The Shakespeare Requirement

by Julie Schumacher

  In Willard 106, opposite the mailroom, Martin Glenk, modernist poetry, saw Stang stride purposefully down the corridor (they had known each other for twenty-eight years but hadn’t spoken for the last thirteen), and shut the door of his office with the tip of an old-fashioned pointer he kept near his desk. He picked up the phone to arrange for the purchase of a miniature donkey.

  Albert Tyne, a Henry James–Edith Wharton specialist, was putting the finishing touches on a thirty-six-page rebuttal—it included a full page of citations—to the university’s mandate requiring that he report for six weeks of sensitivity training. Meanwhile, in the women’s restroom around the corner, Donna Lovejoy, medieval literature, carefully lowered herself onto a cracked porcelain horseshoe (it was broken and tended to slide out from under), noted the absence of toilet paper, and tried not to think about the pile of essays on her desk, the upcoming meeting, or the gradually increasing breadth of her thighs. She had dedicated most of the morning to a contemplation of her 401(k), estimating a possibility of retirement by the time she turned seventy-three—in twenty-one years.

  A few minutes later, Virginia Beauchamp, modern drama, saw Lovejoy emerge in her unfortunate flat black shoes from the women’s room (Beauchamp never used the restrooms in Willard), a tampon wrapper glued to the bottom of a well-worn heel. Beauchamp tied her hair into a knot at the back of her head, removed the acupuncture needles from her left arm (though a productive scholar, she was working on a degree in herbology and alternative healing in her spare time), and walked down the hall to find the conference room dark. She rattled the knob. Why was the conference room locked? Coming up behind her were Helena Stang and director of composition and rhetoric Lance West, who as usual was wearing the knit slacks and matching shirt of a professional golfer. Stang jabbed at a sign on the door with her finger: English faculty meeting to be held in room 102B. She treated Beauchamp and then West to a frosty, condescending smile.

  As a rule, West tried to be civil to every person he met, but Helena Stang made that commitment extremely hard.

  Fitger had meant to get to campus at least an hour ahead of the meeting. Having woken at 4:50 a.m.—he suffered from prostate-induced insomnia—he had showered, read the paper, then cracked two eggs into a cast-iron pan and discovered a dollop of blood in both yolks. He was not in general a believer in omens, but the twin reddish blobs didn’t foreshadow anything good, and he had nearly burned the eggs while considering whether to eat them. Ten minutes later, after fracturing a tooth on a slice of toast (the offending molar didn’t fall out, but a segment of it was actively threatening to secede from the whole), he sensed the trajectory of the day already established. He might as well have quaffed eight ounces of gore in a drinking glass.

  A hesitant phone call to the dentist (Fitger was squeamish about dental work) was followed by the discovery that someone had rear-ended his car in the night. The left taillight was gone, as if punched by a giant’s fist, and the bumper dangled askew about an inch from the street. He tried hoisting and fixing the bumper in place with a rope, but after slicing his hand (would he need a tetanus shot on top of the trip to the dentist?), he kicked the bumper free of the car and tossed it, like a metal corpse, across the back seat.

  Still, he managed to get to work with time to spare before the meeting, and entered Willard Hall through the lower floor. The building was stifling. Fist-sized dust balls hunkered in the cobwebbed corners, and the smell of microwaved vending-machine food seemed to have been pumped in through the vents, lending the low-ceilinged corridor a defeatist air. Fitger hustled up the steps, past the flyers offering study-abroad opportunities, money for semen donation, and clinical trials for individuals suffering from genital warts, acne, and hyperhidrosis. He sped past the conference room, empty and dark and presumably paid to remain so by Econ, his hand taped with gauze and his cracked tooth throbbing, an enamel iceberg ready to calve.

  In the English office, he found not Fran but a needle-thin young person who introduced himself as Ashkir, the undergrad worker, who expressed such bounteous thanks for his employment that Fitger knew he had either misunderstood the salary (did they actually have money to pay him?) or the caliber of tasks—mainly opening mail and wrestling with the Stone Age copy machine—he would be asked to perform.

  Glancing at the stack of boxes on the rug in his office, Fitger asked if any of the Tech-Help staff had happened by.

  Ashkir said they had not. Was Professor Fitger expecting them?

  Expecting? Ha ha! Realistically, no. He had left half a dozen messages and sent the director of the Tech-Help office a letter via U.S. certified mail, but so far his efforts had been unsuccessful. The “loaner laptop” Fran had provided failed to recognize the letter S. Fitger had been carefully composing e-mail and other documents to avoid this letter, steering clear of “is” and “was” and plurals, his correspondence beginning to sound as if it were translated from Quechua or Madurese.

  He turned to Ashkir. Where was Fran?

  Ah. Ms. Ignatieff regretted that she could not come in today; she had an emergency with her little girl.

  “What little girl?”

  Askhir held up his index finger as if testing the wind and consulted a pink slip of paper. “She says Gloria is not well and has to go to the clinic.”

  Who the hell was Gloria? Fitger scratched at his head, the stings from the wasps now faded to flat round patches of discolored skin.

  “She left you this.” Ashkir handed Fitger a personalized copy of the faculty meeting agenda:

  Welcome back.

  You are the chair.

  Committee assignments. (Do not allow faculty to change assignments.)

  The Statement of Vision.

  Other/adjourn.

  Fitger glanced at the clock; he still had time to catch his breath and collect his thoughts before the meeting. Tossing a pair of painkillers into his mouth (the broken tooth, the bandaged hand), he took a few minutes to review the university’s new guidelines regarding Statements of Vision. After learning that “a department’s identity and purpose are paramount in the cogent formation of a credible intellectual and pragmatic unity, this to be expressed in a planning document based upon disciplinary congruities,” he put the guidelines down. The SOV was a formality, essentially meaningless—except for its link to the budget. Fitger’s main job would be to keep the discussion moving, prohibiting speeches and vendettas, and then ask for a vote and disband.

  With time still remaining before the meeting, he pulled a chair up next to the three-legged table that functioned as the department’s reception area and Ashkir’s workspace, its surface decorated, oddly, with a bowl of cheap plastic fruit. “So. Ashkir,” he said. “What does Fran have you working on so far?”

  Ashkir leaned away from the table so Fitger could see. On at least two hundred pieces of letterhead, Payne University in royal blue script across the top, Ashkir had crossed out Mathematics and, with a fine-point pen, written English instead.

  Fitger examined the finished product. At least his penmanship was good. A matching set of envelopes waited nearby. “Ashkir, are you an English major?”

  “Oh, no,” Ashkir said. He laughed. He laughed harder than Fitger thought appropriate. “No, no, no, no. I am studying entrepreneurship.”

  “Really? That’s an area of study? How does one learn to be an entrepreneur?”

  Well, it was interesting. During the current semester—Ashkir was a junior—he was taking classes in marketing, leadership, and building sales teams. He was going to make a lot of money. Enough so that he could buy as many books as any of his English-major friends.

  Did he like to read?

  No, not really. Fortunately, most of his classes didn’t involve a lot of reading; besides (he gestured to the earphones dangling from a cord around his neck), the lectures could be listened to online. And exams were taken v
ia computer, sometimes at home. Entrepreneurship Studies, he said, was extremely well organized.

  Fitger settled himself in for a lengthy discussion. “But Ashkir: entrepreneurship. Is that…intellectual in any way? Are you truly getting an education?” He probed at his broken tooth with his tongue. What about the in-person exchange of ideas? What about history, art, literature, philosophy, religion? Could any student, by sitting alone at a computer terminal in his apartment, truly claim to—

  “Professor, excuse me.” Ashkir held up his hand. “I am sorry to interrupt, but you are late for your meeting.”

  “No, I’m—” Fitger looked at the clock on the wall again; several dead wasps were trapped within it; its hands were still.

  * * *

  —

  Dennis Cassovan, the first to arrive in room 102B for the meeting, nodded to his colleagues as they filtered in and tried to assess their respective attitudes toward Shakespeare at Payne. Virginia Beauchamp was a scholar of theater (and had written half a dozen separate studies of Samuel Beckett); still, she and Hesseldine typically denigrated works of literature written prior to 1945 and could not be counted on for reasonable discourse; Tyne, “on principle,” had abstained from every departmental initiative for the past thirty years. But what about Lovejoy or Brown-Wilson? Lovejoy’s hair was flattened on one side as if she had recently risen from sleep, and one earpiece of her glasses was mended with tape. He remembered when she had been hired at Payne, a vivacious, energetic young scholar. Coming upon her soon after her hire in the faculty mailroom, he had mistaken her for a student. She seemed to have aged several decades in the past ten years.

  Perhaps it was no longer possible to predict the intellectual or ideological camp within which a particular member of the department would fall. Each, it seemed to Cassovan, formed a prickly, obdurate focus group of his or her own.

  Fitger, unsurprisingly, was ten minutes late to his own meeting. He found the faculty seated scattershot in the classroom’s desk-and-chair contraptions, some facing east, some north or west—like frustrated drivers in a series of stalled bumper cars. In one corner of the room, Brown-Wilson, despairing of her committee assignments, was appealing—unsuccessfully—to Sandra Atherman (Victorian literature) and Lance West, neither of whom were willing to consider exchanging their own assignments for a yearlong series of meetings with the unhygienic Tyne and the reptilian Kentrell. In the opposite corner, Hesseldine was protesting the presence of vermin in the building: he claimed to have seen a rodent clutching a sandwich in the vending machine. Other conversations consisted of complaints about the temperature of the building, the broken fax machine, the dearth of research funds, the ever-increasing size of undergraduate classes, the autocracy of the university’s administration, and now the loss—presumably Fitger’s fault, because he was chair—of the conference room.

  Cassovan bided his time during these first twenty chaotic minutes, taking stock of the classroom decor: a chalkboard, a set of small-print instructions regarding escape from fire or armed gunmen, and a series of crooked, laminated portraits of the seven presidents of Payne, all but Hoffman—the only woman—sporting muttonchops or Mephistophelian beards.

  Finally, Fitger handed out copies of the Statement of Vision, revised and updated via e-mail during the previous spring. “Are we ready to vote?” he asked.

  Sandra Atherman, dressed per usual as one of the Brontës (Atherman was popular with students because of the glass eye she sometimes removed and soaked in salt water, during her lectures), said, “If we’re going to vote, we need a motion.”

  “I make a motion, then,” said Fitger.

  “But you have to say what the motion is for.”

  “The motion is…that we vote.”

  Virginia Beauchamp, removing from the back of her wrist a final acupuncture needle, said she didn’t think the chair was entitled to make a motion. Someone else had to make it.

  Fitger asked if anyone else would care to make—

  Dennis Cassovan stood. “I call for discussion to precede any vote on this issue.”

  At the back of the room, someone groaned. Discussion was always an unpopular option, leading as it did to calumny, stalemate, lamentation, and wrath. Donna Lovejoy, perhaps because she had never heard Cassovan speak during a faculty meeting, struggled to turn around in the wooden tourniquet of her seat, perturbed. “Isn’t the Statement of Vision a formality?” she asked. “I mean…We have to churn these things out every few years, and I assumed they were…”

  “Irrelevant?” Hesseldine asked.

  Cassovan acknowledged these questions and apologized for not taking part in the drafting or discussion of the SOV while he was on leave. The document’s first paragraph, he said, with its mishmash of language regarding “literary as well as historical, social, political, and cultural aesthetics,” might have been written about a dozen different departments. And while composition merited two or three sentences, the SOV—which his colleagues could criticize if they liked, but it was the means by which the administration would define their department—failed to mention crucial fields within English, and it specified only twenty-eight required credits for the undergraduate degree.

  “We didn’t have a choice about the credits,” West said. He explained that almost every humanities department had been told to cut back, and that the more modest number of requirements was going to work in their favor. Not just at Payne but across the United States, students were defecting in droves from the traditional major in English to newer fields such as “business writing,” “technical communications,” and graphic design. The lower number of credits was an attempt to reverse those defections. It would make the department more attractive to students.

  Cassovan’s face was impassive. “And this is our object?” he asked. “To make the study of literature ‘attractive’?”

  “I don’t understand your question,” West said. He pointed out that English was competing for students, and for student tuition dollars, with other departments.

  Jennifer Brown-Wilson swung her desk around in a half-circle to look at Cassovan. “What exactly are you objecting to?” she asked. “The smaller number of credits? Or something else more specifically?”

  Cassovan thanked her for the opportunity to clarify. He was objecting, he said, to the absence in the Statement of Vision of any reference to Shakespeare, and to the attendant lack of clarity regarding the department’s requiring of students to take at least one semester-long class in that field.

  West caught his foot in the metal book rack under his desk. Shakespeare would obviously continue to be taught, he said. It was widely included in the curriculum: Helena Stang had just taught a class on the graphic novel that included a manga version of Macbeth.

  Cassovan looked pained rather than pleased at this disclosure. A casual or passing reference or, even worse, a modern adaptation of the works of the dramatist, he said, could never—

  Zander Hesseldine, combing the underside of his beard with his fingers, interrupted. Why should Cassovan’s field be referenced in the SOV when others weren’t? The document made no mention of Postcolonial Literature. Besides, suggesting that Shakespeare studies were in jeopardy was like treating the cockroach as an endangered species.

  Stang, a heavy row of metal bracelets ringing her arm, swiftly agreed: her own field—feminist studies—was not represented in the SOV either; and requiring a semester-long class in the work of a single white male author was, in the twenty-first century, nothing less than absurd.

  West explained that the SOV had deliberately been rewritten without reference to specific fields, because of the lower number of required credits. That said, students would certainly be able to study Shakespeare or medieval literature or poetry or—

  “We have one Shakespearean in the department,” Hesseldine murmured, in an audible aside to Stang. “And I assume that, sooner or later, he intends t
o retire.”

  Cassovan turned to his barbigerous colleague. An armchair Marxist who displayed a Cuban flag on the door of his office, Hesseldine was, in Cassovan’s view, the worst sort of academician, encouraging in his students a smug, postmortem approach to literature and a view of the classics that stank of disdain. Cassovan had been a member of the department for forty-two years and he suspected that his retirement would elicit a yawn of indifference from most of his colleagues. He felt more of a kinship with his students—he had taught, by his estimation, some eight thousand undergraduates—who, though less widely read, were open-minded and intellectually alive. He was at present, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, leading a group of freshmen through Othello, and he had been struck during the most recent session to find a young woman—the one who had helped him gather his books after Fitger assaulted him with a window screen—openly weeping over Desdemona’s demise.

  “A department of English,” he said, “cannot exist without requiring, for its majors, at least one semester-long course in the study of Shakespeare. To require any less would be irresponsible; it is a dumbing down.”

  West said it was important that the Statement of Vision encompass the broad range of interests in the department; and because students majoring in English would now be required to complete only twenty-eight credits, greater flexibility in the curriculum—