The thing was, even though the proceedings were secret, the testimony was only secret up to a point. She didn’t receive names, or dates, or the time periods when a student may have been in her classes, but she did receive the accusations themselves. Up to now, most of them had been trivial and embarrassing. Someone had complained that she showed far too much approval of feudalism, because it implied that she opposed “the legitimate aspirations of poor people and people of color.” Someone had complained that she called on men with their hands raised more often than she called on women—who could possibly know if that was true or not? Had there been a student in one of her classes counting the other students who were called on to speak and writing it all down in a notebook in preparation for a time like now? That wasn’t the kind of thing the university would take seriously, and it wasn’t the kind of thing Drew Harrigan had been complaining of. This, however, was:
The entire thrust of Professor Standish’s course in Church and State in the Europe of the High Middle Ages was to insult Christian students and call them evil and stupid. She spent some time in almost every class talking about how the Middle Ages proved that Christians should not be in charge of governments and Christianity would also produce tyranny and torture if it got any power. She compared the situation in the Middle Ages to the political work of the Religious Right now, saying that the Religious Right was the same as the witchburners and Inquisitionists who had killed hundreds of people for their beliefs in the twelfth century. She referred to the President of the United States as somebody who thought he was on a Crusade. When students protested her bias, she told them they either agreed with her or were too stupid to see the parallels.
There was more, but the more there was, the more ridiculous it got. At one point, the writer complained that Alison did not “respect” his belief that witches were real and consorted with Satan, but tried to push her “secular humanism” on him and every other student in the class. As if she were supposed to just nod and make encouraging noises when students claimed to see ghosts or experience levitation. Maybe she was. Maybe that was what the New University was all about. Hammered by the left and the right, they weren’t supposed to teach any longer, and they surely weren’t supposed to uphold the traditions of high literacy and the Western Enlightenment. Civilization as they knew it was over. Everything really was political now.
I’m going insane, Alison told herself. Then she picked up the two-page “testimony,” held it carefully with the thumb and index finger of her right hand, as if it were contaminated, and got up to go down the hall to the chairman’s office. Alison knew better than to start with Roger Hollman. He had a secretary who could keep her out. She’d start with Chris McCall, and he could deal with it.
Chris’s office was an office like any other. The door was open when he was willing to see students, but Alison knew he was there even when the door was shut, working away on his latest paper on Icons of Individualism in Twentieth-Century American Popular Culture. The door was shut. She turned the knob and walked right in.
“What the hell?” Chris said.
Alison closed the door behind her. “I would have knocked, but you’d have pretended you weren’t here. We have to talk.”
Chris was an athletic, middle-aged man with a ponytail, an atavism, really, a throwback to the days when middle-aged men actually believed they looked younger if they never saw a barber. Alison threw the “testimony” down on his desk and sat down herself.
“Look at that.”
Chris didn’t. He just looked uncomfortable. “I have looked at it. They sent me a copy.”
“Well?”
“How do I know?” Chris said. “It’s important to give the students a safe place to express their opinions. That’s what the investigating committee is doing. It’s important to hear them out and respect—”
“—Respect what, Chris? Whoever this is thinks witches are real. Not Wiccan-practicing modern witches, but the kind that ride on broomsticks and have sex with Satan.”
“Yes, well. Evangelical students, the ones who take the Bible literally.”
“What, Chris? They’re supposed to come here and never get that idea challenged? Should we shut down the entire Religious Studies Department? We might as well shut down History, Archeology, Geology, and Biology while we’re at it.”
“That’s not the point,” Chris said. “The point is whether you called this student stupid for being a Christian believer. I mean, for God’s sake, Alison. You know what it’s been like around here since the water buffalo mess. We can barely breathe in the direction of conservative students without the administration having a complete fit.”