There will be no peace.
Fight back, then, with such courage as you have
And every unchivalrous dodge you know of,
Clear in your conscience on this:
Their cause, if they had one, is nothing to them now;
They hate for hate’s sake.
Monday, Kate reached Baldwin at two, in time for her office hour. The Senior Faculty Committee meeting was scheduled for four that afternoon, and Kate hoped, without too much conviction, to pick up a few tips before the meeting on the way the wind was blowing. So political a thought had not previously occurred to her and marked, no doubt, her initiation into the world of history. Clio, she thought, stand me now and ever in good stead.
“We have found no one for Swahili,” a voice said. “How is Bulwer-Lytton doing? Look, the elevator is actually coming,” Mark Everglade added. “There must be something wrong with it.”
“I do think,” Kate said as they got in, pressed ‘8’ and watched the doors close, “that such consistent pessimism is surely the triumph of experience over hope, not to mention reason. Even this University’s elevators must work occasionally. The law of averages . . .” Kate’s voice faded away as, between the third and fourth floors, the elevator came to a reluctant, but by no means uncertain, stop.
“There is a law of averages,” Everglade said. “There is also a law of falling bodies. We are about to prove Galileo’s theory that two bodies of different weights will, if dropped from a sufficient height, reach the ground at the same time and in the same state of dejectedness. You ring the alarm bell; I will telephone.”
Kate pressed the alarm bell in much the same spirit with which one accepts herbal tea from an ancient aunt: it probably won’t help, but it can’t hurt. Mark, meanwhile, addressed himself to a little cupboard which housed the University’s most recent attempt to grapple with the problem of its elevators: a telephone. “What do you dial for emergencies?” Mark asked Kate.
“I don’t know. It says in the front of the campus directory, but I’m afraid I never noticed.”
“Who, alas, has? We shall have to dial the operator, and we all know where that leads.”
“Do you think there is sufficient oxygen?”
“For what? Compared to the air I’ve been breathing in most meetings lately, there is probably here a smaller proportion of carbon monoxide and irritating tars than in most otherwheres.”
“May I help you?” a voice said over the telephone.
“You certainly may,” Mark happily replied. “We are stuck in an elevator and . . .”
“If you are on campus,” the voice continued, “you may dial directly the number you want. Is this an outside call?”
“I can’t even get outside this elevator,” Mark said. “Help, help, help,” he mildly added.
“I will connect you with maintenance,” the voice said. “If you are on campus, will you dial one-two, one-four? Are you on campus?”
“Perhaps it’s a recording,” Kate said.
Mark pressed down the telephone button until he heard a dial tone, then dialed 1214. There was a busy signal.
“Try calling the English Office,” Kate said.
“A brilliant suggestion which I am hideously certain will not work. Ah, well.” Mark dialed the English Office.
“English,” the secretary’s voice brightly said, “will you hold on a minute?” There was a click as the secretary pushed the ‘hold’ button. Mark slammed the receiver down as violently as the small cupboard allowed. Kate put her purse and case down on the floor.
“I am reminded,” she said, “of a story my father used to tell, repeatedly, in order to drive home a moral whose application has, until this moment, escaped me. He was a friend of the president of some railroad, the New York Central or something, and one day my father asked his secretary to find out when the next train left for Tuxedo, where he was planning to meet someone. The secretary returned to tell him that she could not get through to railroad information because the line was continually engaged. ‘Nonsense,’ my father called out. ‘Get me the president of the whatever railroad.’ The poor secretary couldn’t get the president, but she did get his private secretary, at which point my father grabbed the telephone from her. ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Fansler,’ the president’s private secretary said, ‘but Mr. Whosis is out of town. Is there any way I can help you?’ ‘There certainly is,’ my father said; ‘when is the next train to Tuxedo?’ Well, she managed to find a timetable and tell him; and the moral of the story is: always go to the president.”
“I trust,” Mark said, “that since we are without a President, the Acting President wall do.”
“Perfectly,” Kate said.
“And do you happen to know his extension?”
“Yes, I do. I was recently glancing through the new directory, as one does when it first comes out, and I noticed that his number is 1837. Shall we try it?”
“How did you happen to decide to remember his number and not the emergency number? Your father’s advice?”
“Naturally not. I have never given a thought to my father’s advice until this moment. Eighteen thirty-seven is the year of Queen Victoria’s ascension.”
“Of course. Silly of me.” Mark picked up the receiver and dialed 1837.
“President Matthewson’s office,” a voice cheerfully said. “Good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon,” Mark said. “May I please speak to Mr. Matthewson? This is Mark Everglade of the English Department calling.”
“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Everglade, but President Matthewson is at a meeting. May I take a message?”
“You certainly may,” Mark said. “Tell him that Professor Fansler and I, both of the English Department, are stuck in an elevator in Baldwin Hall and are rapidly running out of oxygen. I might add, in case it will in any way goad you more rapidly to action, that Professor Fansler and I are not of the same sex. Good afternoon to you.” Mark hung up the phone, “I give her fifteen minutes,” Mark said, “to check on us and the elevator. Shall we go over the catalogue, since the opportunity presents itself?”
“Mark, what do you think of Cudlipp?”
“He does his job, which is to represent the College, I do mine, which is to represent the Graduate School, Michaels, as chairman of the whole Department, complains about Cudlipp from time to time, but after all, everybody’s got to do his thing, doesn’t he?”
“I often ask myself,” Kate said, “—does he? Do you know anything about University College?”
“Sure,” Mark surprisingly said. “I’ve been letting its students into my classes lately; they’re good.”
“Funny, you never mentioned it,” Kate said.
“To tell you the truth, I’m not certain it’s kosher, so it seemed a case of least said soonest mended.”
“Do you think Cudlipp would object if he knew?”
“No doubt. But he can’t very well do anything about it, since the Graduate School doesn’t give credit, and what credit the University College gives is its decision. He makes damn sure no University College students take any College courses, or vice versa, and that’s exactly as far as he can go.”
“Why is he so against the University College? I know all about the question of resources, but his passion has deeper roots than the University’s operating deficit.”
“Mainly, I guess, he thinks the University College degree threatens the value of The College degree. He wants undergraduate education at the University to be absolutely elite, and all those adults returning with their tired brains to school threaten him.”
“Do I,” Kate asked, “hear the calls of rescuers?”
“Professor Everglade,” a voice called. “Switch the Emergency button to off, and push open the door.”
Mark looked at Kate and shrugged. “Well,” he said, “here goes. Are you prepared to dive down the shaft?” He switched the button and pushed at the inner door which, rather to his astonishment, opened. Below them, the door on the third floor had been pushed back. “Have you a lady in there?” the voice called. “Professor Fansler is with me,” Mark said, winking at Kate, “if that answers your question. The point, I gather,” he said to Kate, “is to drop down into their arms on the third floor but not into the elevator shaft. Chivalry demands that you go first, so that I may hand you down into their waiting arms. And we never even looked at the damn catalogue.”
It was typical of Kate’s post-revolutionary attitudes that being caught in an elevator, which might, at one time, have been an adventure, was now not even material for an anecdote. She rushed up the stairs from the third floor to her office on the eighth, apologized for her lateness, and plunged into interviews with four students from University College who hoped to register for her course in Victorian literature. She recognized John Peabody from the luncheon arranged by Bill McQuire. He introduced the others: Barbara Campbell, Greta Gabriel, and Randolph Selkirk. “No doubt,” Mr. Peabody said, “you want to know something about us, how we come to be at University College, why we want to take your course, stuff like that. It’s probably simplest if we just start in and tell you about ourselves.” To Kate, who had been uncertain what inquiries she might decently make, given, particularly, her profound disinclination to ask personal questions, this blunt prelude was a distinct relief.
“We,” Mr. Peabody began, “have all returned to college after what is known as a voluntary interruption in our education—though the word voluntary has to be pretty broadly defined. Anyway, we weren’t bounced out of college, we bounced ourselves. And when, in the fullness of time, we decided to return to college, the last thing we wanted was dormitory life, rah-rah games, anybody being in loco parentis or the company of eighteen-year-olds. To us, therefore, University College seemed a kind of miracle. There aren’t many adult schools in the whole country, not many even in New York—schools which give degrees, and aren’t just places to take courses and wile away the time. University College has no athletic requirements, no organized social life, and some of us are a bit shaky at math at the time of our entrance examination. But we are all in college because we have decided to be; we are, as the saying goes, highly motivated; and most of us are even pretty bright. I might add, though Barbara can tell you more about this, that the women students are looking for a bachelor’s degree, not for a bachelor.”
Barbara Campbell was stunning, beautifully dressed, and appeared to be in her early twenties. “I’m fairly typical, I guess,” she said with a smile which acknowledged that she certainly didn’t look typical. “I went to an excellent prep school where I was mainly interested in what our antedeluvian headmistress used to call ‘the lads,’ and then to Bennington, where I spent three years—almost; I quit in the middle of my third year. I discovered at Bennington that I enjoyed thinking, and that if you work there are plenty of people who will encourage you. I worked like a demon for five days, when, since we were all girls, it wasn’t necessary to wash your hands or feet or even face if you didn’t feel like it, and every weekend I spent away from the campus with a man.
“Partly, I began to realize that I had been in an intellectual and emotional cocoon for years, and partly I just wanted to bouleverse les parents—at which I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. They objected to the fact that I was living with a guy, they even objected to the guy, which at least made some sense, and they said if I didn’t give him up they would stop paying for college or anything else. I didn’t and they did. After a time I got tired of the guy, and of working in the glamour trades, and I began to want to study again. I saved enough money and here I am. My parents have since come round, but I don’t take any money from them, though I have been known to accept an occasional lavish present. If I took their money they would assume, however tacitly, that I had accepted their values, and I haven’t. I want to take your course because I’ve heard you’re great, and tough, and it recently occurred to me how like a harem Bennington was. I don’t mean just that all the faculty was sleeping with the students, I mean that all the faculty was male, and that the whole spirit behind the place was of girls sitting at the feet of men. I find the idea of a woman teacher invigorating. End of my speech—I’m to introduce Greta.”
Greta Gabriel was in her middle forties, Kate guessed. Her story resembled Polly Spence’s, though she had not yet reached the grandmother phase and was not from the upper reaches of New York society. She was a suburban housewife who had decided that her life of being maid, chauffeur, and emotional wastebasket was insufficiently inspiring. Everything about her new academic life was difficult, from the commuting to the pressures of her life’s multitudinous demands, but she felt alive for the first time in years, and indicated her gratitude for the uniqueness of University College, which allowed her really to work, not to dabble, and agreed to reward her work with a degree.
Randolph Selkirk was more unexpected. “I was at Yale,” he said, “getting A’s in everything and working all day six days a week to do it. I had a girl and one day she broke off with me, saying I wasn’t human enough for her. It took me several weeks to calm down and discover it was quite true—I wasn’t human enough for anyone. I stopped working so hard, and finally took a leave from Yale and went to work teaching in a slum school; then I married the girl, who had begun to find me more human. We had a baby, which seemed to us a proper affirmation of life, and after a time I wanted to return to school, and this was the only place that wasn’t an undergraduate society for boys or a series of money-making courses for bored adults. My wife is working to help me finish, and I can’t begin to understand why they should want to get rid of this place—University College, I mean. Still, I’ve observed that the boys from the College are radical enough when it comes to occupying buildings, but not when it comes to supporting an institution which might challenge the status of their own degrees. I’ve noticed nobody minds being revolutionary when he doesn’t think he has anything to lose. Forgive the cynicism. If you want to know why I’d like to take this course, it’s because I’m particularly interested in the ideas of the Victorian period.”
Kate leaned back in her chair and regarded the four of them. It seemed to her, oddly, that life had walked into her academic world, impressing her as not even the police or occupying students had done. She understood why McQuire found impressive the fact that University College students had been the only ones to feel loyalty to their school. Of course, she had sensed it from the beginning—which was why she had let McQuire drag her to that lunch and entice her into conversations with Frogmore. “ ‘Your presence exactly,’ ” Kate thought, looking at them, “ ‘so once, so valuable, so very now.’ ”
“You are welcome to the course,” she simply said.
What with further student conferences, a delegation from the student-faculty committee on curriculum, a good many frantic telephone calls, and similar distractions, Kate was not able even to ascertain if there was a wind, let alone the direction in which it was blowing. At four o’clock, the hour of the Senior Faculty Committee meeting, she left her office and stopped off in the faculty ladies’ room where she found Emilia Airhart looking at herself dubiously in a mirror. She turned, apparently with relief, to contemplate Kate. “How lucky you are!” she surprisingly said.
“I?” Kate asked. “I’m feeling lucky at the moment, for personal reasons. Does it show?”
Emilia Airhart laughed. “Probably,” she said, “but I don’t know you well enough to tell. Congratulations, whatever it is. The luck to which I referred had to do with your willowyness—I have always longed to be willowy; if only one could design oneself, instead of turning out to be some dreadful preordained shape. I would, like you, be tall and slim, with my hair gathered at the nape of my neck, attractive without being charming. You mustn’t be insulted by the last item, which is, from me, a compliment. I dislike charm, having accepted Camus’ definition of it: the ability to get the answer yes without having asked a question. I prefer people who have to form questions. Still, it is agonizing to have the soul of Greta Garbo in the body of Queen Victoria. Ergo, lucky you.”
Kate laughed. “You don’t look a bit like Queen Victoria,” she said.
“Of course I do, if you could picture Queen Victoria in panty hose with flat shoes and her skirts above her knees. I take it you are going to the Senior Faculty Committee meeting?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “And for once in my life I don’t wish I could think of an excuse not to. I go with a purpose: I’ve decided to do what I can for the University College. Do you know anything about it?”
“Haven’t a clue; ought I to have?”
“Probably,” Kate said. “But there isn’t time to go into it now. The College is trying to kill it off, which is rather too bad, I think.”
“Nasty old Cudlipp, I suppose. Terrible man. If only he were more like Pnin.”
“Who?”
“You know, Pnin, the man in Nabokov’s novel. Cudlipp looks just like him, but, alas, couldn’t be more different. I hardly like to say that if Cudlipp and Clemance are for something, I’m against it—it sounds so unscholarly and prejudiced, which it is—but at least I’m leaning in your direction, if that’s any comfort.”
“It’s some,” Kate said. “By the way, as to my being lucky, I’m getting married. I haven’t told anyone in the Department yet, but I’ll have to soon. Perhaps it’s being unmarried that’s kept me thin.”
“Congratulations, or whatever the proper phrase is, though in a way I’m sorry.” Kate raised an interrogative eyebrow. “Don’t misunderstand me, but you’re the only woman I’ve ever known who seemed unmarried as a wonderful choice, the combined influence of Artemis, Aphrodite, and Athene all in one. Please don’t be offended.”
“On the contrary,” Kate said. “I’m honored.” Emilia gave a pleased grin and preceded Kate out the door. But Kate stopped a moment in the hall. “You know,” she said, “Forster says in one of his novels that the abandonment of personality can be a prelude to love; for most women I think it certainly is. You’ve made me see that, for me, it hasn’t been.”
“Do you like Forster?” Emilia Airhart asked. “I see you do; he’s too effete for me. But he did say once that life is a performance on a violin which one has to learn to play as he goes along. A remarkable description of our times.”
“Gentle, perhaps,” Kate said, “not effete.”
The Senior Faculty Committee of the English Department, which comprised all tenured members of the Department, used, in pre-revolutionary days, to meet several times a semester for the purpose of discussing promotions and additions to the faculty. While these meetings were grim enough, in all conscience, a certain degree of cordiality prevailed, so that, as Kate used to say, though it might be clear that one professor thought another a tiresome, pontificating, and deluded bore, he did not openly indicate this opinion. Since last spring, however, fatigue and the plethora of meetings which the process of restructuring inevitably entailed had taken their hostages, which were, as always, good will, courtesy, and graciousness. The professors were exhausted, and exhausted people are easily made first angry and then rude.
To make matters worse, exhaustion bred not only bad temper but long-windedness. The inability of certain men, once they had got to their feet, to finish a statement and sit down, amounted, in Kate’s view, to a disease as incurable as satyriasis and far more socially dangerous. She knew, as she seated herself in the room, that scarcely would Michaels, the chairman, have rustled his papers and made the few desperate grunts, punctuated by giggles, which constituted his reaction to exhaustion, than Plimsole would be on his feet and away. In fact, he was.
Plimsole was concerned, as he had been for months, as to whether teaching assistants should be considered primarily as students, which they were, or as teachers, which they were also. The question was certainly of importance and was one, moreover, on which the radical faculty felt a consuming passion the conservative faculty was not prepared to match. This, perhaps more than anything else, annoyed Professor Plimsole. Kate could well infer from the looks on the faces of those about her that had the senior faculty had an opportunity to hear Mr. Plimsole before his promotion, that event might well have never taken place. It was, Kate thought, a mark of the need for this revolution that the faculty of departments like this never met, and the senior members never really heard the junior members at all. But, since last spring, all the meetings except those of the Senior Faculty Committees had been open to junior faculty and the long-winded Mr. Plimsoles might in the future be more successfully nipped in the bud.
“I really do feel,” Mr. Plimsole began, “that this body must come to a decision about the professional autonomy of teaching assistants. It is not that I anticipate another series of events like those which rocked this institution last spring; indeed, I would hate my colleagues to think I spoke in anticipation or even expectation of any such event, but I also do feel that we cannot allow our teaching assistants to remain in doubt as to their actual professional standing, and they are professionals, we must face that, for certainly the teaching assistants come into direct contact with students, both in actual teaching duties and in the correction of papers, and it is surely insufferable and insulting that they should be loaded with the responsibilities of teaching and then be treated as students if they are found, for example, occupying a building, though as I have indicated I do not bring this subject up because I think buildings are likely to be occupied in the near future. But once we have co-opted them into our profession they must be treated professionally and not summarily dismissed as teachers because as students they have acted against what they consider inequitable policies on the part of the administration, whether or not those of us here consider the policies of the recent administration to have been inequitable or not . . .”
“His hat!” Emilia Airhart, who had risen, shouted. “His hat!” For a moment there was stunned silence as everyone tried to absorb the evident fact that Professor Airhart had flipped; Mr. Plimsole was certainly not wearing a hat, discourtesy having failed, as yet, to extend that far. Professor Airhart, having delivered her interruption, sat down again. Mr. Plimsole, as though he were an old mechanical Victrola, could be seen, metaphorically speaking, to be winding himself up again. But Professor Cartier, whose succinctness no revolution could undermine, bounced up just in time.
“Mrs. Airhart, whose field is contemporary drama, refers to a speech by a character called Lucky in Waiting for Godot: those of you interested in the reference may have time to look it up this evening if this meeting is allowed to get on with its agenda. I congratulate Mrs. Airhart on the appositeness of her remarks, and remind Mr. Plimsole that the question of teaching assistants occupying buildings is properly the business of the Committee on Graduate Studies. I would like to put before this committee the promotion of Professors Levy and Genero, presently teaching in the University College.” He sat down as abruptly as he had stood up. Kate grinned. She remembered, as no doubt did all her colleagues, Lucky’s speech, which, while it made less syntactical sense than Mr. Plimsole’s, achieved at least the adumbration of significance.
Carrier’s remark, as was inevitable, brought Jeremiah Cudlipp to his feet. “If Mr. Plimsole’s contentions are misplaced before this committee, and I agree that they are [glare at Mr. Plimsole which Kate wanted to regret for his sake, but could not], so are those of Mr. Cartier. Assistant professors teaching in the University College cannot be considered for tenure by this committee until it is established that the University College is, in fact, a continuing part of the University. I suggest that it is not a continuing part, and ought not so to be considered by this committee.” He sat down. Kate heaved a sigh. The fat was in the fire or, as McQuire would have said, the four-letter-word-bathroom had hit the fan. Michaels, the chairman, giggled, rustled his papers, and drew in his breath to speak. In vain. Clemance had risen to his feet.
“I support Professor Cudlipp,” he said, as though that might be news to anyone, “but,” and every head in the room came expectantly up, “I think perhaps we ought honestly to confront the problem before us. I have a sense of polarization having divided this committee, and that sense is profoundly disturbing to me. I think we ought to listen to what Professor Cartier has to say, and indeed to what any of us may have to say on this question, even if we cannot today vote to recommend the promotion of people in a school which may not for long exist.”
At this precise moment—it was probably not planned that way, but Kate wouldn’t put it past them—the door opened and Robert O’Toole entered. The myrmidons were gathering. Kate looked at Clemance. Why, she thought, is your conscience bothering you? Bless you. Robert O’Toole’s thoughts, however, were clearly far from wishing to convey a blessing.
“I’m afraid I can’t agree with Frederick,” O’Toole said, calling Clemance by his first name. “It seems to me inevitable that his great-heartedness should lead him to such a sense of openness, and equally inevitable that we, his more narrow-minded friends, should recall him to the fundamental accuracy of things.”
Professor Cartier again rose to his feet. “Mr. O’Toole’s ability to answer questions he hasn’t heard is certainly worthy of admiration. I should like to repeat my recommendation that we consider for possible promotion Professor Levy. He has done excellent work in the Victorian field, and if I understand correctly departmental needs at the moment, we could use a man in the Victorian period.”
“I thought Professor Levy’s book on Wilkie Collins excellent,” Michaels said. “Have any of the rest of you read it?”
“I have,” O’Toole said, extending his arms from his French cuffs and examining his fingernails. “It’s a good enough book in its way, modest, unexceptional, competent, but small in its ambition. One can’t condemn it nor, I think, is one inclined to praise it extravagantly.” At this point someone tapped Kate’s shoulder and handed her a note; it said, “Whatever that pompous s.o.b. is for, I’m against. EA.” Kate grinned her appreciation of the sentiments expressed, and stuffed the paper into her purse. Several senior professors now began to argue about Mr. Levy’s book and Kate, sensing some moments’ respite, rested her eyes on Clemance. Was O’Toole, in a sense, a comment on Frederick Clemance, an inevitable commentary which now, like the notes to “The Waste Land,” had to be considered along with the original document? O’Toole had been one of Clemance’s most brilliant, most loved students, and had returned the affection wholeheartedly, not least by adopting every mannerism of Clemance’s for his own. But he could never learn to temper his arrogance as Clemance had learned. Or would he learn in time? When Kate had first known Clemance, after all, when she had first sat in his seminar, Clemance had been almost as near to fifty as O’Toole was now to forty. Could ten years make that much difference? Kate doubted it.
The news of O’Toole’s deanship was apparently not yet general. But that O’Toole had himself decided that the success of his tenure depended upon the demise of the University College was beyond question. At this point Professor Peter Packer Pollinger could be heard sputtering through his mustache; slowly the group’s attention focused on him. “Why’s he against it?” Professor Pollinger was asking the world in general.
“Are you addressing me, sir?” Clemance mildly asked.
“ ‘What is it that is moving so softly to and fro?’ I asked,” Professor Pollinger said.
Clemance regarded Professor Pollinger as though, were sufficient attention paid, some meaning might be discerned; the hope, however, proved illusory. “Is that a quotation,” he patiently asked, “perhaps from some misty Maeterlinck-like drama?” This question, which was not intended to be, and was not delivered as though it was, insulting, aroused Professor Peter Packer Pollinger to the highest reaches of indignation.
“Mist be damned,” he said. “It is a question of symbolism, whoever you are. Same as the English toward the Irish; pure snobbism. That adult college is a symbol to you, and you and you,” he nodded, causing his mustache to quiver as he indicated Clemance, Cudlipp, and O’Toole. “I know the reason. Cudlipp went to University College himself when it was still just a group of extension courses, after they threw him out of the College and before they took him back. I thought Levy’s book large and exceptional, and I am inclined to praise it extravagantly. You,” he said to O’Toole, “are lost in an obscure wood.” He puffed again through his mustache, leaving his on the whole pleased audience to infer that the obscure wood occurred in one of Miss Macleod’s misty dramas.
“Surely,” Clemance continued, “we are wandering rather from the point. At least,” he added, anticipating another outburst, “from my point. Whatever our views may be on the University College, they are not the most germane points to be made at the present time. The Administrative Council has, I believe, undertaken to study the needs of the University as a whole. Doubtless we will all be asked to present our points of view, if any. Meanwhile, it seems to me perhaps irregular to consider promoting to tenure assistant professors whose service is entirely in a school whose future in the University is problematical.”
Are you just trying to smooth it all over? Kate thought. She wondered if Peter Packer Pollinger’s allegations against Cudlipp could possibly be true. Interesting. Professor Goddard, who taught medieval literature and whose specialty was Piers Plowman, rose to his feet.
“I don’t follow Professor Clemance’s reasoning at all. In the first place, it is our business to promote people on the basis of their ability and possible service to the Department, not on the future of any school in the University. In the second place, I am on the Council to which Professor Clemance refers, and I don’t think I’m betraying any confidences by saying that the Council is also studying whether or not The College has a place today in an urban university like this, whose reputation has been made largely through its graduate offerings. I don’t mind saying that my own inclination is to consider that a college for adults is more to the point in New York than a college for overgrown schoolboys from whose ranks, I need not remind all of you, came most of the instigators of last spring’s disturbances.”
Into the awed silence which followed this remark Kate spoke. “I wondered,” she said, “how many of us here do, in fact, have students from University College in our classes. The College, as we know, has always avoided cross-listing courses with the Graduate School, but I have only recently learned that University College does, in fact, encourage students to enter many of our courses. How many here do have University College students in their classes?”
“I might add,” Michaels said, “that such a show of hands will be unofficial, and its results not recorded in our minutes. Is it all right with you, Professor Fansler, if your question remains unrecorded too?”
“Certainly,” Kate said. “I asked it for my own information, and so that I might follow it with another question, also off the record if you like, at least for the present: How good are those students?”
Tentatively at first, and then with more assurance as the number of hands in the air increased, the professors indicated the presence of University College students in their classes. Professor Peter Packer Pollinger was of course one of the first to raise a triumphant hand, whether because he knew it would annoy Clemance or because he had found a Macleod admirer was not, nor ever likely to be, clear. “And have you found them to be good students, or poor students, or merely satisfactory?”
“I object,” Cudlipp shouted, running a hand over his bald head. He had a habit of throwing back his bald head as though he had, in fact, long hair which dangled in his eyes. “The question is irrelevant.”
“Nonsense,” Professor Goddard shouted, “Piers Plowman may, as my students persistently tell me, lack relevancy, but if you are damning a part of this University to extinction, I fail to see how it can be irrelevant to discuss the quality of its students. Perhaps Professor Cudlipp can enlighten me.”
“Before Professor Cudlipp enlightens us,” Michaels, the chairman, said, “may I be allowed a few words? I don’t know if you are aware that I am running this Department, which is twice as big as the Business School, and almost twice as large as the Law School, with no administrative staff whatever—the Law School, I may remind you, has five deans, the Business School six—and I am teaching two courses in Victorian poets at the same time. Mr. Levy, whom, because he is in my field, I know better than I know Mr. Genero, would be able to help me considerably not only with my dissertation load, but with certain administrative tasks in the department. Though none of you can be expected to know it, Mr. Levy is a first-rate administrator. If we are to promote people on the basis of their usefulness to the English Department, I would like to point out that, whatever the abilities of the students in the University College, Mr. Levy is to be highly recommended.”
“I would like to second that,” Mark Everglade said. “Mr. Genero, as it happens, is in my field, which is Comparative Renaissance, he is fluent in Italian and speaks and reads five other languages as well, and if I am to continue as Secretary I would like to suggest that his usefulness to me can scarcely be overestimated. Let me add, while I have the floor, that the students from University College who have been in my classes have been first-rate and have been, compared to the boys from the College, possessed of a higher degree of motivation and a considerably lower degree of arrogance.”
Cudlipp leaped to his feet. “I move that this meeting be adjourned,” he shouted.
“I second the motion,” O’Toole said.
“Now wait a minute,” Cartier shouted.
“Motions for adjournment are not debatable,” Cudlipp announced. Indeed, the faculty had learned Robert’s Rules of Order in recent months.
“We shall have to take a vote,” Michaels said. “All in favor of adjournment signify by saying ‘Aye.’ ” There was a loud chorus of ‘Ayes.’ “Opposed.”
“No,” several voices trumpeted.
“The ‘Ayes’ have it,” Michaels said. “This meeting is adjourned.” He gathered up his papers and marched from the room lest any inclination to continue the discussion manifest itself.
“Interesting,” Kate said to Mark Everglade, “and thanks for your support.”
“It was heartfelt,” Mark said, “and not at all disinterested. I’m conniving for Genero’s assistance in a desperate way.”
“What astonished me,” Kate said, “is how many we’ve obviously got on our side—the side, I mean, of University College. The support is much greater than I dared think. Of course, alas and alack, Cudlipp must be aware of this as fully as I. What do you think he’ll do next?”
“What you taught me to do in the elevator,” Everglade said, “remembering, in your Proustian way, the stories your father told.” Kate stared at him. “He’ll go straight to the President,” Everglade explained, “together with Clemance, the University’s most renowned adornment, and O’Toole, Dean of the College—yes, I was passed a note during the meeting. Speaking to the President directly works for getting out of elevators, discovering train schedules, and killing schools and promotions.”
“Does Cudlipp really have that much power?”
“He does. What is more, all Michaels and I have been able to threaten him with is our resignations from the administrative posts in the Department we so reluctantly occupy; and since Cudlipp would be only too delighted to take on those duties himself, with all that means for his enemies, our threats can scarcely be dignified by the term idle.”
“Golly,” Kate said.
“So,” Everglade asked, “what else is new?”
“As it happens,” Kate said, “I’m getting married.”
Enjoying the impact of this as a curtain line, Kate, who was still eschewing elevators, ran down the stairs and out of Baldwin, again to meet Polly Spence.
“I was on my way to see you,” Polly Spence said, “absolutely on my way. Have you heard the news from the Linguistics Department?”
“They’ve disproved Verner’s Law,” Kate ventured; “they’ve discovered long E never shifted after all.”
“It’s almost that amazing. They’re firing the only specialist they have in the English language because they might have to give him tenure and he’s primarily associated with University College.”
“The words are familiar,” Kate said, “and I even think I recognize the tune.”
“Which will mean,” Polly went on, “actually mean that the Linguistics Department will have a specialist in Chinese and not in English—can you believe it?”
“Oddly enough, I can,” Kate said. “Who objects to the promotion from University College, have you heard?”
“Well, of course, I’m just a lowly teaching assistant, and none of my news can be called from the horse’s mouth, or even from his immediate neighborhood, but the general word is that The College objects, and especially the new dean who looms on the horizon, though he is as yet nameless.”
“I believe,” Kate said, “I could put a name to him. Polly, you’ve actually come up with something lunch at the Cosmo wouldn’t cure. Give my love to Winthrop and I’ll give yours to Reed.”
“Who’s Reed?” Polly Spence called.
“My husband, more or less,” Kate called back, leaving Polly open-mouthed and speechless on the steps of Baldwin Hall.