit of turning up whenever there was a perceived crime against a person of color, and when she got back to her office after lunch with Robbins Petavit (having survived, again, the scrum in the Webster Inn lobby) she had no difficulty at all in calling up the footage. The attorney, standing before the front door of Sojourner Truth House with a silent Nicholas Gall on his left side and a silent Omar Khayal on his right side, announced to the world that Professor Gall intended to file a suit against Webster College for wrongful termination, to the tune of $2.5 million, a figure that mystified Naomi.
Her first call was to the college attorney.
“It’ll never happen,” Chaim Wachsberger said. He sounded exhausted. “If it did, guess what would end up in the public record? Why would he want that?”
For the same baffling reason he’d wanted any of this, Naomi thought.
But the very notion of a lawsuit u
pped the ante. It would be out there in the world that Gall, the wronged scholar, was going to sue his employer. And Webster, with no actual charges to counter, would exist in a state of suspended indictment with nothing at all to say for itself.
Her next call was to Will Rennet, now the chairman of her board. He, unlike the college attorney, seemed to grasp the situation entirely. “Oh fuck,” he said.
“I just heard about this. Chaim says it will never happen.”
“It would be better if it did. Then the plagiarism would come out.”
Naomi closed her eyes. Rennet had shown such devotion to Webster. He had always supported Naomi, and she felt that he’d always liked her personally. She wondered how much longer either of those things would be true.
From the beginning she had characterized the job of a college president as, first, doing no harm to the institution, second, improving the institution if at all possible, and third, getting out in one piece. There were bells and whistles, of course, myriad responsibilities, drudgery, absurdities, little challenges like speechifying and remembering names and riding the general rocket that was twenty-first-century selective admissions in a helicopter parent culture, but at the end of the day the job boiled down to these three.
So far it had all gone terribly well—too well, it seemed to Naomi now. The hardest thing had been Radclyffe Hall, and technically that hadn’t fallen within the scope of her presidency. Her inauguration was—it embarrassed her a bit to remember—a love fest, with a general celebration of the fact that Webster at last had a Jewish president, a female president. Webster, whose mid-twentieth-century political demographic had been 93 percent Republican, now had a president who’d chaired the Women’s Studies Department, who was faculty advisor to the Queer and Gender Discussion Group, and whose published academic work featured a lesbian separatist music collective. It didn’t get cooler than that to your typical twenty-first-century Webster undergrad, and as for those older graduates who belonged to pre-Sarafian Webster—they’d shown real restraint, at least in her presence.
This, however. This was pushing her. She could feel the strain, in her muscles, in her breathing. She felt it at the witching hour of three in the morning, when she woke in her presidential bed in the Stone House, wondering where Hannah was, and how many were sleeping out tonight, and how it was all going to end. The fortitude she’d shown back at the beginning (or thought she’d shown) had been predicated on the notion that it wouldn’t last long. It couldn’t last long. These were Webster students, and however hardy they imagined themselves to be, they were also, overwhelmingly, the products of comfortable suburbia, family wealth, the kind of security that comes from knowing you’re going to attend college in the first place. They, like generations of protesters before them, would make their point and then go back to class, because the ground was hard and holy cow, did people smell after a few days without a shower, and besides, they couldn’t risk failing organic chem if they were going to med school.
But these kids, no.
She wasn’t even impressed anymore. She was tired. And she was pissed.
And she was trapped, because whatever she did say about the movement and the tenure decision had to be true but could not be the truth, which was stressful beyond belief, and it promised only to go on, and on some more.
But then, at last, something fell into her hands.
The end of the fall/winter term brought its usual dispersal of official standings from the registrar, including those students who’d earned dean’s list distinction (3.5 GPA and above) and those students who were circling academic probation or worse. The latter list was longer than usual and contained a number of names with which Naomi had recently become familiar. She was relieved beyond words to see that her daughter wasn’t among this group of Webster dissenters. (That would have been impossibly awkward.) But Chava was. No wonder she’d withdrawn. And so was Elise, the basketball player from Naomi’s freshman seminar. And so was Omar.
Naomi, scrolling down the line, gasped when she saw it, her hand frozen awkwardly above the keyboard. Omar’s work for the semester had been…well, it hadn’t been, that was the point. F in his history course on the Ottoman Empire. F in anthropology (Food Systems in the Pre-Columbian Americas). F in English (Outsider Voices in Contemporary Fiction). And an A in Anthropology (Advanced Supervised Independent Study, professor: N. Gall). GPA for the term? 1. The cutoff for academic probation was 1.5.
She put her hand down in her lap, and continued to sit, staring at the screen. Here, at last, was a thing, a definite thing, but did she dare to use it? The many, many ways it might make things worse, not better, weren’t difficult to assess, and yet no one could take issue with the bald fact that Omar Khayal, whatever he might arguably have done for Webster, had done little or nothing in the way of his own schoolwork. Even the most cynical observer of those three F’s (the college is trying to get rid of him!) would have to apply that same paranoia to Nicholas Gall’s A—for “independent study” (a notoriously mercurial concept of academic work at the best of times). Omar, not a strong student to begin with, was flunking out.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she wrote him an email, summoning her best facsimile of institutional concern.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
CC: [email protected]
Date: 2/3/16
Subject: Fall15/Winter16 Marking Period
Dear Omar,
I note with real concern the results of your most recent marking period. I’m sure it will not come as a surprise to you that these grades pose some difficulty for your academic standing. No one at Webster wants to lose you as a student, but it is critical that you come in to discuss the situation immediately. It may be possible to grant a retroactive leave for the past semester, which would enable you to go forward with these grades expunged from your record. Alternatives would include an agreed-upon period of leave, effective immediately, beginning Spring 16 on academic probation, or separation from the college.
Again, this will be a matter for us to discuss in a confidential setting. I have scheduled a meeting for you, myself, and Dean Robert Stacek for tomorrow, Wednesday, February 4, at 2 p.m. in the Office of the Dean of Students, Billings 205. Please call my office to confirm. If it is necessary to change this appointment we will make time to see you at your convenience over the next few days, but it’s important that we do not leave it any longer.
Yours,
Naomi Roth, President
Billings 301
Webster College
The next day at one forty-five she descended the wide staircase of Billings Hall, hand trailing the wooden banister like a self-conscious debutante, and entered the dean of students’ office, directly below hers, which Bob Stacek had now occupied for nearly fifteen years. On the wall behind his desk three crew oars were hung, each inscribed with the names of his crews in the English manner, and a framed silver medal from the Eastern Sprints below them. There were fraternity group shots (plastic cups of beer held aloft), an alarmingly young Bob Stacek on the Pont Neuf with a much younger version of Lois Stacek (Wellesley, ’77), and half a dozen formal portraits of the Stacek progeny: three stocky boys and—a good while later—an elfin girl. All of them had graduated from Webster, the daughter only a few years earlier.
“On the whole,” said Stacek without preamble, “it works better if you schedule an appointment through my assistant, rather than by cc’ing me on an email to a student. I had to cancel something.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” she said briskly, taking one of his visitor’s chairs. “I was impulsive. But we might have a break here. I mean, finally.”
“We could have suspended him months ago,” Stacek observed. “He hasn’t been attending classes or responding to warnings. He’s not living in his dorm. That’s a violation.”
Was it? Naomi frowned. Stacek might have mentioned that sooner.
“And he’s agitating.”
“Well, that is n
ot a violation,” Naomi said tersely. “Peaceful assembly and all that.”
He said nothing. His scalp, through thinning hair, appeared moist in the overhead light. “What are you planning?” he asked finally.
“I’m not planning. Yet. I’m hoping.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I’m hoping he’ll walk through that door in the next few minutes. I’m hoping he’ll talk to us. I’m hoping he’ll want to stay at Webster. But if he doesn’t want to stay…” She took a breath. Even saying this much, in private, to someone far more pissed off than she was, felt like a betrayal. “Then I’m hoping he’ll go away.”
“Far, far away,” Stacek agreed.
All the way back to where he came from, Naomi thought. For an awful second she wasn’t sure whether she was attributing that nasty sentiment to the dean of students or to herself.
It was two p.m. now. The two of them sat in anticipatory silence. It was not pleasant, but given the germ of anticipation that popped to life as the bell in the Webster clock tower tolled the hour and swelled and strengthened with every passing minute of Omar’s tardiness, it was not entirely unpleasant either. Five minutes—an entirely forgivable delay. Ten minutes—irritating, but students were not always attuned to the adult necessity of keeping exact time. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Half an hour. Naomi, to her own mild disgust, was thrilled.
“I have a two thirty,” Stacek said abruptly, as if he were interrupting an altogether different conversation, or any conversation.
“Yes. Well. I’m disappointed.”
She wondered if he could tell how very untrue this was.
“From what I’ve seen of this kid, I don’t think he’d cancel CNN for a meeting with the dean of students. Or even the president,” Stacek added with a slightly smarmy deference.
“I’m afraid we have to suspend him,” Naomi said. She thought, as she said this: sound sad.
The Devil and Webster Page 22