November 6
Russell Hearing Today
A hearing will be conducted today by the University Bias Response Team into the conduct of Assistant Professor Ephraim Russell. Professor Russell has been accused of allowing racist rhetoric into the classroom, as well as ignoring authors from non-empowered communities.
A video, now widely viewed on YouTube and other sites, has sparked considerable outrage on campus. “How, in the twenty-first century, can we allow this sort of thing to happen at a place like Devon? Student safety must come first,” said Jaylen Biggs of the Afro-American Cultural Center. Others echoed similar sentiments. One student, however, who claims to be in the same class, remarked that the claims were “simply ridiculous,” and that Russell was an “excellent teacher.”
A panel led by Martika Malik-Adams, Dean of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, will conduct the hearing.
D’Arcy and Eph approached the limestone façade of the beaux arts building that housed the Devon administration. It was a work of architectural elegance, adorned with Corinthian pilasters and classical balustrades. The ever-expanding administration had outgrown the twelve-thousand-square-foot confines of Stockbridge decades ago, but many of the top deans maintained offices there, as did President Strauss. Dean Malik-Adams had recently been installed down the hall from Strauss on the second floor. In a large room on the third floor the Devon Board of Governors met four times a year. D’Arcy occupied a desk in the president’s antechamber.
They entered through the enormous double doors. “I wonder where I go,” Eph said. D’Arcy pointed at a calendar of events on the wall. It had those little white letters someone would have to arrange and stick into the black felt every day.
Bias Response Team—Third Floor
On the second floor, D’Arcy pulled Eph toward her and gave him a kiss. “This is where I get off. Go get ’em.”
“Okay. If you can get away let’s meet over at the Dix when it’s done. I’ll text you.”
Eph continued up the marble stairs, steps echoing as he went. Racist approaching! His heart was working harder than a short climb would normally require. By the third floor, he had broken out in a mild sweat. Which room was it? He poked his head in the first door he came to and found himself in the antechamber for some administrator’s office. It was enormous, bigger than any professor’s. A woman behind a desk, perhaps an administrative assistant like D’Arcy, looked up and said, “Oh, you’re looking for the Board of Governors Room. It’s down at the end of the hall.” She knew him! Just like that. Somehow he doubted this random administrative assistant could have identified him a couple of weeks ago. Was that a reproachful look? He felt a trickle of sweat find its way down the center of his back. Thank God he’d worn a blazer.
Walking down the hall, he heard voices. That must be it. He walked through the entrance into the biggest conference room he’d ever seen. An immense oval table dominated the space. Its wood was polished so finely it gave the impression of a calm, reflective lake. The ceiling was twenty feet overhead and decorated with elaborate white wood carvings set on a robin’s-egg-blue background. It occurred to Eph that in a room like this, no one ever raised a hand and said, Excuse me, but … That was likely the intended effect.
“Professor Russell, welcome. I’m Dean Malik-Adams.”
Eph’s suspicion that Dean Malik-Adams had been the disruptive presence at Blue Nation Coffee that day was immediately confirmed. She and two others were already seated on the far side of the table’s expanse. They made no move to get up. The fourth person present, to the side, was a stenographer, which made everything seem even more serious.
“Yes, hello. I see I’ve found the right place.”
“Please, sit down.”
Eph picked one of the twenty or so empty seats on his side of the table. Before he’d even pulled his seat in, the dean continued. “Seated next to me are the other members of the Bias Response Team. To my left is Professor Marcia Simmons of the African-American Studies Department, and to my right is Professor Jaime de la Cruz of the Sociology Department.”
“Hello. I confess I’m confused. I see we have a stenographer?” I’m came out as ahm. The more nervous Eph got, the more South came from his mouth. “This isn’t a court, after all…”
“No, Professor, it is not. We use a stenographer so we have an accurate record of the proceedings. This is simply a hearing where we wish to ascertain the facts of the case, both from you and others.”
“Others?”
“Yes, Professor. We have already spoken to a number of stakeholders.”
“I don’t understand. What’s a stakeholder?”
Marcia Simmons cut in, a strident tone in her voice. “Professor Russell, there are issues here that are of vital interest to the community, and we must take all views into account.”
“If I may, have there been specific complaints?”
“Yes,” Malik-Adams replied.
“May I know from whom, and how many?”
“That is confidential.”
“The number of complaints is confidential?”
“It is. We realize you might find this upsetting, but confidentiality is vital. If we don’t protect it, then it’s easy to imagine there are those not brave enough to come forward in situations such as these.”
“From what I saw in the paper and outside my class the last two weeks, they don’t seem too concerned about confidentiality.”
“I think we can begin now,” said Malik-Adams, ignoring Eph. “That is, if that’s all right with you, Professor.”
Eph sensed he should demur. “Of course. Just trying to under—”
“Professor Russell, this hearing is to ascertain the facts about occurrences in English 240, Nineteenth-Century American Literature, a class that you currently teach, correct?” The stenographer began clicking away.
“I do, yes.”
“On October fifteenth of last month there was something of a disturbance in your classroom, is that also correct?”
“Well, I suppose you could call it that, yes.”
“Would you please describe it to us?”
“We were discussing Twain, specifically Huckleberry Finn, and one of the students, I actually don’t think he’s in my class at all, got up and just started reading.”
“Reading what, Professor?”
“Huck Finn.”
“Could you please be more specific?”
“The sections he chose had some language that some apparently found upsetting. But as I said, I don’t think any of these kids were actually in my class. I’m not really sure—”
“And what language was that, Professor?”
“He was reading otherwise unremarkable passages, but they had, ah, the N-word, if you will.”
“If I will what, Professor?” asked Malik-Adams.
“Uh, if you will accept my, uh, euphemism.”
Marcia Simmons: “Do you mean the word nigger, Professor Russell?”
“Well, yes. That’s the one.”
“Isn’t it true that you yourself also used this word in class, Professor?” continued Simmons.
“No, I did not.”
“One of the students says you did,” Simmons said.
“I most certainly did not.”
“So you say,” said Simmons.
“Yes, ma’am, I do.”
“You may call me professor. I believe I’ve earned that right,” said Simmons.
“Of course, my apologies, Professor.”
“You said that some apparently found the passage upsetting. I take it that means you did not?”
“Well, I didn’t say that exactly. But if I may … Professor, the word we’re discussing is part of the book, and this is Twain we’re talking about.”
“The identity of the author is hardly germane to this discussion,” Malik-Adams said.
“I believe it is. Twain is one of the giants of American literature.”
“Are you aware that Huckleberry Finn has been banned from the curricula of a number of schools?”
“It has a long history of being banned, in fact. The library in Concord, Massachusetts, home to Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, banned it because its characters didn’t use the Queen’s English. But it was also controversial because Huckleberry Finn was the most powerful antislavery message of its day.”
He shoots, he scores!
“Of its day,” said Malik-Adams.
Wait, what?
“What concerns those of us on the Bias Response Team is not what effect the book had on the prosperous people who could afford books in the nineteenth century, but what effect it has on our community today.”
Malik-Adams let the words hang there, and Eph could feel things slipping in the wrong direction. Time to shift gears. “If I may, Dean, Professors, I believe this entire incident was arranged by some students who weren’t enrolled in my class. That boy, whom I’d never seen before, just got up and started reading, and others reacted in a very scripted way.”
“Boy?” said Simmons.
“Student. They all seem so young these days.” Eph laughed nervously. Hadn’t the student been white, though? Still, that was an unforced error. “Forgive me, Professor.”
“There is also a complaint that your course deliberately ignores authors of color. We have examined your syllabus and it would appear this complaint has some merit. Wouldn’t you agree, Professor?”
“Well, that’s true on the face of it, but as I told my students, African-American literacy rates were very low in that period, and I’d very much like to emphasize how tragic this is, but there just aren’t many options from which to choose.”
“What about”—Professor Simmons glanced down at the notepad in front of her—“Elizabeth Keckley?”
Eph wracked his brain. Elizabeth Keckley … Keckley … She wrote a single book, didn’t she?… What was it again? Crap, crap, crap.
“Elizabeth Keckley,” Professor Simmons continued, “who wrote a stirring memoir of her ordeals as a slave. Does Elizabeth Keckley not measure up to your course’s standards?”
Damn, now he remembered. “Of course. Wonderful book. It’s only that my class is meant to contrast the Romantics and the Realists, and—”
“Is slavery not real enough for you, Professor Russell?”
“Oh, certainly, very real, and a shameful mark on our nation’s history … perhaps not including Keckley was an oversight on my part. I will be sure to add her to the syllabus.” Eph wiped his sweaty brow with his blazer sleeve, finding no way to do it discreetly. He wondered if Professor Simmons had ever actually read Elizabeth Keckley.
“Professor, if I may…” Jaime de la Cruz weighed in for the first time. “Where are you from? I mean, originally. I notice a bit of an accent.”
“Florida, mostly.”
Mostly. Sort of. Grad school, anyway.
“I see,” said de la Cruz. “I have family in Miami. Whereabouts is your family from?”
“Uh, we moved around a bit.” Sure, those vacations to the Gulf. The redneck Riviera, Floribama. Opioid country. Trump country. The silence hung there as Eph willed the conversation to take a different direction. The stenographer was somehow still clicking away. He wondered if she was writing something like awkward pause here.
“I did my doctoral work at Florida State,” Eph said, feeling the need to break the silence. It couldn’t hurt to remind the panel they were speaking to someone with a Ph.D., even if it was from a state school.
“Thank you, Professor,” said Malik-Adams. “Let’s move on. I’d like to ask my fellow panelists if they have any last comments or questions.”
“No, but I need to say, Professor Russell, that I’m not entirely satisfied with what I’m hearing here,” said Simmons, arms folded.
“Professor de la Cruz?”
“Well, speaking as a Latino, I am troubled by all this. Deeply troubled.”
Speaking as. The ultimate rhetorical battlement. The phrase was popping up with increasing frequency. My status as a member of an oppressed group trumps anything you might want to say. Eph had no truck with the plight of oppressed peoples, but shouldn’t any argument be open to critical analysis?
“I believe we’ve heard enough,” Malik-Adams said. “Professor Russell, you should be advised that the possible consequences in these situations range from nothing to a reprimand to outright dismissal. This panel will advise your department head of our findings when we arrive at them. The meeting is adjourned.”
Eph texted D’Arcy and walked over to the Dix to meet her. She ducked out of Milton’s office, saying she was running out for coffee. They met in a quiet pod.
“Well?” She looked anxious.
“Let me ask you something. Have you ever heard of Elizabeth Keckley?”
“Who?”