Hardscrabble Road(96)
“My guess is that they’re thinking that the Bible, being divinely inspired, is also divinely delivered, so that God prevents us from making mistakes we would make with ordinary texts.”
“You sound like you’re quoting somebody.”
“I am,” Gregor said. “I’m quoting Father Tibor Kasparian, who is the pastor of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church and a good friend of mine.”
“The Tibor Kasparian who wrote ‘The Aesthetic Roots of the Nestorian Controversy’?”
“I don’t know. The Nestorian controversy sounds right. He talks about Nestorians quite a lot. I just don’t understand him. My name is Gregor Demarkian, by the way.”
“I know,” Alison Standish said. “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. I recognized you from your photographs. And that would be the same Tibor Kasparian, by the way. I met him at a conference on The Problem of Art in a Time of Heresy. He’s an interesting man.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “He is.”
“I take it you’ve come about that list, and about that man who died. I didn’t know him. I didn’t know Drew Harrigan, either. I’ve got no idea why all this is happening to me.”
Gregor got down off the ladder and looked around. It was like being in Tibor’s apartment, in among the Serious Books. He saw English, French, German, Latin, Greek, and a few he didn’t recognize.
“Rob Benedetti’s people looked it up,” he said. Then he paused. “Rob is the district attorney. After the list came out, they looked it up. They said that Drew Harrigan had talked about you ‘repeatedly’ on his show, and called for you to be investigated for bias, and that the university had responded by opening an investigation.”
“I know.”
“That’s a fair indication of why all this is happening to you.”
“Except that Harrigan’s original accusation is part of what’s happening to me,” Alison said, “and I don’t understand why. I teach medieval literature and intellectual history. I’m not in the Women’s Studies program. The people in the Women’s Studies program don’t even like me. I’m too blindly wedded to the repressive hermeneutic of dominant heterosexism. Or something. I never get the jargon straight. My last book was about the influence of Scholastic theology on English common law.”
“From what I understood, Harrigan claimed that he was in contact with a student of yours who claimed that you deliberately gave lower grades to students with conservative political convictions.”
“I know. The problem is, I wouldn’t know which of my students had conservative political convictions to save my life. Modern politics doesn’t tend to come up in a course concentrating on marital imagery in medieval devotional poetry.”
“What about the student in question. Do you remember him?”
“I don’t even know if it was a him,” Alison said. “I’ve never had his name, and the university investigating committee wouldn’t give it to me short of a court order. Which, by the way, I was threatening to get. I’ve wracked my brains for weeks, but I can’t think of a single student in any class I’ve taught for the last five years who said anything at all about his politics one way or the other. I keep thinking that has to be wrong, somebody must have made an offhand comment during the last elections, and somebody probably did, but it didn’t stick with me. And if you’re about to ask me why somebody would go to all the trouble of contacting Drew Harrigan if that was the case, don’t bother. I don’t know.”
“What did you mean, the university wouldn’t give you the name of the complaining student?” Gregor asked.
“They wouldn’t,” Alison said. “That’s the way university inquiries are run. We’re better than the criminal justice system, you see. We’re really interested in getting to justice, and not just in a competition. It’s not an adversary system here.”
“So you aren’t allowed to face your accusers?”
“If they had to face me, they might be too intimidated to make the accusation.”
“That’s the idea,” Gregor said. “It helps guard against false accusations.”
“I know,” Alison said. “Which is why I was threatening a court order. They backed down after that, though. I knew they would. The public doesn’t understand the spirit of disinterested inquiry which is the function of the university, so they’re liable to get all worked up over what they mistakenly see as a university committee running roughshod over a professor’s due process rights.”