Tenure Track (2 page)

“
Jane, are you there?” Gary queried.

“
Oh, uh yeah.” She tried to shake off her initial shock. “What are the details? Is this just an overreacting parent or are we talking about something serious?”

“
Oh, it’s serious, and they have proof,” he said. “This could be very bad, Jane. Very bad. But I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. Can you meet me here on the hour?”

She agreed, then spent the next 25 minutes trying to convince herself that this would all turn out to be a mistake.

No way. Not Lewis, of all people.

Jane told Isobel that she would be out for an unspecified amount of time. Walking out the door of the department’s administrative office, she passed beneath a security camera camouflaged by a sign reading:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it — George Santayana, 1904.”
It was her favorite pithy response to obnoxious students who dared ask why they were required to take History courses.

She left Hammond Hall and quickly made her way across campus to the phallic limestone tower that housed most of the main administrative offices. The afternoon was sweltering, typical for the first day of classes under the hot August sun. The smell of freshly cut grass filled her nostrils. In the distance rumbled the faint sounds of weed whackers and leaf blowers used by the Spanish-speaking lawn care men who worked practically nonstop at minimum wage to keep the campus looking immaculate.

Just outside the main administrative building, she crossed the Commons
—
a large, grassy expanse where dozens of young men and women were lounging about, taking advantage of the sunshine to keep up their summer tans.
Aah, youth. Skin cancer be damned. Let’s try to get as brown as those maintenance men we never acknowledge.

It was amazing to her how, no matter how much changed in the world, some things always remained the same. Throughout her career, she had found that college students from generation to generation shared a propensity for testing their mortality. They had the impulsiveness of teenagers, coupled with the sudden freedom of living beyond the watchful eyes of their parents. The more parental types said that something was bad for them, the more they wanted to try it. As one of her otherwise well-disciplined students once explained about his smoking habit, “Ya gotta die of somethin’, why not lung cancer?” Jane had frequently overheard the same comment about cirrhosis of the liver from obviously heavy drinkers. At their age, death from a slow, painful disease was far away and abstract.

As a teacher, she had always found this aspect of student behavior to be just an amusing curiosity. As the parent of two high school seniors, it terrified her. Many times she had heard Gary exhort to nervous parents during frosh week: “Mom and Dad, it’s time to let your children pursue their own dreams, even if they differ from your own.” Next year she would be one of those parents. Increasingly these days she thought about the twins whenever she observed students on campus. In just one year her babies would be in the same position as these young bodies roasting themselves on the Commons.

God help them all.

Ironically, concerns about the decision-making skills of college students had indirectly resulted in her current trek—concerns born of the darkest day in the university’s 150-year history. Maintenance workers had expertly covered the physical stains left by Bloody Valentine’s Day, but the psychological marks remained. Campus violence experts declared the school lucky, in that the death toll had been limited to four, but the incident had forever shattered the collective sense that this campus was a safe haven in a violent world.

Revelations in the days following the murders had been even more shocking. From the start, experts had been baffled by Jessica Hampton’s deviation from the typical profile of most campus shooters. For one thing, she was female. The notoriety of having been the country’s first female campus mass murderer led to huge media scrutiny of Hampton’s life. The presence of Donald Pfeiser’s skull and crossbones drawing overlooking the crime scene lent an air of the supernatural to the event, further fueling public fascination. Then the lurid motivation became public, revealed in a videotaped recording Hampton had posted on her Web page about one hour before the shooting. Police investigations verified the troubled student’s claims on the video.

It seemed that the 52-year-old Donald Pfeiser, married with four children, had been carrying on an affair with Jessica Hampton. It had not been his first, as it turned out. The tall, balding engineering professor had a long history of bedding students, both male and female. In the weeks following the shooting, numerous former and current students came forward with their tales of “Don the Juan,” as he was apparently known. Seventeen year-old, virginal freshman Jessica Hampton had simply been one of his more emotionally fragile conquests. As Jessica recounted in her video, he had approached her during the first week of the semester, as she sat alone at a popular coffeehouse just off campus. Shy and homesick, she had been easily flattered by the attentions of the older man, whose initial fatherly concern helped ease her into seduction. “He was in my pants before mid-terms,” she had testified with shame.

The affair had lasted throughout much of the girl’s first semester at college, until Pfeiser tired of her increasing clinginess and attempts to contact him over Christmas break. He had finally ended the relationship in late January, coldly advising Jessica to use the sexual knowledge he had conferred upon her to become more popular at frat parties.

The girl had been devastated, especially when, a few days later, a campus health center nurse informed her that she had contracted gonorrhea. The nurse later recalled how Jessica broke down in the examination room, crying and confessing exactly who had given her the disease. The veteran health care professional indicated a lack of surprise. Over the years she had seen numerous cases of unwanted pregnancy and disease caused by randy professors, but the center’s privacy rules prevented her from saying anything other than recording Jessica’s case as another campus STD statistic. However, as many critics noted after the shootings, the nurse could have referred the clearly distraught student to one of the campus’s many mental health counselors. Instead, she had merely sent Jessica home with a prescription, a handful of condoms, three STD pamphlets, and the advice to learn from her mistakes.

The used, confused, and now diseased teenager quickly spiraled into a deep depression. Her roommate complained to their dorm R.A. that Jessica was acting “creepy,” not going to classes or showering, wearing nothing but sweatsuits, eating only junk food, and listening to “angry chick” music constantly. The R.A. did nothing other than lecture Jessica that she needed to get to her classes or face academic probation. The roommate effectively moved out, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s room down the hall.

Police found that Jessica did venture outside the dorm at least once, to withdraw the remainder of her summer job savings from an ATM, then walk to a nearby gun shop to purchase the handgun and ammunition. Her father had owned a similar handgun, which he had insisted she learn to use for her own protection against dangerous people like rapists. Her rambling video indicated that, in Jessica’s mind, Don the Juan was equivalent to the rapists her father had warned her about, “destroying innocence and spreading pestilence.” Even though Jessica’s STD was entirely treatable, she might as well have been afflicted with advanced AIDS. In her rapidly unhinging mind, her life was over.

Never in the video did Jessica say that she was planning to kill Pfeiser. Her purpose in leaving the document seemed more to warn other students to stay away from him and other similar predators. But few who viewed the video would ever forget the eerie words with which she ended. “Well,” Jessica had said blankly into the camera, “at least he won’t be able to give it to anybody else.”

Most experts who endlessly analyzed the incident concluded that Jessica was not a true mass murderer in that she had probably only intended to castrate Pfeiser and kill herself in front of him. The shooting of the two wrestlers was likely just a defensive reaction to seeing two large men coming at her. In her mind, the theory went, they had been potential rapists, too. Despite this conclusion, Jessica Hampton would forever be known in the public consciousness as the first female campus mass murderer. And the university would forever be known as the site of Bloody Valentine’s Day.

Hampton’s parents and those of the two wrestlers sued the university, arguing that it had failed to protect a mentally unstable young woman from a known sexual predator, thus indirectly contributing to her violent breakdown and the deaths of two innocent young men. After months of scrutiny, the veteran nurse was pressured into retiring; the R.A. transferred to another school; and the university reached an undisclosed monetary settlement with the families. As part of the agreement, the administration agreed to beef up campus security and take action to discourage sexual relationships between faculty and students. Out of months of debate grew the No Fraternization Policy.

Despite Internet rumors started by some either ignorant or snarky students, this regulation had nothing to do with abolishing the Greek system. In an effort to show the world that they were serious about protecting students, the Board of Regents implemented one of the most stringent sexual harassment policies among major colleges. Jane had served on the committee that initially devised the rule, though the final wording went far beyond the committee’s original intent.

Noting that Dr. Pfeiser seemed to have had a strong psychological hold over Hampton, the debate had moved from sexual harassment into the realm of how much
implied
power professors had over students just by virtue of being faculty. In the aftermath of the shooting, many people, especially several vocal female faculty members, supported this argument.

By the time the No Fraternization Policy worked its way through various levels of committees, administrators, and the Board of Regents, it had become a rule that forbid
all
sexual relationships between students and faculty members, unless it could be proven that a previous relationship existed prior to the two parties becoming student and faculty (such as if a faculty member’s spouse or significant other decided to take some courses). State law already held a similar policy for public high schools.

The final committee vote on No Fraternization had been very close, falling mainly along gender lines. The Chancellor and the Board of Regents unanimously favored it, largely because several key state lawmakers were threatening to pass similar legislation if the university proved unable to regulate itself. As much as the liberal arts faculty liked to think of the campus as an independent island within the state capital, as a public university it was often at the mercy of politicians who worked across town. Many in the Republican-led legislature despised the perceived liberalism of the flagship U. Some lamented the shooting as an inevitable result of the faculty’s lack of morality. Many voters agreed, as public support for the new policy ran high.

Jane had been torn over the final wording of the rule. On the one hand, she understood the ethical need to discourage faculty-student relationships. Her department housed its own version of “Don the Juan” in the form of Henry Gould, a.k.a. “Horndog Harry.” Although there had never been a single formal complaint lodged against him in 40 years, Gould’s nickname and reputation were well-known subjects of campus gossip. Married three times, his last two wives had been undergrads, one of whom was pregnant while he was still married to another.

Jane often wondered if the secret to Horndog’s success in avoiding complaints was his ability to pick weak-minded targets whom he could easily control. His first wife had been very timid; the second committed suicide; and the third had been confined to a mental institution for several years. For Jane, Horndog was exactly the type of professor the new policy was designed to ferret out. If a clear prohibition against sexual relations with students did not change his behavior, perhaps his conquests might at least be more willing to speak out.

On the other hand, from a practical standpoint, Jane thought the new policy was far too broad, and to be honest, except for the occasional child prodigy, they were talking about consensual activities between legal adults. Yet she agreed there was a big difference between an impressionable 18 year-old frosh and a 40 year-old grad student. She worried about her daughter becoming susceptible to seduction by someone like Horndog or Don the Juan. Catching herself being somewhat sexist, Jane realized that she did not have such concerns about her son, partly because he was male and partly because she just could not envision her nerdy boy as the object of an older woman’s desires.

Despite objections voiced only in private meetings, Jane publicly stood behind the policy, which had been supported upon legal challenge by the state Supreme Court. Behind closed doors, administrators and leaders of the faculty senate agreed that enforcement would only be initiated by student complaint. They had no intention of closely scrutinizing the sex lives of teachers or students, but hoped the new policy would give them more leverage to purge tenured predators like Don the Juan. It was the school’s version of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” in place for a year but yet to be tested in a real case.

Now, on the first day of classes, instead of the notorious old goat of the History Department, it was mild-mannered young Lewis Burns being accused of violating the policy. Jane secretly hoped this would turn out to be a false accusation. This was not how she intended to start her tenure as Chair.