Where Drowned Things Live. Susan Thistlethwaite
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 felt that the idea that the “classics” represented disinterested “truth” in Western culture were countered by those who pointed out how these classics valorized slavery, the oppression of women and LGBTQ people and greased the skids for colonial exploitation for millions around the world. They were in turn dismissed as “hopelessly PC.” Adelaide brushed that aside as so much nonsense and kept on questioning. Grimes was sure truth was objective and he had the lock on it. I’d seen the reading list for his introductory class on Ethics. No women, minorities or “third world” authors need apply. And certainly no Queer theory ever crossed his mind.
Adelaide looked impassively at Grimes, but I noticed her hands on the table were clenching and unclenching, a sure sign of agitation in her. Grimes noticed too, but he plowed on.
“Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if this self-study enabled us to enlarge our department, given the kinds of substantive classes we teach.”
“Who?” Adelaide’s sharp voice cut through the room. The one syllable stopped Grimes like somebody had attached a chain to his axle.
“Who? What do you mean who?” he blustered.
“Look. Harold. If it’s not a raid then it will be a plant. And what gets foisted on to us depends wholly on who writes this self-study and who ultimately will determine the content. That’s what this discussion is about, isn’t it? You have somebody in mind to add to our department. Maybe you and the Dean together have somebody you’d like to add to this department and this self-study is the fig-leaf that will cover that maneuver.”
Whoa. Made sense to me, but also made me want to crawl under the table. When mastodons clash, the calves run for cover.
But I hadn’t reckoned with Donald Willie, Professor of Psychology and Religion. Donald verbally stepped between them.
“I think both of you are making good points.”
Maybe we should get a sign for the conference room door that said “Counseling Session in Progress.”
“I think we should do a self-assessment and I do think the whole department should have input. Can we turn this to a discussion of what sub-committees we would need here and who would be available for what? That way we can break through this impasse and move the discussion along.”
Donald’s voice came reasonably and softly from between his mustache and beard. He referred to himself as a “Jungian,” and as far as I could tell that meant he spent a lot of time on dreams and on the unconscious. Well, since this meeting was alternately traumatizing me and threatening to render me unconscious from boredom, I thought he was our best bet for cutting through to some kind of conclusion so we could get out of here sometime this week.
Grimes looked at Donald for nearly a full minute and everybody, including Adelaide, kept quiet. Grimes started patting his pockets, eventually finding pipe, tobacco, damper and the other impedimenta of the pipe smoker. I couldn’t help myself. I looked at the prominent “No Smoking” sign on the wall. Grimes didn’t seem to notice, however, and the fiddling didn’t result in a pipe to smoke. It resulted in a pipe with which to gesture at Willie.
“I’m sure that’s a very productive suggestion Donald and thank you for making it.”
With that the unlit pipe and the other equipment went back into his pockets and Donald was effectively dismissed.
“I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. What’s really needed as we begin this process is a survey of the students who take courses in our department as part of their overall humanities distribution requirement, which classes have been and continue to be the best subscribed, which group of classes produce the most majors and so forth.”
Grimes tapped a stack of papers in front of him.
“This is a set of guidelines on conducting the self-study; the guidelines are also on your faculty page on the website. Self-study, we believe, means nothing less than that we study ourselves.”
Adelaide snorted, but let Grimes continue.
A slight flush on Grimes’ cheek betrayed he’d heard the snort, but he didn’t glance in her direction.
“Let’s take this back, say, at least ten years.”
Grimes looked around the table expectantly, still standing, legs akimbo in his ‘captain of the ship’ stance. Nobody saluted the captain and nobody took him up on