CHAPTER ONE
Castle Rock University
2017 CE
“You’re kidding me.” Benjamin Schröder sat back in his chair, shaking his head in disbelief. “You’re serious about this crap?”
“I’m very serious, Doctor Schröder,” the thin, sharp-faced man seated behind the large, polished desk informed him severely. Patrick O’Hearn, the history department’s chairman, was a good twenty years older than Schröder, but he’d always struck the younger man as a spoiled brat who’d never quite grown up. Schröder knew he wasn’t the most tactful or “process oriented” of individuals, but O’Hearn possessed a unique ability to make him think longingly of utterly inappropriate physical responses to “microaggressions.” Of course, in O’Hearn’s universe, the clarity of his understanding—thoroughly validated by everyone else living inside his bubble—meant he was incapable of microaggressions. All he was doing was “speaking truth to power”…especially when he dragged in a junior member of his own department for “counseling.” Aside from his voice, which was actually a surprisingly pleasant baritone, the older man represented every single thing Schröder disliked about academia…except for the whiny students unalterably opposed to enduring the contamination of alternative viewpoints. The only reasons students like that bothered him less than O’Hearn—and he had to admit, they ran a very close second—was that he kept reminding himself of what his mother had taught him as a teenager: Ignorance and even narrowmindedness can be fixed; stupid is forever. And willful stupidity like O’Hearn’s was especially galling. He suspected that the two of them would have cordially disliked one another under any imaginable circumstances; under the circumstances which actually applied, “dislike” was far too pale a verb.
“What happened to my right to file a response?” he demanded now. “I’ve got ten days to respond even to a formal grievance, let alone an administrative review!”
“Of course you do, Doctor.” O’Hearn emphasized the academic title with a certain spiteful courtesy. “And if you choose to exercise that right, no one would even consider denying it to you. That right is absolutely guaranteed under the Student Grievance Policy and Procedures. I simply thought—purely as a courtesy to a professional colleague, you understand—that it might be expedient to…advise you in this matter.”
Schröder clenched his teeth and cautioned himself against dwelling any further on those politically incorrect but highly satisfactory responses to O’Hearn’s bright smile. The most satisfactory item on the menu would have included a direct kinesthetic rearrangement of the smile in question, which would hardly help his case at the moment. Some of the verbal responses which sprang to mind would have been almost equally unhelpful, however well deserved and apropos they might have been.
“Should I take it, then,” he said instead, after counting slowly to ten, “that Dean Thompson’s taken an official position on this?”
“Oh, by no means! That would be highly inappropriate at this stage of the process.” O’Hearn shook his head, blue eyes gleaming with poorly disguised satisfaction behind the lenses of his wire-frame glasses. “She would never attempt to intervene or pressure anyone at such an early stage of the grievance process. At the same time, of course, she has to be aware of remedial options and any…potential sanctions. And, as your department chair, I thought it best to ascertain from her on your behalf exactly what those options might be after Ms. Kikuchi-Bennett raised her concerns with me.”
“How kind of you,” Schröder said, then bit his tongue mentally as O’Hearn’s eyes flickered with mingled anger and satisfaction.
“You are a member of my department,” the chairman pointed out. He didn’t add the words “unfortunately” or “for the moment, at least,” Schröder observed. Or not out loud, anyway. “And I’m sure you’re aware of how seriously Castle Rock University takes any potential discrimination or harassment, especially by faculty.”
“Oh, I’m well aware of that,” Schröder replied. “I’m still a little confused about exactly how I’m supposed to have discriminated against or harassed Ms. Kikuchi-Bennett, though.”
“The creation of a hostile classroom environment is the very definition of harassment, Doctor,” O’Hearn said rather more frostily. “And attacking an undergraduate’s gender identity and political views in front of an entire class certainly creates exactly that sort of environment.”
“I’m not aware of having attacked Ms. Kikuchi-Bennett’s gender identity—or political views—in any way.”
“Sarcasm, ridicule, and denigration constitute ‘attacks’ in most people’s view, Doctor.” O’Hearn’s tone was positively icy now, but the satisfaction in his eyes was brighter.
“No doubt they would…if I’d done any of them.” Schröder felt his own temper rising and stepped on it firmly. It wasn’t easy, and he felt the ghost of his father standing at his shoulder. The old man probably would have already ripped out O’Hearn’s tonsils and wrapped them around his neck for a bowtie.
Not the best image for him to be dwelling upon at the moment.
“I’m afraid three independent witnesses support Ms. Kikuchi-Bennett’s interpretation of your remarks, Doctor.”
“And am I permitted to know who these three independent witnesses might be?”
“I’m afraid that’s privileged information under the university’s privacy procedures. At this time, of course.” O’Hearn flashed another of those thin, smug, satisfied smiles. “If the process continues to the formal grievance stage, however, I’m sure you’ll receive copies of their statements.”
“But not their identities?”
“It’s the content of their statements, not their identities, that would be relevant,” O’Hearn pointed out, “and the university has a legal and moral responsibility to protect their privacy, if only to avoid any appearance of retaliation against them. I’m sure you can understand the chancellor’s position on that point, Doctor. You would certainly be within your legal rights to seek that information if you should choose to appeal the Grievance Committee’s formal ruling in other venues. Of course, at that point the legal department would be legally and morally obligated to protect that information until such time as the courts directed its disclosure.”
“Oh, of course.”
Schröder wished O’Hearn’s attitude had surprised him. Given academia’s taste for witch hunts, though, the surprise would come from any other response. Besides, he had a pretty shrewd notion which of Kikuchi-Bennett’s friends had chosen to support the transgender student’s allegations. If he was right, the frightening thing was that at least two of them were undoubtedly completely sincere in their belief that he had, indeed, brutally and viciously assailed Kikuchi-Bennett in front of their entire class. Their hypersensitive, exquisitely quivering antennae would have left them with no other conclusion, especially after Kikuchi-Bennett “rebutted” his comments not by refuting—or even considering—his reasoning or his evidence, but by scorning them as “typical of the racist and homophobic patriarchy’s callous dismissal of any dissenting viewpoint.” In his experience, once those labels were deployed, any possibility of rational discourse had left the building.
He thought—briefly, and not very seriously—about pointing out to O’Hearn that what he’d said was simply that women hadn’t acquired the franchise in the United States at the point of a gun, but by convincing the majority of men that in a just society interested in living up to the Declaration of Independence’s nobly espoused principles they should have had the franchise all along, just as African-Americans should have had their freedom all along. The suffragettes’ victory in the Nineteenth Amendment had been achieved because their stance had been correct all along and their moral pressure had convinced enough male voters of that to support the amendment’s passage. Since the discussion had been about the evolution of legal and societal viewpoints in the United States, and about the fashion in which protest movements and organized political pressure groups had achieved change, it was difficult for him to see that as even misogynistic, far less racist, homophobic, or gender phobic.
It was Kikuchi-Bennett who’d raised a hand, rejected his argument, and asserted that only someone speaking from the “privileged platform of the white male patriarchy” could possibly have made such a ludicrous assertion. As someone who was neither female nor black, his “patronizing dismissal of their struggle” both demeaned them and revealed his own “blinkered” inability to see the truth hidden in the “so-called history written by that same white male patriarchy,” and segued from there into the necessity for “free-speech zones” where such “hate speech and shameless historical revisionism” as his—which was particularly offensive coming from someone speaking from a “privileged position of power”—would not be tolerated.
Maybe I should have pointed out that my family probably knows a little more about that whole African-American thing than most non-Black families, he thought. In fact, he’d considered doing just that, although not very hard. Claiming personal credit for the moral superiority of ancestors who’d been dead for a century or two was about as intellectually dishonest as an argument came. Besides, it would have been totally irrelevant to her. And certainly not germane to the course’s subject matter.
Aware that Kikuchi-Bennett’s passion, however misguided he found it, was completely genuine, he’d dialed back his instinctive response. Apparently replying with the observation that “traditionally, college is where we’re supposed to challenge our own conceptions and preconceptions” had been…an insufficient dial-back.
Personally, he would have preferred to demonstrate the illogic and inconsistency of Kikuchi-Bennett’s arguments in a reasoned debate from which both of them might have learned a little something, if only respect for opposing viewpoints. It would have been nice if, failing that, he’d at least been able to shut the tirade down in less than the fifteen minutes of the rest of his students’ time which had been squandered to absolutely no good purpose. And, oh, for the long-vanished days when he could have suggested that Kikuchi-Bennett was always free to depart his classroom and refuse to return to it ever again.
I wonder how Mom would’ve dealt with this? he wondered, only half whimsically. In fact, he had a pretty good idea how Doctor Joséphine Schröder would have responded, especially here at her own alma mater. We probably shouldn’t call it an alma mater anymore, either. “Mother” is so sexist. Alma parente would probably be better…of course, that’s a masculine gendered noun, isn’t it? Damn, Latin is such a sexist language! Just like French, Spanish, and Italian. I guess we’ll have to find a new noun that’s neither.
Fortunately for her, his mother had acquired tenure at Emory two years before Benjamin’s birth. The climate had been just a little different then, and by the time the rot had truly set in, it would have taken a very hardy individual to pick a fight with “Doctor Joe,” who was famous for her ability to vivisect faulty reasoning and absolute death on fabricated or cherry-picked “facts.” Besides, even the faculty members who’d most strongly disagreed with her politics—aside from a handful of much younger, recent additions—had admired and respected her too deeply to consider this sort of nonsense, and her own students had loved her.
And the truth was that as infuriating as O’Hearn was, the man was about to do exactly what Benjamin wanted him to do. Under the circumstances, mentioning anything about rabbits, tar, or brier patches would probably send the man’s blood pressure through the roof, but really . . .
“So essentially I’m supposed to respond to anonymous accusations without benefit of even hearing exactly what those accusations are? And your position is that, on that basis, I should accept whatever recommendation you choose to make rather than turn this into a confrontation before the dean, the senate, or the chancellor?” he asked after a moment.
“Really, Doctor Schröder,” O’Hearn said in moderately offended tones, “that’s not a very constructive attitude. Having said that, though, I do feel the proposed…solution would be simplest—and fairest—all around. I think it’s clear you don’t feel you contributed to a hostile classroom environment for your students. As your department head I’m fully prepared to believe you sincerely feel that way and, indeed, that you had absolutely no intention of causing such distress to Ms. Kikuchi-Bennett or to any of her fellows. Obviously, however, whether or not that was your intent, it’s what happened, and that makes it almost worse, in a way. I’m sure the thought of causing such distress unintentionally must be as painful to you as it would be to me, and, as you know, our student body is one of the most diverse in American education. It’s going to grow only increasingly diverse in the future, and I would think that any professor who desires a long-term association with this institution—and, especially, one whose family has always been so deeply invested in it and in its core missions—would prefer to be equipped with the best tools available for encountering that diversity.”
Oh, I’m sure you would, you sanctimonious prick, Schröder thought. The mere fact that I don’t think I contributed to a hostile classroom environment because I didn’t doesn’t mean one damned thing to you, does it? In fact, in your world, the fact that I don’t think that only proves I did do it in the first place!
Of course his opinion didn’t mean anything to O’Hearn. But it was abundantly evident where the department head was going to come down, and there was no doubt that Helen Thompson, who just happened to head the tenure committee, would come down in exactly the same spot. Allen Rendova, the university’s chancellor, on the other hand, almost certainly wouldn’t, for several reasons. Including the fact that he was more than smart enough—and had bothered to learn enough about one Benjamin Schröder and his family—to see exactly where this was going to end.
O’Hearn didn’t plan on it going as far as the chancellor’s office, though. Benjamin Schröder was still a semester short of attaining tenure, and O’Hearn was counting on the fact that he’d never acquire it if he fought this bullshit allegation. He figured the administration would opt to get rid of a troublesome professor by quietly denying him tenure rather than risk the sort of public auto de fé Kikuchi-Bennett’s version of events would almost certainly inspire. After all, the tenure denial wouldn’t be directly linked to the way he’d embarrassed the university, now would it? And if that just happened to let the department head put the blocks to a brash, younger professor with whom he disagreed profoundly—and who’d already published more independent research than O’Hearn had managed in his entire career—well, every cloud had a silver lining, didn’t it?
He really should have done a little research on me before he decided to go here. And if I felt like a nice guy—which I don’t, at the moment—I should probably ask him if he’s ever met my brother or checked into some of Mom’s nonacademic credentials. Or Dad’s, for that matter! Not that I’m going to look a gift horse in the mouth. If he wasn’t such a prick, I’d thank him for this! And wouldn’t that blow his mind?
He leaned back in his chair, his expression grim, and reminded himself of why he was at Castle Rock University in the first place.
Once upon a time, before CRU became the sprawling university it now was, it had been known as Castle Rock College. The small, privately endowed college, founded shortly after the Civil War by a tiny group of Quakers, Huguenots, and Methodist pastors, had opened its doors specifically to the sons and daughters of freed slaves, but it had never been one of the historically all-Black colleges. Its founders had believed that bringing Black and white students together—engaging them and mutually educating one another, as well as themselves, in the same classrooms—was the best way to break down barriers between them.
That attitude had been less than popular in 1868 North Carolina, and the college’s entire initial enrollment had been only thirty-three students, just six of whom, all the children of its faculty members, had been white. But to its critics’ amazement, it had survived despite every legal—and extralegal—impediment thrown in its path, including half a dozen “mysterious” fires in its first ten years of operation. It had also become known as much for its intellectual diversity and exacting academic standards as for its radical notions about race and equality. One of its founders—and its first president—had been Marc-Antoine Martineau, an abolitionist Huguenot who’d immigrated from Canada to the United States in the late 1840s and run a Virginia station on the underground railroad for ten years before the first shell was fired at Fort Sumter. Marc-Antoine’s son, Jourdain, had chaired the Castle Rock Department of History for twenty-three years, and Benjamin’s mother, Joséphine Martineau Schröder, had graduated summa cum laude in 1963 and gone on to graduate studies at Duke University, McGill, and Oxford as part of her own outstanding academic career.
And while she was doing that, Castle Rock College had become Castle Rock University, with an explosive growth in enrollment that began in the sixties and seventies and continued into the nineties. The school’s century of dedication to civil rights and minority education had been a big part of that growth, but it had stalled over the last fifteen or twenty years. In fact, O’Hearn’s comments notwithstanding, enrollment had begun to shrink. Benjamin had his own suspicions about why that had happened, and he was enough his mother’s son to want to do something about it.
Patrick O’Hearn had no intention of allowing him to do anything of the sort, and not just because he saw the younger man as a threat to his own position. As much as Benjamin despised him, he never doubted the sincerity of O’Hearn’s beliefs. Those were what Benjamin truly threatened, in the chairman’s eyes, and the steady growth in the size of Benjamin’s classes—graduate and undergraduate, alike—underscored that threat. Benjamin was one of those right-wing, fascist hatemongers. He might never say or do anything overtly to betray his hate-fueled political agenda, but it had to exist. O’Hearn had plenty of evidence of that, given the way he required students to defend their logic and their facts and persisted in introducing “alternative viewpoints,” all of which were clearly designed to allow the oppressive poison of racism, misogyny, and homophobia back into the academic community from which they had finally been banished. It was beyond intolerable that a cretin who believed all of that should actually be one of the two or three most popular professors in his entire department, with waiting lists to get into his classes.
That attitude and sincerity made his determination to either hammer Benjamin into the proper mold, or else get rid of him before he acquired tenure, perfectly understandable.
Contemptible, perhaps, but understandable.
This is just so damned petty, though, he thought. I can do the frigging “gender sensitivity” standing on my head. It’s only a matter of giving them back the answers I already know they want. And it would probably look good on my resume. After all, it would show what a good, twenty-first-century, forward-thinking sort of fellow I am. There are probably even some good points in there. God knows I’d’ve loved for someone to have been a bit more “gender aware” when David came along! But I know the idiot they have in charge of it here, and David and Steve would laugh their asses off listening to him!
I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that Granddad’s portrait is hanging on the wall outside his office and Great-Granddad’s is on the wall in Rendova’s office? Maybe he resents that even more than I thought he did. Or maybe the connection makes him so scared of me that he has to stomp out the flame right now. Can’t have one the founders’ great-great-grandkids kicking up a stink and challenging the school’s mission, after all.
Hell, from his perspective, he’s got a point! I am here to fight tooth and nail for genuine intellectual diversity. In his eyes, that is challenging the CRU mission. Of course, he and I differ rather profoundly on exactly what the mission is, don’t we? It may be too late, but I at least owe Castle Rock my best shot at it.
The temptation to tell O’Hearn exactly what he thought of him—and warn him where this was headed—trembled on the very tip of Schröder’s tongue, but he sat on the impulse. However personally satisfying it might have been, he already knew O’Hearn’s plan wasn’t going to play out the way the older man thought it would. Under the circumstances, the last thing he wanted was to give the department chair even a shred of a claim that he’d been “confrontational, arrogant, and personally abusive” when O’Hearn invited him to a civil fact-finding discussion. There were better and more effective ways to win this war, he thought, and he had no intention of throwing away his opponent’s mistakes.
He reminded himself of that as he settled further back into his chair, crossed his legs, and gave O’Hearn a smile just as false—and just as deliberately false—as any the department head had ever given him.
“You’re perfectly correct that I don’t feel I contributed to any ‘hostile environments’ in my classroom, Doctor O’Hearn,” he said pleasantly. “In fact, I’d go farther than that. I’m positive I didn’t. Of course, at the moment I haven’t quite attained tenure, which—obviously—means I haven’t been with the university long enough to…acquire total submersion in all the finer nuances of its current challenging intellectual diversity. That’s something I look forward to understanding more fully and completely in the fullness of time. And, of course, you’re correct about my family’s long-standing relationship with CRU. Because of that, I hope to make my own small contribution to its robust and stimulating intellectual climate over the next twenty-five or thirty years.”
O’Hearn’s face tightened, and Schröder allowed himself to smile a bit more broadly as he dwelt upon the vision of O’Hearn forced to tolerate him as a tenured member of his department for the next decade or two. Clearly the chairman found that prospect unpalatable. Well, Schröder wasn’t exactly thrilled by the prospect of putting up with all the crap he knew he’d face—not just from O’Hearn, who wasn’t even the university’s most strident voice, to be fair—over that same decade or two, either. But it would be worth it just to contemplate the damage to O’Hearn’s cardiovascular system. Besides, he’d known what was coming when he joined Castle Rock’s history department. He hadn’t deliberately created this opening—hadn’t really planned on opening his campaign in earnest until he had acquired tenure, really—but it was here now, and as his parents had always told him, nothing worth doing came easy.
“When did you say that gender-sensitivity seminar begins?” he asked.