THE PROGRESSIVE STUDENT Alliance made its headquarters in the space of a defunct fraternity, the old DKU house. The beautiful two-story stone structure evoked an Anglican chapel in the Cotswolds. The university had been openly hostile to fraternities since the fifties and used the considerable tools at its disposal to rid itself of them. Most of the houses, though, were privately owned, and the university couldn’t simply reclaim the properties. So Devon played the long game, waiting for opportunities. In its view, DKU had housed a particularly noxious gaggle of undergraduate brigands, a label with which the house residents themselves would not have quibbled.
In the mid-seventies, when money was tight everywhere, DKU fell behind on its property taxes. Like a hen appealing to the fox, the fraternity asked for Devon’s help. DKU had been at the school since 1851, went the appeal. It was an integral part of Devon’s history. And the order’s traditional involvement in the community had to be considered. Some of the brothers had even helped raise money for, you know, that thing a few years ago. So went the argument presented by Jamie Riggs, DKU’s president.
“Yes, indeed,” replied the dean of student affairs. “It would be a shame to see DKU leave us,” whereupon he nodded to university counsel, a man from the venerable Shearman & Sterling, who produced a check and a prodigious raft of papers, ready for signature. He held the check up so Jamie could see it, then pushed the papers across the table.
Relieved, Jamie signed here and signed there, imagining the reception he was going to get back at the house. Oh, what a party it would be. DKU lives!
Jamie Riggs would be the last of the Delta Kappa Upsilon’s 127 presidents. The party that night would indeed become the stuff of legend, but mostly as a monument to naïveté. Jamie, having been hungover at the time and not expecting treachery from his beloved Devon, had not actually read the eighteen-page loan agreement and its various codicils and covenants, which, while providing funds to cover the tax payment, required repayment, in full, in a week’s time.
Eight days later, at precisely nine a.m., an eviction notice was posted on DKU’s front door, giving the boys until the end of the semester to vacate. The magnificent DKU house was Devon’s for the bargain-basement price of $18,000.
For a number of years, the house was underutilized, serving in turn as auxiliary space for the Architecture School, a venue for performance art, and, most recently, a student-run café. A $150 million gift from Ellis Dixon, private equity mogul and member of the class of ’77, made possible the building of a new, state-of-the-art student center, so the café had outlived its usefulness. Over the summer, the dean of student affairs decided to allocate the space to the Progressive Student Alliance, along with $100,000 for the group’s general-purpose fund. For the PSA, it was a nice upgrade from meeting at Blue Nation Coffee. They now had a permanent base from which to forward the Struggle.
“Rufus, put on some tunes,” Red said.
“Play some Björk,” Gaia said.
“I’m not playing fucking Björk again,” said Rufus, a sophomore and resident tune-meister. He favored bushy, seventies-style hair and cargo shorts. He linked his phone to a speaker with Bluetooth and played some Phish.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Red. “Israel doesn’t cut it.” Red hadn’t bothered with their little first-day protest. “There’s no juice. No one around here understands the Middle East, and why should they? It was fucked-up when they were born, and it will be fucked-up when they die. That’s all they know. We’ve tried more than once and there’s no traction.”
Red looked at the signs that said DIVEST NOW! and ZIONISM = RACISM! sitting in the corner. They would be repurposed later. Despite the warm weather, Red wore a rainbow knit cap, bulging with the effort to contain his dreadlocks. When he pulled the cap off, his Rasta-style braids spilled out like a tangle of cinnamon snakes. They contrasted vividly with his pallid complexion. Plopping on the faded couch, he lit his first joint of the day. It was one p.m. Others joined him.
Red wasn’t his given name, but it had followed him from birth when he came out of the womb with his unmistakably vibrant scalp. Later the name gelled nicely with his flavor of politics. He was a product of Buckley and Exeter, educational bona fides unsurpassed in the eyes of the Eastern establishment. That Red Wheeler was a product of that establishment, with a rich family and a trust fund of considerable heft, was something he had dedicated himself to living down, at least outwardly. He loved walking into his grandfather’s Park Avenue offices, dreadlocks screaming defiance as he strolled by all the work-slaves.
But the truth was, having money freed him from having to make any himself, from being a cog in someone else’s corporate machine. No one was going to exploit Red Wheeler. The rationalization gave him comfort.
Red was one of those people who just always seemed to be around. Every campus had a few, inhabitants who found creative ways to extend their collegiate experiences far beyond the usual boundaries. Red was in his seventh year, having found Devon much to his liking. He’d been a handful of philosophy credits shy of graduating for some time, a process he managed with care. Technically, he wasn’t enrolled at the moment at all and lived off campus.
Being at Devon relieved Red of any responsibility, from having to figure out what The Plan was. His family was big on planning. Red, not so much. He liked things one day at a time. The pursuit of progressive causes conferred a needed sense of purpose and also acted as a shield of sorts. When you’re saving the world, no one should be on your case about a goddamn plan. Better yet, progressivism came with its own prepackaged lifestyle of clothes and rallies and pleasing pharmaceuticals. It was a lifestyle Red fully embraced.
“The year just started,” Rufus said, still on Israel. “Maybe we just need to turn up the vol on this, give it time.”
Red inhaled deeply on his joint. “Fuck that … tried Israel last year … got … no traction.” The words came out in a staccato whisper and puffs of smoke as he tried not to exhale prematurely. After a few more moments, he exhaled more fully, and a fragrant cloud filled the room.
“I still can’t believe Milton said, ‘Keep up the good work,’” Gaia added. She wore small round glasses and had multicolored beads woven into her hair. “I mean, what an asshole.”
“Milton Strauss is a progressive, but he’s also part of the power structure, which is a fundamental contradiction in the dialectic.” Red really liked the word dialectic. “He’s an old-style liberal, really … but still, the man can be useful. Everyone has a part to play.”
The others, seven or eight of them, nodded in agreement, passing around the joint. They often deferred to Red, as he was older and had seen his share of the Struggle—G7 Summits, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, Antifa … Red was universally acknowledged to be “woke” and drifted seamlessly between causes. When Trump won, he rallied four hundred students into the middle of East Quad for a primal scream at three a.m. It got over two hundred thousand views on YouTube. He’d originally made his name as a sophomore when he led a student movement to force the endowment to divest from fossil fuel companies. Borrowing from the eighties playbook when Devon antiapartheid demonstrators constructed a shantytown, he rallied students to build a “zero net energy village” right in Bingham Plaza. Consisting mostly of unsightly yurts, slapdash lean-tos, and other tent-like structures, it prompted Milton Strauss to announce over a billion dollars of divestment. Red was quoted in The New York Times.
There were always rumors around Red after that, talk of some hacking, maybe even with Anonymous, the infamous hacker collective known for wearing Guy Fawkes masks. Red did little to dispel these rumors, keeping a Guy Fawkes mask lying casually around his apartment. The truth was he never got any further than Comp Sci 101 way back in freshman year.
If there had been such a thing as president of the PSA, it would certainly have been Red, but the group eschewed such bourgeois power structures in favor of the more progressive practice of “general consensus.” This often took the form of finger snapping, which meant “I approve.” Someone once told Red that snapping could be traced to the beatniks, who would gather in coffeehouses, reciting poems suffused with cultural rebellion. Listeners would snap as each verbal dagger struck its mark, not unlike African-American churchgoers chiming “Amen” during an inspired sermon. Red didn’t know if the story was true, but he liked to think so.
“We have to make it about Devon somehow, otherwise people won’t give a shit. You think the average GPA-sucking zombie around here cares about fucking Israel? But they do care about the cozy little bed they’re sleeping in called Devon University. We need them to question everything they think they know by exposing the elitism and the systemic privilege.”
Red also liked the word systemic.
“All these rich kids, man … so fat and comfortable in their patriarchal bubble, so intellectually constipated … they don’t know struggle. We gotta bring the whole thing down.” That Red was rich and had been living off his family’s money at Devon for seven years went unsaid, had the contradiction even occurred to anyone. Being woke proffered a certain moral license.
As the group thought on this and other weighty issues of social justice, the purple cannabis cloud grew around them.
“You guys see the Republican Club invited that fascist Potter to speak?” someone asked. Robert Potter was a Republican senator from Texas known for his conservative stance on immigration.
“We’ll see about that, won’t we?” Red grinned.
“Hey, I got my first gig,” Rufus said, studying his iPhone. “Beta house.”
Rufus, whose nom de fête was RoofRaza, was a purveyor of electronic dance music, commonly known as EDM. His reputation as a campus DJ had taken hold toward the end of the previous year when the frats gave him a gig or two. “Four hundred cash money, baby.”
“Fraternity dicks,” Gaia said.
“Maybe so,” said Rufus, “but it’s beaucoup bucks.”