Ginelli, so glad you could join us,” said Grimes, pausing to underline my peon status by not even using the customary faculty honorific of “professor.” He then waited, underlining my tardy status, until I had crossed the large room to take my seat.
Well, given my height I am not able to insinuate myself into a room in any case. I paused behind my chair for a minute and looked at him. I’m about an inch taller than he is and he really didn’t like the fact that I could look down on him. He was used to looking down on women (literally and figuratively) and on most men for that matter.
“Take your seat,” he barked out, having been pushed too far.
I could feel my job sway under me and decided I’d really better sit down.
Henry, my office-mate, swiveled his pseudo-Tudor conference chair in my direction as I took my seat, and with his back to Grimes crossed his eyes at me. Wow, this meeting must be excruciating for Henry to mug in front of Grimes, even discretely. Henry desperately needed his job. This must really be bad.
Grimes seemed to decide he had punished me enough and began pacing at the head of the table.
“As I was saying, at the Department Chairs meeting, Dean Wooster emphasized that the self-study is a way for all departments to have access to the creation of a curricular structure that befits the intellectual demands this twenty-first century have laid upon us.”
He paused for emphasis, not for comment. At least not from me. Anything I could truthfully have said would have further imperiled my job.
Hercules Abraham, Professor of Judaism, the most senior member of the department and the kindest man I have ever met, nodded his small, neat, white head from his position directly to Grimes’ left. I wondered what he was doing here. At more than seventy years of age, he was semi-retired and only taught a few seminars and tutorials. He had no committee assignments and was not expected to have to attend faculty meetings. He must be here voluntarily. I was stunned. I would have used any excuse not to be here.
Hercules spoke, his still prominent French accent making the words seem to flow.
“This is necessary, I believe, for in these changing times we have to adjust ourselves.”
As he spoke, his blue eyes peeked out from his wrinkled face radiating good will. He leaned his thin frame back against the high-backed chair and smiled at all of us, confident that he, Hercules, had helped our leader make an important point.
It would probably never occur to Hercules that this was bureaucratic claptrap. To him, it would mean we would all pull together and in the spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion to learning make this university a new Garden of Eden.
Hercules combined the innocence of a child with the wisdom of Solomon. He had been a four-year-old Jew in France when the Vichy government, far from trying to hinder the Nazi round up of Jews to send to concentration camps, was being positively helpful to their occupiers. Hercules and his mother (his father had fought and died in the French Resistance) had been hidden in the French village of LeChambon, the tiny mountain town in France where literally hundreds of Jews were saved by French Protestant farmers who became expert forgers and smugglers to fool the French government officials and Nazis in order to save Jewish lives.
Maybe Hercules believed in goodness because he had seen it. He just made me feel like I wanted to protect him, but in many ways he was also like a tough little French rooster, too thin and wiry to be eaten. And sometimes there was a suspicion in my mind that Hercules saw right through Grimes, but felt that by not directly challenging him Grimes could be brought to see what was right. If you grew up hiding from Nazis, you probably had a good idea how to hide what you were thinking.
I was too new to this academic culture to read it accurately.
But before Grimes could get his mouth open, Adelaide Winters jumped in with her customary bluntness.
“Is it a raid, Harold or can we ride it out?”
Adelaide Winters was Professor of Women and Religion and no innocent and nobody’s fool. At fifty, with slate-grey hair, an extra hundred pounds, and a laser-like brain, she was a formidable presence in any meeting. She gave off strong “take it or leave it” vibes. A former student in Philosophy and Religion had told me last year that when Adelaide had entered the lecture hall and approached the lectern, he had at first thought a “cleaning lady” had taken leave of her senses. He said, like he was proud of himself, that it had taken him only “three seconds” to realize his mistake. I doubted that he realized he was both a sexist and a classist for making that particular error. So I’d told him. He didn’t seem to appreciate it.
Adelaide was one of the few people I’d ever met who when they spoke, I was tempted to write it down. She always cut directly to the heart of any topic and her terse, laconic approach boded ill for academic claptrap. She and Grimes seemed to be long-time enemies, though I did not know if there had been something specific that caused that, or whether it was because they were so completely opposite in virtually everything they approached. You couldn’t miss the antipathy and it seemed like years in the making. And it had been, what, over twenty years?
Grimes, of course, was furious that the shadowy, intricate tunnels of rhetoric where he’d planned to lead us had been rudely exposed to the light of day by Adelaide. But he hardly showed it. His eyes, hidden behind his horn-rims and his face shadowed by the backlight, only swiveled to glance at Adelaide sitting well down the conference table, a ghost chair on either side of her. Perhaps she had chosen that seat to convey that she preferred the company of the dear departed. Or maybe she just liked the elbowroom.
Grimes drew himself erect and looked directly at her.
“There is absolutely no question of a raid. What we have here is an opening to explore the kinds of issues that you yourself deem so important. What constitutes knowledge? How is the content of the curriculum to be determined and what content is necessary for the well-educated, twenty-first century graduate.”
Now, I might be a new academic, but I knew baloney when it was being fed to me, in fact, to the whole group, in one large serving. Adelaide was right. What was going down was more cuts in the humanities areas. More faculty positions being given to economics and to the “hard sciences,” computer, math, physics.
Unless we could, by some miracle, come up with a coherent reason for our existence.
And there, we in Philosophy and Religion were publicly, embarrassingly split. And, as we knew only too well, the backlash against diversity, against women’s studies, black studies, against multi-culturalism, was being fueled by theatric political challenges to what was again being labeled “political correctness.” One of the two faculty members whose position had been eliminated had been a promising young African American guy whose scholarly specialty was African and African Diaspora Religion, including African American religion. There were no black studies offerings at all being taught this quarter. Would they ever be taught again? We had one cross-referenced class in Islam actually taught by a Muslim Scholar in another department. I was the “Christianist,” and heaven help the Christians if that were to continue as our only perspective on one of the world’s major religions. Adelaide held firm on teaching a very diverse array of women thinkers in religion, but when she retired? What then?
This was nothing new for the University of Chicago. Decades before, this territory had been staked out with the fierce intellectual fire of Allan Bloom, arch nemesis of all things not mentioned in Plato or Aristotle. According to Bloom, when we had starting teaching anything but the “classics,” we had abandoned American society to such ills as divorce and abortion and a host of other supposed moral decay. Those who
