by C. P. Boyko
“It was depressing,” says Rennie Jarabal. “I don’t know why, but it felt like we’d lost.”
“It was certainly kind of anticlimactic,” says Ethan Hendry. “We went from taking over the university to—having a meeting.” He left his placard behind.
Bellhouse was no happier about the retreat. “We were just a bunch of damn sheep, doing what we were told to do by the big boss-woman.”
Angelik Huaraman said, “Shouldn’t someone stay behind and make sure she doesn’t, you know, escape?” No one volunteered, so Huaraman assigned a couple of undergrads to guard duty.
“Fuck,” said Bellhouse, “who died and made you queen?” —“It’s okay,” said Troy Rosswind, one of the delegates. “We don’t mind.” —“You’ll miss the meeting,” someone said. “What if there’s a vote?” —“Will you vote for me?” asked Rosswind shyly. —“Bullshit!” cried Bellhouse. “Nobody gets two votes!” —Dalerow agreed: “Everyone needs to be at the meeting, or it defeats the whole purpose of having a meeting.”
In the end, President Radil was left alone and unguarded in her office. The room was soiled and disarrayed—footprints and litter on the floor, handprints and smudges on the windows and walls—but, aside from one slogan inscribed on a bookcase (“Being—Not Buying!”), no damage had been done. She closed the door, opened another window, and returned her children’s photograph, its frame cracked, to the desktop. Then she lay on the floor with her legs up the wall. Breathing deeply, she allowed the blood to trickle down into her brain. A minute later she sprang to her feet, rejuvenated. She smashed her fist down onto the telephone handset, catapulting it out of its cradle, and caught it in the air with her other hand. She dialed the dean of students’ extension. It was 1:15.
“She asked me what I knew about Professor Reid,” says Dean of Students Dean Hanirihan—known to the students as “Dean Dean” and to his colleagues simply “Dean.” “I told her what I knew. She told me to have Leopold McRobins, the chair of the Special Committee, call her as soon as possible. She said it was urgent—she told me to interrupt the hearing—but then everything had been urgent since her return. I certainly had no idea, she certainly gave me no clue, that Founders’ Hall had just been occupied by several hundred protesters. I found that out from one of my students, a few minutes later.”
Radil put her finger on the cradle just long enough to sever the connection, then dialed the extension of Jabbar Shah, dean of campus development—who was not in his office, having gone to investigate the takeover of Founders’ Hall. President Radil dialed another extension irritably. She could not prove it yet, but she felt sure that somehow all this kerfuffle was Vice-President Martin’s fault.
At 1:20, Security Officer Gary Holdona received a call from Albert Nhizhdin at Founders’ Hall, who told him that the building was being occupied illegally by trespassing protesters who refused to leave. For half an hour, Nhizhdin had watched in dismay as the students made themselves more and more at home. “They took our chairs, used our phones, stole our pens,” he says. “Some of them were kicking a soccer ball around—in one of the oldest buildings at one of the most venerable institutions of higher learning in our country!” The last straw for him was the sight of several students sitting on the floor of the atrium, passing around a cigarette. “The building has been nonsmoking for years.”
Holdona could hardly hear what Nhizhdin was saying over the noise in the background. “Then,” he says, “a second individual came on the line and asked me who I was. I identified myself, and asked them who they were. I received in reply a coarse insult, and was hung up upon. I immediately radioed Chief Pedersen.”
Elea Bukarica, who snatched the telephone from Nhizhdin, recalls, “I told that pig to fuck himself, this was a legal protest.”
Nhizhdin denied this, and was able to cite the pertinent clause in the campus constitution, which he had helped draft. “A permit is required for any demonstrating assembly larger than fifteen people to enter any building.”
Bukarica was enraged by Nhizhdin’s pedantry, but far more by his calm and eloquence, which seemed calculated to provoke. “If someone’s shouting in your face,” she says, “it’s much more offensive to reply in a normal tone than to shout back in their face. Staying cool and rational is just a way of belittling the issue and deprecating their emotion.”
She shouted in his face: “We just took over the university, you fascist prick! Your shitty Nazi bureaucracy doesn’t apply anymore!”
Nhizhdin remained infuriatingly impassive. Biochemistry major Wil Partlingover took Nhizhdin aside and suggested that he might be safer outside the building.
“That,” says Nhizhdin, “was the most chilling threat I’ve ever received—the implication being that I was about to be lynched by a frenzied mob.”
“I certainly didn’t mean it as a threat,” says Partlingover. “I just thought that someone should point out to him that maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing to stand there, in the middle of a hundred excited protesters, after you’ve just ratted them out to security, and tell them they’re breaking the law.”
“What’s happening here?” asked Allison Ziegenkorn, holding out her voice recorder. “Are you being ejected from the building?”
“Eject them from the building!” —“Throw them out!” —“If they’re not with us, they’re against us!”
Says Delilah Johannes, “Personally, I never felt threatened. I was jostled a little, maybe; but it was enough just to say, ‘Okay, I’m with you guys, I’m on your side,’ and they left you alone—even welcomed you.”
Nevertheless, Nhizhdin and about twenty other staff members took this opportunity to exit the building. —“Are you going against your will?,” Ziegenkorn called after them. —“Most certainly,” said Nhizhdin. “As you can see, we are being physically and forcefully ejected from our workplace.”
“What a laugh,” says Bukarica. “Nobody laid a hand on any of them till they were already on their way out. And then it was only a gentle, guiding, escorting hand.”
“We were pushed out the door,” says Dan Altengood. “Esther nearly fell down the steps.”
In Room 204 of the Whitethorn Building, Professor Leopold McRobins found himself mechanically transcribing onto his notepad a long list of two-digit numbers being mechanically read aloud by Professor Shimkus. His colleague, Andrea Scholt, leaned over to whisper that he probably did not need to write this down, since Shimkus was reading from Item 38, of which they had all received a copy. McRobins acknowledged her advice with a reproving nod—he did not want anyone to think that they were conspiring—and continued to transcribe for a few moments before raising his hand, clearing his throat, and finally interrupting Shimkus: “My apologies, Doctor, but perhaps, in the interest of time, we could all simply refer to the printed data, and save you the trouble of reading them to us?”
Shimkus acknowledged this suggestion with a similar nod, and explained the significance of the figures: the mean grade given by Professor Reid on midterms last semester was lower than both the departmental and university-wide means. Burt Hayle asked for a copy of the statistical analysis. Shimkus told him that it was a simple average. Val Perdemertonich also wanted a copy. McRobins was about to step in when Dino Varlew, one of the student committee members, moved that everyone receive a copy; Suz Palombo seconded; the motion was passed. Shimkus asked if for the time being and for the sake of argument his statistics could be taken as correct. This was deliberated.
McRobins followed these proceedings as mindlessly as he had transcribed Shimkus’s numbers. “I’d agreed to act as chairperson,” he says, “because I’d anticipated strong emotions and bitter conflict, and felt myself to be impartial; but I’d forgotten how numbingly dull all such committee meetings actually are.” He had failed too to foresee how fully that moderating the discussion would remove him from it. And the coffee was burnt, and the lunch had been cold. He had already decided to vo
te for reinstatement—everyone deserved a second chance—and so the endless hairsplitting, jockeying, and deliberation held for him neither interest nor suspense. Inevitably, his tactful interventions and paraphrases became fewer and farther between, and the conversation, without his realizing it, grew long-winded and fractious.
At 1:35, Dean Dean Hanirihan burst into the room panting, and asked to speak privately to Palombo and McRobins. Apologizing, he assured them that the matter was urgent. McRobins was flustered by the untoward interruption, and at first told the committee to carry on without them, but Palombo rightly objected. He suspended the hearing and joined Dean and Palombo in the hallway.
Dean led them into an alcove and told them what had happened. He spoke in a strained whisper that did not do justice to the event or to his emotion.
“My immediate reaction,” he says, “was heartbreak. I couldn’t believe that my students had done something like this. Why hadn’t they come to me first?”
He turned his hurt incredulity on Palombo. “What are they thinking, Suz?”
Palombo replied sadly, before her own surprise or anger could show, “I was afraid something like this would happen.” Instinctively, she steered a course between feigning full knowledge, which could have made her culpable, and denying all knowledge, which would have made her an outsider. She told Dean and McRobins about the rally’s planned march to the Whitethorn Building, and speculated that Arjmand had got carried away. —“Or this other rally carried him away,” said Dean. —“Maybe. There are a lot of hotheads in our group. I foolishly thought I could control them, or at least channel their energies more constructively. I’m sorry, Dean.”
Palombo was one of the few students who called him “Dean.” He wished he could explain to her that “Dean Dean,” rather than being his formal title, was, like any rhyming or repetitious nickname, actually a term of affection. But some things were spoiled if stated explicitly. And perhaps, he thought desolately, she knew just what she was doing. Perhaps he was not as close to any of the students as he’d imagined. “It’s all right, Suz,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”
Bafflement and anxiety caused McRobins to sway on his feet. “But what shall we do? Should we adjourn the hearing?”
Dean felt that their first priority must be preventing damage, injury, expulsions, or arrests, and that the best way to do this was by ending the occupation as quickly as possible. Palombo agreed, and volunteered to liaise with the protesters.
“Then we should postpone the hearing,” said McRobins.
“Not necessarily,” said Dean. “Depending on the outcome, the decision could help defuse the situation.”
McRobins stiffened. “I’m not going to push the committee towards reinstatement just to placate some hooligans!”
“Of course not. But if the committee arrived there anyway, by itself—well, it could help. Tell me, both of you, without prejudice: which way are things leaning?”
“I honestly couldn’t say,” said McRobins. “We have yet to vote.”
Palombo was more willing to speculate. “Rimmer, Yaremko, and Shimkus aren’t going to budge; but I thought Hayle, Scholt, and Perdemertonich were coming over to our side. I was optimistic.”
She was no longer. “I was afraid,” she says, “that the committee would see the takeover the way McRobins had: as a bunch of hooligans trying to intimidate them. I thought they very well might vote No in defiance.”
She did not phrase it that way to McRobins. “I’m only worried that now,” she said, “even if the committee does vote for reinstatement, the department will ignore the recommendation, saying it was made under duress.”
Gradually, McRobins saw what he must do: sequester the committee and guide them to a speedy but honest and unadulterated decision. Dean and Palombo wished him luck; they all shook hands solemnly.
“But what should I tell them happened to you?” he asked Palombo.
She shrugged. “Family emergency. And oh: if they’ll allow a vote in absentia, I vote for reinstatement.”
McRobins returned to Room 204 with trepidation and resolve. Despite everyone’s best intentions, the discussion had gone on without him. Val Perdemertonich asked to see the official departmental grading guidelines. Yaremko said that there were none in print. Perdemertonich asked how Reid could be censured for failure to comply with nonexistent guidelines. Rimmer said that there were unwritten guidelines, as the memo of September 15th from Dean Ulgrave proved.
“It is not the student’s but the teacher’s fault if the student fails to learn,” said Rimmer, “and grades reflect only this. Professor Reid’s excessively harsh grading, especially for spelling and grammar on midterms, is unjustifiable elitism that discriminates against foreign, underprivileged, regional, rural, and other minority students.”
While McRobins waited to interrupt, the departmental secretary came in and told him to call the president, who had been taken hostage by several hundred protesters occupying Founders’ Hall.
“Thank you, yes. I’ve already been apprised of the situation by Dean Hanirihan.”
So he had no choice but to tell the committee about the takeover. After much astonished deliberation, they voted to sequester themselves until a decision was reached. Dino Varlew, who, unlike McRobins, had greatly enjoyed the free lunch, broached the possibility of ordering supper. —“I think,” said McRobins, “that that is a bridge we can cross if and when we reach the river.” —“Right, no problem,” said Varlew, but suddenly he felt famished.
The large majority of those who’d entered Founders’ Hall had not proceeded any farther than the atrium, or had retreated there from the overcrowded hallway outside the president’s office. This majority felt itself to be the real core of the protest, the occupying force, and some of them were bemused and vexed by the calls to order from the returning vanguard.
“I didn’t know who these guys were,” says sophomore Tonja Salanitro. “They came in shouting, ‘Meeting in the atrium.’ Well, we were already having a meeting in the atrium. They said that we needed to figure out what our demands were. Well, shit. Dunkan Tomlinson, Nolan Forntner, Daenil Polotz and I had been outlining our demands to Professor Falck and the dean of admissions for the past twenty minutes. We were already in negotiations.”
“They were discussions,” says Gloria Chisholm, dean of admissions, who, like Falck, had an office in the building. “We had no authority to negotiate. We were just asking them questions.”
Oreggio Ballenby too did not welcome what he thought of as the “political” group. “Sure, we had been screwing around: kicking the soccer ball, dancing in a conga line, shouting out the windows at passersby, wrestling. And then the politicos came back and said we needed to get serious, needed to get organized. But if there’s no room for fun and games during your revolution, there’s not going to be any fun or games in your new regime, and you’ll be just as bad as what you’re replacing.”
Others, like general studies major Sanders Brand, welcomed the meeting. “I was so sick and tired of the laziness and apathy of the people at that school, that when we first marched on the Hall, I was really excited: ‘All right! Finally we’re doing something—not just talking about doing something!’ But then nothing more happened; we just milled around beaming at one another, congratulating one another. ‘Okay,’ I thought, ‘we took over a building. Good for us. But now what are we going to do with it?’”
“We don’t need a meeting!” cried Nolan Forntner reflexively, then turned this defensive cry into rhetoric. “We know exactly what we want already! We know our demands! Haven’t we been making them for months, for years? Haven’t we been fighting for what we want all our life? Ask anybody here; they’ll tell you. Do we want to preserve our green spaces? —That’s right. Do we want to keep our good profs and throw out the bad? —You bet we do. Do we want to be listened to when we speak? —Hell yes! So you tell me: What do we want?”
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br /> The atrium rang like a bell with replies. Dunkan Tomlinson wanted free textbooks. Sanders Brand wanted the old textbooks to be donated to poor nations. Langdon Bellhouse wanted an end to lies. Angelik Huaraman wanted a crackdown on campus muggings. Sylvie Reinhardt wanted a ban on plastic bottles, Daenil Polotz on advertising. Elea Bukarica wanted all experiments on animals stopped. Troy Rosswind wanted smaller classes. Langdon Bellhouse wanted to firebomb his literature survey course. Carla DiAmbla wanted corporations to be taxed more. Many wanted the popular singer, Glade Lufiz, acquitted of his manslaughter charge. Sanders Brand wanted an end to world hunger. Clark Dalerow wanted to abolish prudery, Oreggio Ballenby monogamy, Tonja Salanitro gender. Some wanted freedom, some power, some self-actualization; some poetry, some magic, some love. Langdon Bellhouse wanted all telemarketers killed.
“You see,” said Forntner, “we already know what we want!”
“I want a meeting,” said Rennie Jarabal.
Diana Pirales proposed a vote. A middle-aged returning student with three adult children, Pirales was accustomed to mediating arguments at home, and to leading discussions among her less confident, less outspoken classmates. (Says classmate Paula Earleywine, “She was one of those students who thought out loud, and who couldn’t seem to absorb any information without first speaking it.”) Wil Partlingover refused and urged others to refuse to vote; he did not want to be bound by the outcome, or to validate the system by participating in it. Yet the vote was held. “Everyone who wants a meeting,” said Pirales, “put up your hand.” About forty percent raised their hands. “And everyone who doesn’t, put up your hand.” Another forty percent, not exclusive of the first group, raised their hands. —“And who doesn’t give a shit if we have a meeting or not?” shouted someone. About sixty percent raised their hands. Nevertheless, the meeting was underway.
“We have to confine ourselves to reasonable demands, or we’ll only discredit the movement.” —“I disagree. If we don’t overshoot, we won’t leave any room to haggle.” —“No, we mustn’t haggle; it shows weakness.” —“On the contrary, refusing to negotiate, to make any compromises, will only make us look like crazy fanatics.” —“We are crazy fanatics!” —“If we confine ourselves to what they would say is reasonable, we’re defeated before we’ve begun.” —“No compromises! They do what we say now; we’re in charge.” —“I agree. If we go into this prepared from the beginning to compromise, we’re liable to gobble up the first bone they throw us.” —“Anything they’re willing to give us is, by definition, not hurting them much, and therefore isn’t good enough. We want to make them pay!” —“Okay, but pardon my obtuseness, but how are they to blame for Glade Lufiz, or world hunger?” —“Everything is connected, and everything boils down to poverty. Without poverty, there is no exploitation; without exploitation, there is no wealth; without wealth, there is no oppression, no inequality, no competition, no bitterness, no greed, no destruction of natural resources . . .” —“Exactly: natural resources! Because everything boils down not to poverty, but to the exploitation of nature, which is the only form of wealth we have, and which must be preserved and shared equally by everyone. Every other evil stems from the evil of ownership, the evil of property.” —“Nonsense. Poverty subsumes property: if everyone had money, we would all have property.” —“Bullshit. If everyone has the same amount of money, you have in effect abolished money.” —“All right, calm down. We’re all on the same side.” —“No we’re not! This artificial concern for other people’s supposed hardships, in some abstract country far far away, is only a distraction from the real battles we need to fight here. This fashionable abstract humanism is nothing but a trick of the ruling class to divide and co-opt and dissipate our energies. The real enemy is and always has been capitalism.” —“You’ve got it exactly backwards! ‘Capitalism’ is the abstraction; anticapitalism is the distraction. Anticapitalism betrays the poor!” —“But even if what you all say is true, how is the administration of this university, just pragmatically speaking, supposed to grant an end to capitalism, or to property, or to poverty?” —“This isn’t just about the administration of this university; it’s about the administration of this government, this country, this planet!” —“That’s why we’ve got to tear down the whole system. It’s corrupt through and through, so to fix one part of it is only to improve its overall functioning and therefore exacerbate its total corruption.” —“And that’s why we mustn’t compromise. Every concession is just another link in our chains. They enslave us with their compromises, the same way a factory owner better enslaves his workers with little token raises and slightly improved working conditions from time to time.” —“But what the hell are we even doing here, if we’re not going to let them consent to our demands?”