No law and order here.
And now I was finding that my attempt to find refuge in academics was a joke. This was no refuge at all. It was the same human violence met with the same inadequate, even corrupt, tools of bureaucracy.
The grey stone came back into focus. I had to shake this off and do right by Ah-seong Kim. And, I realized with a jolt, actually do my academic job.
I was late for a faculty meeting. I didn’t exactly jump up and rush to the meeting, however.
You’d think at $50,000 per student for tuition that there would be enough money to hire faculty. Wasn’t that the point of a university, teaching students?
If you thought so you were decades out of date.
Universities and colleges are engaged in an orgy of budget cutting. But only in faculty positions and faculty salaries. Administrator’s salaries and huge outlays for new and fancier buildings just keep growing like some hideous cancer.
Humanities departments, like my own, were especially vulnerable. We had no huge grants like the sciences. We had no wealthy alumni like the economics department and business school. We were, in short, budget canon-fodder.
I shut down my computer and rose. There was no need to rush to a meeting where so little would be said so slowly and repeated so often.
I grabbed my coat. I’d leave right after the faculty meeting. I passed the divider that separated my part of this shared office from my officemate, Henry Haruchi.
Henry was Japanese on his father’s side and Welch on his mother’s side. He taught Buddhism, though also comparative religion and he had an interest in religion and science. He was a terrifically interesting guy and when we were in the office together we often talked to the detriment of actually getting work done, though as I thought about it he’d been gone from the office a lot this fall quarter. I wished he were around. I assumed he was at the meeting. I’d have loved to run my conversation with Ah-seong by him.
I had to just shelve this onslaught of feelings and get on with it. Just get on with it. I opened the door to my office.
Directly across the hall, Mary Frost, the departmental secretary, was rooting around in her desk. I wondered why. She should have been taking notes at the meeting.
She glanced up and frowned deeply at me. The students called that ‘being Frosted.’ Too bad. I asked her for the password to the faculty link to Policies and Procedures.
She just continued to glare at me without responding.
Just perfect.
2
When I was fifteen years old I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life. I had never before seen, or at least had not noticed, buildings that were evidently dedicated to a higher purpose, not to necessity or utility, not merely to shelter or manufacture or grade, but to something that might be an end in itself.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
I turned and stomped down the hall. The flagstone floor of these fake gothic buildings made a satisfyingly loud sound as I trudged on down the long hall toward the conference room at the end of the hall. On this floor of the Myerson Humanities building, we in Philosophy and Religion occupied one side and History had the other. A big staircase bisected the building in the front. There was one creaky old elevator somewhere. Not really ADA compliant and I’d never consider riding in it.
One side of our hallway had faculty offices arranged from smallest to largest, Henry’s and mine being the smallest. The Department Chair, Dr. Harold Grimes, of course, occupied the very largest. On the other side, the department secretary occupied an equally small office, the mirror of my shared office, and then there were two empty offices, now used for very small classes, and a large conference room at the end where the meeting was taking place. Grimes had the showcase office, a semi-circular room with stained glass at the top that was inside one of the four turrets that anchored the corners of the building.
I clunked along, thinking that if the university really did attack us with more drastic budget cuts we could always defend ourselves by shooting arrows out of the narrow slits in our turrets. With the water in the water cooler and the snack machines in the basement, we could hold out for weeks.
Even as slowly as I was walking, I finally reached the conference room. Though the meeting had started at 3:30 and it was now nearly 4, I could not bring myself to open the door right away. As I lingered in the hall, I could hear the raised voices inside probably making points that had been made several times before, and surely would be again.
This was another area where I had discovered to my dismay that being a cop and being an academic did not differ substantially. Squad meetings were also endlessly repetitious. Of course, at squad meetings we’d had donuts to keep us going. No donuts at faculty meetings, or none that I had ever seen.
I finally pushed the heavy oak door open and shards of afternoon light spilled through the mullioned windows that lined the conference room on the west wall. The light shot directly into my eyes and poked at the headache that had been building since I’d first met with Ah-seong. It had been a long afternoon and it was going to get a lot longer.
Seated around an oak table fully thirty feet in length were the remaining full-time members of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Many chairs lined the walls, but there were three empty chairs still at the table. One because I was not yet seated in it, and the two others for the two tenured positions we had lost in the last two years.
Yes, of course, those courses were still taught, but just by underpaid adjuncts, the fast-food workers of the university whose ranks of cheap labor were growing even as full-time positions were cut or moved to more lucrative departments. I thought it was rather like playing at the ghost in Hamlet to keep the empty chairs pulled up to the table. Were they meant to echo a mute cry for revenge from those whose jobs had been murdered?
The head of our department, Harold Grimes, was standing at the head of the table, the filtered light behind him glinting off of his full head of white hair. This was an effect intended by Harold, as was keeping his suspiciously tanned face out of direct light, the better to hide the network of wrinkles direct light would reveal. He thought he was handsome and affected the clichéd horn-rimmed glasses, tweed jacket, leather patch elbows, pipe in pocket look so beloved of his generation of academic men. He really didn’t look too bad. Stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.
Harold was tall, probably now just a little over six feet as age took its toll on his height and contributed to his increasing girth around the stomach. His veneer of absent-minded professor covered a power player of some skill. He had survived to his nearly sixty years of age having published very little, and none of it of note, in a university where that should have finished him long ago. That it had not, and that he was, in fact, a tenured senior professor, was strong testimony to his palpable personal charm and to his ability to know and be known in the labyrinthine ways of power in the university.
Harold’s field was Ethics, a fact I tried not to dwell on because I found it made me laugh. It’s not wise to find your boss too funny. Harold was not a person to underestimate. Yet, in a weird way I was glad he was our department head. If anybody could protect us from the accounting sharks that ruled academic budgets today, Harold could. That is, if it suited his own purposes. I glanced at the two empty chairs. He hadn’t been able to save the ghosts. And an untenured professor like my lowly self who has not completed her dissertation is very vulnerable at budget-cutting
