Hardscrabble Road(116)

This room, Alison thought, was exactly what you would expect the office of a two-time Nobel Prize winner to be like. There were books everywhere, and not only books related to his field. There was Aristotle and Kant and Heidegger. There was Jane Austen and James Joyce. There was a copy of Einstein’s essays on society and politics. If they gave you something besides a check to mark your Nobel Prize—a plaque, or certificate, or a statue— that wasn’t here. She folded her arms across her chest and looked back at Jig. He was exactly what you would expect him to be, too. The intellectual giant as Brahmin WASP. The genius as preppie.

“I came,” she said, “to find out why you told Drew Harrigan I was discriminating against my students with conservative views.”

Jig didn’t even blink. “Why do you think I did that?”

“I don’t know, but I’m sure you did. I don’t think you went to the administration, or the department. Once the accusation is made, it takes on a life of its own. But I think you told Drew Harrigan that. I think you fed him the original story. That’s why you came to my office the other day.”

“I came to warn you about Ellen Harrigan’s list.”

“I don’t think so,” Alison said. “I wasn’t in danger from Ellen Harrigan’s list. If I’d thought about it for two seconds, I would have realized that. Gregor Demarkian came to see me. The police are no more interested in me than they are in the Easter Bunny. And why should they be? I never met the man. Either man, I suppose it is now.”

“I was trying to be helpful to a fellow sufferer from Drew Harrigan’s allegations.”

“I don’t think you ever suffered from Drew Harrigan’s allegations,” Alison said. “You’re untouchable, really. You’d have to rape a child to get into any real trouble on this campus. You’ve got the two Nobel prizes. You’ve got tenure. You’ve got the political books, and they sell, which means they probably also make money. I went on the Internet and paid twenty-nine ninety-five to join Drew Harrigan’s Web site. Then I listened to a bunch of the archived programs. It wasn’t just me. There was a woman in the Spanish Department who got accused of teaching the Inquisition from a Marxist perspective, a man in the Philosophy Department who got nailed for supposedly having said that the United States was the greatest danger to human life the world has ever known, a man in the Sociology Department who was called out for supposedly saying that the family was obsolete and ought to be abolished. Do you know what they all had in common?”

“What?”

“They were all pretty obscure, and the complaints came from their upper-level and graduate courses. In other words, the courses with the fewest number of students in them.”

“So?”

“So the probabilities are low that it would have happened that way that many times,” Alison said. “The more you look at just who Drew Harrigan went after at Penn over the last year and a half, the more it looks like an inside job. We had Angela Davis come and speak at this campus not six months ago, and Drew Harrigan never mentioned it. Do you want to tell me what it is you were trying to do?”

“Why do you think it was me who was trying to do something? Even if your analysis is correct, and in my opinion it’s logically weak to the point of feebleness—”

“—Oh, stop,” Alison said. “Nobody else came to me. Nobody else ‘warned’ me. Nobody wanted to find out how I was feeling. Of course it was you. The question is, why was it you?”

“I was a victim, too, you know,” Jig said.

“Nonsense,” Alison said. “You throw your ideas out there for all to see and somebody attacks them; that’s not being a victim, that’s being a part of the debate. I was damned near a real victim. I had an inquiry launched into my teaching, into my integrity—”

“—A secret inquiry,” Jig said quickly.

“I know.”

“But don’t you see, that’s the point,” Jig said. He got up so suddenly, Alison flinched. “Secret inquiries. Speech codes. Star Chamber proceedings where the accused is presumed guilty until proven innocent and isn’t even allowed to know who is testifying against him. Do you know how that looks in the outside world, how it looks to our students?”

“Yes, it looks terrible,” Alison said. “The speech codes should be abolished. More professors should do what I did when faced with secret inquiries and threaten to sue. Why does that justify giving Drew Harrigan lies to spout on his radio program about people who’ve done nothing wrong in the first place?”