The Children's War

by C. P. Boyko

  Suz Palombo, who had never attended any of Reid’s classes, had spearheaded the petition that had led to the convening of the committee—which comprised six faculty, two administrators, and four students, including Palombo herself. A tireless and ubiquitous activist on campus, Palombo was Student Union Director of University Affairs, councilor-at-large to the Student Life Center, deputy political editor at The Weekly Beacon, and student liaison to several administrative councils, including Communications and Marketing; Security and Safety; and Scholarships, Awards, and Prizes, among others.

  Arjmand’s and Palombo’s speeches argued simply that Reid was a much loved teacher, and that in dismissing him the university was showing a flagrant disregard for the will of the student body.

  “In calling for Professor Reid’s instant reinstatement,” said Palombo, “we are also calling for greater self-determination for students in constructing their own educational experience.”

  “What a nightmare,” says Professor Anton Rimmer, who was on the Special Committee. “Let the undergrads hire and fire their profs by popular vote! It would be the end of what little academic distinction this university still retains.”

  Claire Yaremko, assistant dean of the department, had been present at the original meeting at which Reid’s contract had been let lapse, and was also on the Special Committee. She was bemused by Palombo’s arguments. “First of all, as was clearly pointed out in the memorandum provided to the committee, quality of instruction had played no part in our decision to let Doctor Reid go. Our primary concern had been what we perceived to be a lack of commitment to the department—an insufficiency of what you might call esprit de corps.”

  “He was not a team player,” says Rimmer.

  “They fired me,” says Reid, “because I wasn’t a joiner. They made that fairly clear. I didn’t attend their cocktail parties, I didn’t sleep with any of them, and I didn’t sign the little petitions they passed around at departmental meetings—which had less to do, I felt, with saving polar bears or dismantling nuclear weapons than with congratulating one another on how very enlightened and righteous we all were.”

  Although Reid’s teaching was not at issue, Yaremko and some of the faculty had nevertheless prepared themselves for the Special Committee by listening to audio recordings of his classes—recordings made by a disgruntled student who resented that so many of the professor’s exam questions were drawn not from the textbook but from his lectures. (“This,” says Yaremko, “amounts to a kind of blackmail. It has been known for years that not everyone learns best in situ. Therefore it is arrogant, autocratic, and discriminatory to insist on perfect classroom attendance.”) Nothing that Yaremko or the others heard in those recordings seemed to justify Palombo’s claim that Reid was an extraordinary instructor.

  “His pedagogy was positively medieval,” says Rimmer. “He simply stood there and lectured for fifty minutes. No discussion; no questions from students; no interaction. He just reeled off facts—as if there even are such things as facts!”

  “Science is in a perpetual state of growth and ferment,” says Professor Eldridge Shimkus, who was also on the Special Committee. “To state dogmatically that something is so, or that such and such is true, is to harden a young mind against future development or innovation. We must not say we know; the most we can say is we think.”

  But Reid’s willingness to state facts was just what some of his students liked most about him. “I’m so tired,” says junior Karin Channing, “of professors hiding behind open-mindedness to avoid committing themselves. You have no idea how refreshing it is to be able to ask someone point-blank, for example: ‘What about the redshift controversy?’ and have them tell you point-blank: ‘It’s nonsense. There is no controversy. The universe is expanding—end of story. Never mind about it; don’t waste your time.’ Every other prof at this school is only too happy to let you waste your time chasing down every false lead—all in the name of independent learning.”

  Yaremko points out that Reid’s didacticism deprives students in the classroom of the very thing that Palombo was demanding outside it: self-determination. “The best way to understand any scientific discovery is to rediscover it for yourself. You cannot do that if you have some figure of authority telling you in advance what you can or cannot find, or what others have already found. That lofty imparting of wisdom leads only to rote and superficial learning—encyclopedic, not organic knowledge.”

  And finally, Yaremko denies Palombo’s claim that Reid’s classes were especially popular. “His feedback ratings from the three previous semesters were slightly below the department average, and significantly below the university average.”

  Palombo and the other organizers of Reinstate Professor Reid had intended to prove to the Special Committee that Reid was indeed popular, by having Arjmand lead the protesters to the Whitethorn Building, where the hearing was being held. “We never planned to go inside or to disrupt the meeting,” says Herman Triem. “The idea was simply to stand outside the window and show our support.”

  However, Arjmand, following his address, was not sure how to propose this march, and was moreover reluctant to annex the Parks rally. He went so far as to make generic calls to action, and to decry apathy on the one hand and bluster on the other, before Forntner, sensing his uncertainty, relieved him on the Rock.

  “Are we going to put up with this?,” Forntner asked. —The crowd cried, “No!” —“Are we going to let the bigwigs dismantle this university tree by tree, professor by professor?” —The crowd cried, “No!” —“Are we going to stand for any more of their bullshit?” —The crowd said that they would not.

  “I had no idea what to do next,” Forntner admits. “All I knew was that we mustn’t lose the momentum we had built up. We had to do something, and we had to do it before people started losing interest, before they began to disperse. So in between all the pep talk, I just started thinking out loud, brainstorming our options.”

  “We could smash those bulldozers,” he told the crowd. “We could go on strike against our shitty classes. We could march over to the radio station and take over the airwaves. We could do all these things. Or we could do none of these things. We can do anything. It’s up to us! So what are we going to do?”

  “Smash the bulldozers!” —“Go on strike!” —“Take over the radio station!” —“Burn the library!” —“Hold the president hostage!” —“Take over Founders’ Hall!”

  Philosophy graduate student Angelik Huaraman says, “I wasn’t the first one to say it. I’m sure I heard people saying it all around me. I may have said it louder, at first; but then other people took it up, and were shouting it a lot louder than I had.”

  “I think a lot of people had the idea at the same time,” says sophomore Jacqui Urribarri.

  Langdon Bellhouse says, “That was my idea.”

  Nolan Forntner thinks it was his idea. “It was one of many suggestions I made, but it was the one most enthusiastically embraced by the crowd.”

  A chant was taken up: “March on the president! Take over Founders’ Hall!”

  Professor Bertrand Laing watched the protest from the sidelines with mixed feelings. “They were steeling themselves, I guess,” he says. “The noise became deafening. This went on for what felt like several minutes. I began to think that they weren’t going to do anything after all, that they were just howling at the moon. Then—I don’t know what changed—they were on the move. It was like a flock of birds all taking flight simultaneously.”

  About three hundred students marched across campus from Speaker’s Rock to Founders’ Hall. Some latecomers followed the crowd out of curiosity. Some went along to criticize and to heckle. Some, sitting in stuffy classrooms, watched the boisterous group pass by the window, and felt left out and lonesome. Others put their heads out the window, and were exhorted to join the revolt; some did. About four hundred people altogether—including by now a few faculty
, staff, and visitors—climbed the marble stairs and entered the ornamental front entrance of Founders’ Hall.

  Kinesiology major Oreggio Ballenby recalls the moment he entered the Hall. “My friends and I had been treating the whole thing as a lark till then. Everyone was having fun; it just seemed like a big joke, or a game. But then, actually going inside . . . Without becoming any less fun, it suddenly became a lot more serious. I mean, we came striding right into these huge, beautiful rooms that most students never even get to see. And the rooms were divided into all these offices and cubicles, and dozens of people were working there. And they all just dropped what they were doing and stood and stared at us. I felt like a trespasser—but invulnerable. It was wild.”

  For economics major Hifan Hwan, the experience was exhilarating and revelatory. “We just walked in. No one tried to stop us. No one could have stopped us. And I realized that everything is like this. No one can stop you from going anywhere you want to go. This ritzy old building was just like any other building. It was made of walls and windows and doors. And you can walk through the doors. And if you want to, you can smash the windows. And the walls are just ordinary walls. And most walls, actually, are only in your mind. You can go anywhere.”

  The administrative staff working in the front offices reacted in a variety of ways to the students’ arrival; but most felt at first only a benign curiosity, as towards a school play, and paused to watch the action unfold.

  “I remember thinking quite clearly,” says Esther Dentonne, “that someone had, as usual, forgotten to tell us about this. In other words, I assumed that this parade—right between our desks!—was something scheduled, authorized, sanctioned. I welcomed the interruption—or would have—but at the same time resented the lack of forewarning.”

  Dan Altengood felt mild irritation. “No one ever uses those doors, and I wanted to tell them to go back out and around and come in the right way.”

  Albert Nhizhdin was also unimpressed. “I was in the middle of running numbers for a report to the trustees. I wondered how long this thing was going to take.”

  Only a few felt trepidation or fear, and these emotions were conflated with excitement.

  “I felt exactly the way I’d felt last year during the earthquake,” says Phoedre Montez. “Like the fabric of everyday reality had torn open a little.”

  Delilah Johannes, to her own surprise, and to her later embarrassment, let out an instinctive whoop of delight, “like a kid welcoming the circus to town.”

  Allison Ziegenkorn was eating lunch in the basement office of The Weekly Beacon when she was visited by Edward Xin, who informed her that protesters had occupied Founders’ Hall.

  “What are you doing here?” she cried. “Go get pictures!”

  She raced across campus still chewing, and juggling a pen, notepad, student press card, and voice recorder. She found several students milling about at the top of the stairs, some still pushing their way in, some hanging back uncertainly. She grasped the elbow of the tallest person standing at the threshold and asked him what was happening.

  Dunkan Tomlinson did not know what was happening, for he had joined the crowd only recently. However, not wanting to discredit the protest, and feeling the flush of importance that comes from being interviewed, he spoke as though he did know. “Us students are plain fed up,” he said, “and we’re not gonna take it anymore.” He said that lectures were boring, irrelevant, and often taken verbatim from textbooks. He said that textbooks were too expensive, and that unnecessary new editions were forever making last year’s books obsolete and worthless. He said that the plastic knives in the cafeteria were too flimsy to cut through a baked potato, and that garbage cans all over campus were overflowing by Monday morning. —“What are your demands?” asked Ziegenkorn. —“Everything! All of it! We want everything to change, and we’re not leaving here till it does!”

  Tomlinson suddenly found himself at the center of a circle of supporters who could not understand why their spokesperson was not with the vanguard. They began to clear a path.

  President Radil, meanwhile, was searching desperately for a spokesperson among the roiling, jostling, chanting crowd in her office. “The only thing worse than fighting a beast with a bunch of heads,” she says, “is fighting a beast with no heads at all.”

  “Dialogue!” she cried. “Haven’t any of you ever heard of dialogue? I can’t hardly negotiate if I don’t know what it is you want.”

  “We won’t negotiate!” someone shouted. —“Nobody knows what we want!” someone else shouted, in accusation.

  “You, with the sign,” said Radil. “Tell me what all this callithumping hullabaloo is about.”

  This was freshman Ethan Hendry’s first protest rally. Taking his cue from those around him, he had been stomping, hollering, and clutching his “Parks Not Parking Lots” placard like a talisman. He was having a good time, and did not want it to end. Now, addressed by the president of the university herself, he felt a dizzying, dangerous freedom, as if he might as easily have told her to fuck off as that he loved her. He drew himself upright, raised the sign over his head, and hollered, “March on the president! Take over Founders’ Hall!” Others joined in.

  Some interpreted this absurdity as strategic obstinacy, a refusal to enter into that dialogue demanded by the enemy. Following this supposed lead, they contributed to the chaos with more noise, nonsense, and reflexive contrariety.

  “Dismantle the machinery!” —“The machinery is your disease!” —“The disease is the status quo!” —“The status quo has got to go!”

  Law major Rennie Jarabal says, “I don’t know what I expected to happen when we got in there, but it wasn’t happening. All my joy, all my optimism that we were really about to change something—it just turned to ashes.” In desperation, she began singing “We Shall Overcome” at the top of her voice. Others joined in.

  “All right, all right,” said Radil. “Go on and blow off some steam. But would someone at least do me the kindness of opening a window? It’s thick as beef stew in here.”

  “Open your own window!” —“Oh, don’t be an ass! Open a damn window for the lady!” —“Who are you calling an ass?”

  Eleanor Fitzhugh-Larman, among others, felt that the hysterical stonewalling was only damaging the protest’s credibility. Raising her arms, she pleaded for some quiet and order.

  “Quiet is the prison of the spirit!” shouted someone, joking. —“Order is the tyranny of the oppressor!” shouted someone, not joking.

  Her friend and secret admirer, Tedi Wuat, gave an ear-splitting whistle and told everyone to shut up. “You’re all giving me a goddamn headache.”

  Clark Dalerow, who had been impressed by Dunkan Tomlinson’s speech on the front steps, was able to push no farther than the hallway outside Radil’s office (leaving Tomlinson somwhere behind). Here the crowd was impenetrable, and cantankerous. “People were snarling and throwing elbows just to get a little breathing room,” he says. “And everybody was telling everybody else to shut up and move back, while all the time trying themselves to creep a little closer to the door to hear what was going on inside.”

  Dalerow began to ask himself, then others, why those students who just happened to be in the president’s office were privileged to bargain on everyone’s behalf. Various chants to this effect were tested—“Democracy means everyone” and “No more decisions behind closed doors” eventually giving way to “Who the hell elected those assholes?”

  The students inside the office took up these cries too, assuming, naturally, that they were directed at the university administration. Finally, the disgruntled fringe resorted to physically pulling people out of the room and into the hallway. Anyone going inside to bring someone else out instantly became a target themself—and not without justice, for indeed many used the ensuing melee as an opportunity to secure themselves a better position nearer Radil’s desk.

&nb
sp; “It was great,” says Sylvie Reinhardt. “Just like a punk rock show.”

  “It was awful,” says Rennie Jarabal. “People were behaving like animals. Every muscle in my body went tense with disgust and misanthropy.”

  Literature major Carla DiAmbla clenched her fists, closed her eyes, and screamed. Nearly everyone froze.

  The short-lived scuffle, in which no one was seriously hurt, had one productive result: a more widespread desire for calm and orderliness.

  Psychology grad student Winston Prajda says, “It seemed like everybody at the same time took a deep breath, took a look around, and realized that this thing wasn’t working. We had to get ourselves organized, or we’d implode.”

  In the lull that followed, Tedi Wuat signaled Fitzhugh-Larman to proceed. She began to summarize for the president the speeches given by Forntner and Suresh Arjmand. She was affiliated with neither rally, and spoke clearly and dispassionately. She did not get very far before she was booed. Bellhouse, from the back of the room, asked who had put her in charge. Others succinctly accused her of grandstanding, sycophancy, and self-aggrandizement.

  Fitzhugh-Larman tried to apologize to the crowd. —“You’re still talking!” —Trembling and blinking, she looked about her. “I didn’t mean to . . . I just thought . . . If we don’t tell her what we want, she can’t . . .” —“Shut up, bitch!”

  Now President Radil finally managed to stand. “What you all want to do,” she said, “is go on back outside, where everybody can see everybody and everybody can hear everybody else, and you want to elect maybe one, maybe two, maybe three representatives. Then send them on back in here, and then we can talk.”

  There were objections, but no one could offer a better solution. —“If we don’t consult everybody,” said Clark Dalerow, “we’re no damn better than they are.”

  Despondently, the crowd shuffled out of the office. “We’re having a meeting; pass it on.” —“Move back to the atrium!” —“Everybody to the atrium!”