Hardscrabble Road(72)

She went to the desk and picked it up. It was from “the office of the chairman,” as if the chairman had an office. God, but Roger could be so damned pretentious. It only got worse when he wrote his articles, which tended to be heavy on the “transformative experience” of “trangressive texts.” The fad for postmodernism and deconstruction was waning, and Alison thought it couldn’t come too soon. She’d spent enough of her life listening to literature professors spout gibberish.

She looked at the envelope and frowned. She wanted to open it, but the man was still sitting there in her visitor’s chair, saying nothing, looking expectant. She put the envelope down again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You are—? Did we have an appointment?”

“Oh, no,” the man said. “I just—I looked you up on the system. These are your office hours. So I decided to come over. Under the circumstances.”

“Are there circumstances?” Alison asked. There was the envelope, waiting for her. She couldn’t have been fired. Getting a tenured professor fired was damned near impossible. Other things could have happened to her, though. She could have been censured, or suspended. She could have been put on monitoring, which would mean that a representative of the university would sit in on all her classes to make sure she didn’t say something she shouldn’t. She’d never heard of that happening at Penn, but it had happened other places. On the other hand, it was usually the diversity coordinator or somebody like that who did the monitoring, and those people were more concerned with professors who hated left-wing students than the ones who hated right-wing students. Maybe the right-wing students had their own monitor who could be brought in if the occassion demanded it. Alison didn’t hate left-wing students or right-wing students. Mostly, she didn’t even know which were which.

“You can open that if you want,” the man said. “I don’t mind.”

“No, no,” Alison said. “It’s all right. I’m sorry to be so rude. I’m afraid I don’t remember you.”

“We’ve never met. I’m Jig Tyler.”

“Oh,” Alison said, and thought: Good grief, the great man himself, two Nobel prizes, the Fields Medal, five bestselling books. She put the envelope down again and held out her hand. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. I mean, I did, a little; you looked familiar but I couldn’t place you. I’m Alison Standish. I’m very happy to meet you.”

Jig Tyler had stood up and taken her hand. He gave it a good quick shake and let go. “You’d better sit down and read that letter. You’ll feel better or worse depending on whether you’ve heard the news.”

Alison picked the letter back up again and opened it. No matter how thrilled she was to meet Dr. Tyler, she really wanted to know what was in this letter, and she wanted to know it now, not later. She sat down behind her desk and ripped it open. Roger was pretentious, but not ridiculous. The letter started Alison, and she immediately relaxed.

I’m glad to be able to tell you that the committee has looked into the allegations of the student in question and found them without foundation.


Alison wanted to fix the syntax—you didn’t use “found” and “foundation” in a single sentence with only two words separating them—but instead she chucked the letter onto her desk and looked up at Dr. Tyler in his chair.

“Relieved?” Jig Tyler said.

“Very,” Alison said. “Did you know what it was about?”

“About an allegation that you systematically discriminate against students with conservative views, brought out by a few broadcasts by Drew Harrigan. It’s all over campus that the department launched an inquiry and it’s been all over campus since this morning that they were going to abandon it. I take it you’re relieved.”

“Very. I know you’ve been in trouble like that a dozen times, but I don’t have two Nobels to fall back on.”

“I take it you haven’t heard the news,” Jig Tyler said.

“If you mean the news that Harrigan is dead, yes, I’ve heard it,” Alison said. “It’s a terrible thing.”

“Boot up your computer and get online. You need to see something.”

Alison swiveled her chair to the side and tapped at the keyboard, sending the screen saver, a picture of the cathedral at Rheims, shuddering. The desktop appeared and she clicked on the Internet connection, which came up immediately, since the university was on a cable system and not on dial up anymore. She rather missed the sound of dial up, the way she rather missed the sound printers used to make before they got the silent ones.