The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Well,” he said unhelpfully, “that’s up to you. It’s entirely your call.”

  “Why so? You’re the dean of students.”

  “And you’re the president,” Stacek said, as if she had ripped this very position from his own more deserving hands. You wanted it? You got it, sweetheart. “Even if I made a decision in this matter it would cross your desk before being implemented. But with this particular kid I’d clear it with you before doing anything. He may be one of a dozen looking at suspension after last term, but he’s the only one with an MSNBC camera crew following him around.”

  “I’d like your input,” Naomi said, channeling someone far wiser and more Zen than herself. Grace Paley, perhaps. Margaret Mead. Somebody. “I’d like to know what you’d be doing in my position.”

  He shot her a look of outright disgust and a message so crystal clear he might as well have said it aloud. If I were in your “position,” I would not have put myself in this position. Okay?

  “Suspension,” he said, once he’d regained control of himself. “There’s no alternative.”

  Merely to spite him, she declared an alternative. Another appointment: one more and one more only, to take place the following afternoon, again at two p.m. Again, Naomi wrote the email, and this time she gave it an unmistakable tone: “Failure to keep this appointment will indicate your unwillingness to work with the college in this matter, and leave us no alternative but to proceed with some form of suspension.”

  That night Naomi had the pleasure of hearing herself called “a despotic figurehead” live on CNN by Ms. Chava Friedberg, formerly an undergraduate of Webster College and part of Webster Dissent’s “spokesperson collective,” as an in-studio panel of experts on trends in higher education dissected Dr. Naomi Roth’s apparently epic mishandling of the movement, from her cavalier dismissal of genuine student concerns to her arrogant assumption that no one would notice or object to the firing of a popular professor, who happened to be a person of color. According to Ms. Friedberg, Webster College—for all its posturing as a place of progressive education—had a shockingly low percentage of ethnically diverse faculty members. Naomi was just shooting off an email to Douglas Sidgwick for the actual statistics (she would make some calm and dignified use of them in the morning) when Chava said something else: something Naomi could not quite force through her own brain and out into the realm of understanding. “What?” she actually said to the television.

  “This happened when?” said the panel’s moderator. His name was Bill, or Phil. He wore a brown bowtie.

  “This happened today. I’m sure that the college would love for this information not to be released, but that’s not the kind of Webster we deserve. No just society is ever possible without transparency.”

  “You’re saying Omar Khayal has been expelled, as of today.”

  “Technically he’s been suspended,” Chava said seriously, as if accuracy were very, very important. “Summarily suspended. Without warning and without recourse.”

  The panel seemed momentarily stunned.

  “Well, that’s…” said a woman from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

  “I’m not surprised,” said the other woman. She was much younger. She looked barely out of college herself. She wrote for Slate, according to the screen. “This president has a highly emotive and extremely impulsive leadership style.”

  “If you call that leadership,” the older of the two men sneered. He was Naomi’s age, more or less: gray, furry, dressed down in a denim shirt and jeans. He looked slightly familiar, and it crossed Naomi’s mind that they might have worked together once, back in the day. “This is the kind of leadership we haven’t seen since George Wallace in Alabama.”

  She was still too much in shock to respond to this. Her heart was tearing open her chest. Naomi’s right hand, she now realized, was frozen above the keyboard of her laptop. She’d been in the middle of an email to Will Rennet about something else. What had it been? She couldn’t remember. From the bedside table in the next room she heard her phone begin to rattle.

  “It’s hard to believe that a president whose own academic field is the history of feminism could have emerged as such a reactionary figure,” said the moderator.

  “Not really,” said Naomi’s gray contemporary. “Not if you’d made a study of her academic work, as I have. Always, there is this dismissive tone about earlier social movements. It’s something that’s come up frequently in my own research—a disparagement of events from which one has failed to emerge as a leader.”

  “Sour grapes, in other words,” said the Chronicle of Higher Education.

  “Well, I can’t comment on this woman’s inner life,” he said with distaste. “But I can make the observation that this is not a person who is remembered for having been an activist at all, though it’s touted as a big part of her biography, and I’m assuming it’s something that made her attractive to a school like Webster. Having a former Weatherman in the president’s office has a certain cachet, but Naomi Roth was no Weatherman,” he concluded.

  “Nor would she want to be!” Naomi shrieked at the screen. She had never entertained a single bombing fantasy. Now, though, she indulged in a brief reverie about blowing CNN’s Boston studio sky high.

  “What are Omar’s plans?” asked the Slate girl.

  “He is so passionately devoted to what we are trying to do at Webster,” Chava said. “I…honestly? I don’t think he’s thinking about his own future at all. I think…growing up where he did, and how he did, the future was more of a luxury. He wasn’t entitled that way, and he still isn’t. Obviously,” she said, with vigor. Her lower lip, in the wide, flat, HD screen that the college had installed when its predecessor died the previous spring, quivered in great detail. Naomi, mesmerized, stared at it. That lip—it had a worried plumpness, a bitten surface. It was not a thoughtless lower lip at all. That lower lip was being very deliberately presented to the international viewing public. In the bedroom, the phone gave a ping, conveying a voice mail. Then it began to rattle anew.

  By morning she had endured difficult conversations with eight of the trustees, including Will Rennet, the closest thing she’d ever had to a champion (it killed her how much that meant, how grateful she still was). It wasn’t, of course, the first time the two of them had spoken about what was happening. But it was the worst time.

  In an ordinary calendar year, Webster’s board met three times. On campus in June (reunions) and October (homecoming) and on a mid-March board retreat, somewhere rustic (yet elegant!) and usually adjacent to a golf course. The last retreat, nearly a year earlier, had been at a board member’s Montana ranch, an hour north of Missoula. Morning trail rides that led to a tented breakfast spread in a stunning valley. Massive log rooms with wood stoves. Huckleberry soap and lotion in the bathrooms. Crazy good barbecue. The Native American Gathering, proposed at that retreat, had been met with a few interested questions and a round of generous approval, and the mood in sum had been elevated: All was well. Webster was holding its perch in the top ten of US News and World Report’s ridiculous rankings (one man’s ridiculous was another’s lifeblood, no one needed to point out). The endowment sat snugly between that of Williams and Amherst, and was even haler than those of certain Ivy League institutions, at least if you separated out their graduate schools’ dedicated coffers. The quality of life reported by Webster’s undergraduates was a stratospheric 94 percent positive, and (just as important) the degree of satisfaction expressed by their parents was a commendable 86 percent. In fact, it had occurred to Naomi then, and for the very first time in her tenure as Webster’s president, that she was actually doing this. She was actually succeeding at this. Pulling it off. Fooling them with her impersonation of a college president, as if she were actually becoming one of those luminous, astonishing, extraordinary women, members of that wondrous little group that had accompanied her down the aisle at her Webster inauguration.

  And this was the moment she realized that not one of thes
e women had been in touch with her since the advent of Webster Dissent. No Courage! No Hang in there! No advice. She would not have turned down advice. Not a sorority after all, it appeared. Or maybe it was, but she had never truly been a member. Maybe they were all meeting up—right now, in a secret location—partaking of some exclusive sisterly ritual and deconstructing President Naomi Roth’s mishandling of the situation at Webster. It was a sensation she had not experienced since middle school, but it came back fresh as a daisy. And hard as a wave.

  What had become of that happy narrative—The Tale of Webster College President Naomi Roth: Feminist Scholar, Shaggy-Haired Ethnic Single Mom, Standard-Bearer for These Latter Days? She had been so refreshingly unconventional, so quirky but lovable—the kind of university figurehead any undergraduate might be super stoked to grab a beer with (or invite over for a vegan potluck and a life-altering chat about the Bloomsbury Group). That story—her story—was drifting. It was falling. It was getting hard to see the next chapter, let alone some soaring career crescendo she’d never actually conceived. (Naomi Roth: Visionary Author and In-Demand Speaker? Naomi Roth: Secretary of Education?) What would become of her own victory lap, the kind Logan Coulson had helped himself to in the final year of his Webster presidency? When would the final year itself begin? Maybe—it struck her now, and with an actual physical pang—it was actually under way. Maybe this thing, this mess was already sinking her maiden (matron?) voyage, making her brilliant career, in Miles Franklin’s indelible turn of phrase, go bung. For the very first time, Naomi let herself truly understand that she was no longer a success at this. Or more likely she had never been a success; the only thing that had changed was that she was no longer fooling anyone, herself included.

  She was no longer fooling a goodly portion of her board—that much was plain. Those few who either weren’t habitual MSNBC viewers or who had the self-control to wait for morning headed the list of names on her call sheet, which was handed over the following morning by a grim Mrs. Bradford as Naomi entered her office. The others had all called again, too: the retired Massachusetts governor, the television producer with the golden touch, the absurdly rich tech guy from Boston, the man whose impossibly luxurious Montana ranch had all that huckleberry soap in the bathrooms—each of them wanted her on the phone before she did anything else. The two mothers of current undergraduates (both, by strange coincidence, CEOs of Houston-based marketing firms) had checked in, each of them having called shortly after nine a.m. All three hedge funders (two Greenwich, one Atherton), hot on their heels, instructed Mrs. Bradford to have the president call them back immediately. Walter Hammer, a retired Navy engineer who’d graduated from Webster (like his father and grandfather, twin daughters, and, if Naomi remembered correctly, a grandson) had left a message of vague support and asked her to phone “when convenient”), and the novelist (poor, but respected!) had left word, wondering if she had a moment to speak. Even the recent graduate occupying Webster’s largely symbolic board seat for young alumni (a position created by Naomi) had called in. And—hardest of all, that barely acknowledged Hope at the bottom of this Pandora’s Box—Will Rennet, her once but maybe not future champion, was on the phone when Naomi arrived. For the first time in her experience, probably the first in any Webster president’s experience, there had been two guards at the door to Webster Hall, and for a terrible moment, making her way up to the arched stone doorway through a scrum of media drones, she’d wondered if they intended to block her entrance.

  “No.” She waved at her stony assistant. She whispered: “I can’t talk right now.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Mrs. Bradford said. She hadn’t skipped a beat. “Yes, just as soon as she gets here. There’s a crowd downstairs. I’ve asked security to stay at the door. It’s probably taking her a bit longer to get in.” She listened, one long finger tapping the faux leather corner of her desk blotter. “Yes, eleven thirty. Eastern. Yes. We have nearly everyone. Yes, I’ll let her know.”

  She hung up the phone and turned her stony face to Naomi. “We’re all set for a conference call at eleven thirty. I moved your meeting with the Webster Daily to four.”

  The Daily. The student papers were still the only publications she’d sat down with for on-record conversations about Webster Dissent, but that had been in the fall, before the group had deigned to name itself and when Naomi had still hoped to communicate with the kids on the Quad. It hadn’t worked. She was pretty sure it wouldn’t work any better now, but she’d said yes. It was her responsibility to be available to the student press; that hadn’t changed.

  A conference call with “nearly everyone”—they’d done that only a few times in five years. Once for a student suicide. Once for a batch of some party drug with the absurd name of Brown Betty that had sent a dozen Webster students to the hospital. Once after the Sojourner Truth House, and that had been only four weeks earlier. Everything was speeding up, it occurred to her. Faster and harder, just like labor. She’d read somewhere that women were programmed to forget the pain of labor, but Naomi hadn’t forgotten.

  “Professor Russell is coming in,” Mrs. Bradford said. “The others will be on the phone. Wendy Lopez is the only one who can’t phone in.”

  Wendy Lopez was the recent graduate in the young alumni seat. Her absence wouldn’t have much impact. But Milton Russell was the trustee Naomi least wished to be physically in her presence while twelve other angry men and women remotely raked her over the coals. Russell had retired to West Webster after a long and undistinguished teaching career in Webster’s history department. As an undergraduate he had won the Webster Key award for loyalty to the college (she had never discovered what he’d actually done to warrant that and wasn’t sure she wanted to know), and as a professor he had overseen the Heritage Review, a conservative publication produced by an odious little club of his student admirers. Milton Russell was an unapologetic product and staunch defender of pre-Sarafian Webster College, and he had never attempted to temper his disapproval of Naomi.

  “We’ll need, I guess, coffee.”

  “Done,” said Mrs. Bradford, with an unwarranted sharpness. “And cookies.”

  Milton Russell was partial to cookies. While he was still teaching he’d made a daily appearance at the Loring Library for its four p.m. tea ritual, when students briefly set aside the heavy burden of their scholarly pursuits and indulged in the traditional snacks. Trust Mrs. Bradford to know that. “Thank you,” Naomi said. She went into her inner office and shut the door.

  The calls had lasted until two a.m., and after that she’d lain in her bed, stiffly, on her side, as if she were suffering some acute pain. She was a bit of a coward when it came to pain, at least the deep internal variety (she would take a broken limb over a stomachache every time, even factoring in the speedy resolution of your average stomachache), and whenever she did get sick she regressed utterly—a mewling, frozen lump, incapable of caring for herself. It was a good thing Hannah hadn’t been there to see the sad thing she’d become last night, under the covers. That sad thing, that weak thing—so repellently…well, the word she was looking for was feminine, really—it was not something she’d have wanted Hannah to see. It wasn’t something she’d wanted to see, herself.

  It took no time at all to catch up on what the rest of the world now believed: Webster College had expelled Omar Khayal, summarily and without affording him any opportunity to speak with the college authorities, let alone to stay his execution. The young foreign student’s belongings had reportedly been packed up by parties unknown and removed from his rooms in the Eagle Road dormitories; he was not certain where they were, he told CNN with admirable restraint, and yet the personal devastation—the plain human hurt in the voice of this parentless young man so far from home (not that he had a home) was plain to anyone with a pulse.

  “What reason did the college give for expelling you?” said the woman holding the microphone.

  Omar’s narrow shoulders fell. “I wasn’t given a reason,” he said.


  Naomi was more furious than self-pitying. She was more self-pitying than amazed. She was fully amazed. For another hour she merely pushed back in her chair, feet up against the long desk, staring at nothing. Her office chair was one of those old oak and leather models that rocked back and forth at the base, like one of the teetering toys Hannah used to play with—a Weeble, Naomi thought, fishing the name (and the irritating jingle) out of the murk in her head. Weebles wobble but they don’t…something. She couldn’t remember what Weebles did not do. Weebles don’t feel defeat? Weebles don’t get pissed off at idiots? Wish I could be a Weeble, she thought with—finally—a tiny breath of absurdity. She was wobbling all over the place.

  Russell arrived a few minutes early, entering the conference room with his eyes averted. He already seemed furious, and barely produced the most basic of greetings. He sat himself in front of the ginger cookies and immediately inserted two into his mouth, fixing a baleful gaze upon the portrait of Josiah Webster over the mantel as he chewed. Naomi opted to focus on her notes, which she had finally begun an hour or two earlier and were now somewhat extensive.

  Part one: how we got here. Part two: what our options are now. The crisis (and she was now forcing herself to name this a crisis, which meant admitting to herself that it was a crisis) was transforming itself into something almost orderly on the page before her, delineated in her always very good handwriting, bisected into column A and column B, with underlined headings and notes to herself in parentheses (toilet trailer, Day of Campus Discourse, open invitation, etc.). She was careful not to defend herself. She failed to see how Webster Dissent might have been more strategically, more compassionately handled. Naomi wouldn’t go so far as to say that none of this was her fault (who else’s fault could it have been?), but if someone on her board (and she briefly met the bitter glare of the former faculty advisor to the Heritage Review) had it in mind to request her self-sacrifice in this matter, Naomi Roth intended to aim for this individual’s odious, wattled, and mole-covered neck.