Moments after Frank left the table, Sally sprang from her seat and made a beeline to the Women’s Center, which called an emergency meeting of its membership that very night. Of the feelings of hurt and outrage that were expressed at that meeting, I am told, the greatest was the pain caused by the knowledge that Hampshire women had agreed to drench their shirts in beer and parade themselves for the amusement of patriarchal tools like Frank, Zach, and myself.
The next day at the weekly Community Council meeting, an angry delegation from the Women’s Center stormed in, demanding that something be done about this out-of-control fraternity. Excessive arm-twisting was not needed. The council members competed with each other to express their outrage that such a thing as a fraternity could exist on Hampshire’s hallowed grounds (“I came here to feel safe from things like that”) and that the school had allowed itself to slip so deep into sexism and prejudice that Frank, Zach, and I felt comfortable using official funds to lure Hampshire women (“taking advantage of underprivileged financial aid students”) into a contest for our sexual, misogynistic amusement.
There was some discussion about whether it would be adequate punishment merely to ban the party, outlaw Sigma Pi, take away our housing privileges, and make us publicly apologize to the community; but in the end it was decided that, no, all these measures failed to rise to the occasion. Sexism and patriarchal enslavement were on the rise, one might say they were running amok across Hampshire, and this was the Council’s one last desperate chance to “fight for progress before it is too late.” If we were allowed to remain on campus, it would be a sign to sexists that they were safe to practice oppression willy-nilly wherever they liked. When it came time to vote on the motion that the gentlemen of Sigma Pi fraternity be expelled forthwith and any trace of their presence be erased from the scrolls of Hampshire history, the resolution was carried by unanimous consent.
The Community Council, however, had no power to actually expel, and voting on student disciplinary matters had never, as far as anyone could remember, been in their line of duty. “In my day, the only students who tried to get other students in trouble lived very lonely lives,” Steve reflected. “And even the narcs could be reasoned with.” But like the Pharisees, the Community Council referred our case over to the person who could impose a death penalty, the dean of students. With a recommendation that the highest penalties be imposed, the Council sent us on to the administration, where our fate would be decided.
Before meeting with the dean I had a showdown with Sally on our hall. “You can’t blame me for telling. What you guys were planning made me feel unsafe in my own home.”
“You have to know,” I pleaded, “that there is no way we were going to actually have a wet T-shirt contest at Hampshire. Even if we wanted to, how could we have pulled that off?”
She shrugged. “That’s what Frank told me you were doing.”
“But it never occurred to you that he was just babbling. You live with him, you know he says all kinds of things.”
Her eyes narrowed. “There are some things you don’t joke about.”
“Like wet T-shirt contests?”
“Everyone agrees. Everyone. People are going to have to start being a lot more careful what they say around here.” She turned and stormed off.
On the second day of the crisis every student received a letter from the Women’s Center in their mailbox; a warning to all Hampshire women to beware of predators on campus, naming Frank, Zach, and me as the school’s reigning masters of exploitation. Our friends noticeably began to squirm when we spoke to them in public. “Everyone asks me how I can be friends with you,” Marilyn said.
“Do you say it’s because we didn’t do anything wrong?”
“No one wants to hear that.”
A candlelight vigil was held outside Zach’s mod, a public mourning at the site of oppression, or of planned oppression.
Amid this furor, we were called into the dean of students’s office. We sat at his round conference table and he stared hard into our eyes, a sneer of hate across his lips.
“How could you guys have done this? Do you know how many people have been in my office demanding your heads?”
“How many?” I asked.
“The whole damn campus!”
“That must be tough.” I nodded. “But the thing is, we haven’t actually done anything. . . .”
“So this is just trouble following you around again? Everywhere you go, trouble just comes chasing after you. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe the trouble is you?” Frank, Zach, and I looked at each other. That hadn’t occurred to any of us. But now that he’d mentioned it, the dean might have a point. . . .
“We,” Zach finally broke in, “we are innocent men.” We explained to him how the commotion had started, with Frank’s comments in the dining hall, mere bravado, we explained. The dean listened impatiently and finally broke in,
“Innocent!? You call that innocent!? Do the standards of this community have any meaning to you?”
“We’re all for the standards,” Frank said.
“We love the standards,” I agreed.
“Because of you, a lot of people feel very uncomfortable here.”
“But we—”
“Don’t tell me again that you didn’t do anything. If you guys weren’t at Hampshire, there wouldn’t be this trouble, would there?” We couldn’t argue with that.
“But still,” I insisted, “you can’t actually expel us if we haven’t done anything. There’ll be”—I paused before whispering the word I knew could stop a charging college administrator cold in his tracks—“there’ll be lawsuits.”
The dean let out a blast of harrumph and glared as though he were willing me to never have been born. After a few minutes of silent stare-down, he said quietly, barely audible, “Get out of my office.”
“I mean, we’ll own the school if you do that,” Zach prodded.
“Get. Out. But don’t think you’re getting away with this.”
Outside his office a cluster of activists waited and vigorously booed as we left.
Later, we learned that the demonstrators had been so incensed that we had walked away unexpelled that they had begun taking steps to occupy the Gold Coast (as the hallway of the Cole Science Center that housed the administration offices was known). Just before the ramparts went up and the occupation pizza orders were placed, however, the dean persuaded them that though Hampshire’s wheels of justice moved slowly, once they began moving no force on earth could stop them; justice would be served in due course. That seemed to satisfy the activists only very briefly. By nightfall, as we camped out in the living room of Zach’s mod, friends brought news that the word was sweeping the campus: The administration hadn’t really failed to move against us but had revealed their true colors—shown themselves to be in league with our wealthy parents and the sexist, classist, racist cabal that held the school in its iron grip and would never allow its own to be punished. If we were expelled from Hampshire, the theory went, our inexorable rise to the heights of society would be halted. The zillion-dollar-a-year corporate jobs overseeing Burmese slave labor camps we had been promised from birth would be withheld from us if we were expelled. Thus we would not go on to join and contribute to the ruling class and we would not be able to write the annual seven-figure checks we’d otherwise give Hampshire. Thus, as the administration had proved by failing to lop off our heads at the first hint of a wet T-shirt contest, the patriarchy was firmly in the driver’s seat at Hampshire College and only a mass mobilization could bring it down.
“I don’t have any rich parents like you dopes!” Frank exclaimed in outrage. “I wash dishes in SAGA, for Chrissakes.”
“That makes you worse,” Zach said. “You’re a class traitor.”
Outside, the planning continued as the activists now saw this was about much, much more than expelling three wayward oppressors; this was a battle for the soul of education.
The next day the campus simmered while
the dean sat across the table from the student leaders. Somewhere amid the deadlocked discussions, a burst of inspiration ignited the room. Even more effective than expelling us would be to force us to prostrate ourselves before the college, issue an apology for our insensitive behavior, for violating community norms, and for the scope of our entire lives, which we would acknowledge had been dedicated to oppression, imperialism on a global and personal level, and to objectification of “the other” in all its forms. It was suggested that expelling us would in fact be doing the community a disservice because once we were gone, they wouldn’t be able to punish us anymore (and—the thought flashed through their heads—no new oppressor might present himself for years). After we had completed a seminar taught by heads of the Women’s Center and representatives of any other groups whom our behavior had offended, we would make a public declaration of fealty to principles of inclusion and progress. And then, the dean told us, smiling, “and then I think the community might be willing to put this behind us.”
The dean and the two other administrators who flanked him on either side smirked at us. “I really think we’ve found a great solution here.”
“So you’re not expelling us?” Frank asked.
“Once you’ve completed the course we’ve prescribed, I think we’ll be able to take that off the table.”
“So let’s talk about your apology,” the woman on the dean’s left said. “We were thinking we could call a gathering in the gym where you apologize—”
“Apologize? For what?” I said.
The dean and his cohorts threw up their hands. “We’re trying to work with you. Please tell me you’re not going to start that again.”
“Damn right we’re starting that!” Frank fumed.
“Besides,” Zach said, “even if we were planning what they said we were, I don’t see anything in the student handbook about not throwing a wet T-shirt contest in a kiddie pool full of beer.”
The three smirks vanished and were replaced by grim looks of concern.
“Look,” said the dean, “if you don’t understand why you need to apologize for making people feel unsafe at their school, I really question whether you belong at this institution. We are offering you a way out of this mess you’ve created.”
Zach suddenly stood up. “The only way out I see is the door. Good day, gentlemen.”
That night, at the Red Lion, Steve Shavel confirmed the wisdom of our actions. “If they could expel you, they would’ve done it. They know they can’t get away with that.”
“So we just tough it out?”
“I think that’s your only plan.”
“But they can make life miserable for us.”
“The road of a Supreme Dick is long and dark,” Steve consoled. Still nominally a student—although again not enrolled this semester—Steve was embroiled in his own battle. For his past seven or eight years as an undergraduate, Steve had taken all his classes from one professor—an esoteric philosophy professor, a specialist in the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who taught, fortunately for Steve, only at night. This professor’s classes were attended by a small but fanatical legion of followers who sat in for marathon debates winging late into the night. These classes were a sort of quiet alternative to the critical theory workshops that dominated the Hampshire literature curriculum, in which Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault competed to define the postmodern ironies of our civilization—as well as to make the classes completely incomprehensible to anyone who dared join them. In contrast, Steve’s professor offered what resembled an old-fashioned, almost ancient, philosophy lecture and dialogue, drawing little from “recent texts” or “critical rethinkings” and offering an intense but traditional approach to modern philosophy.
This professor not only sent Steve down his all-consuming road of Wittgenstein studies, but he served as Steve’s advisor, and thus the person who had kept him in good academic standing for a full decade. When, a couple of years before, he had been forced by the administration to put Steve on an academic contract, the two wrote out and filed the following plan: “Whatever Steve accomplishes this year will be exactly what we have agreed upon.”
A Hampshire professor could get away with having a minuscule following and enrollment in his classes. He could also get away with teaching at odd hours and lackadaisical attention to administrative duties. A professor could even get away with thumbing his nose at the Hampshire establishment. But in this time of campus upheaval, he could not get away with all that while teaching an uncritical study of dead white male philosophers. Steve’s professor had been informed by the reappointment committee of the School of Humanities and Arts that his contract would not be renewed the following year. For the professor, who had spent almost his entire teaching career closeted away at Hampshire, this was a career catastrophe. For Steve, without the professor’s protection, there was little likelihood he’d be able to draw his Hampshire career far into a second decade. Along with Nathan, who had also become an acolyte of this professor, Steve began planning the fight to save him, but the hopelessness of their position was quickly becoming apparent and Steve was sinking into a depression.
“Hampshire College has mortgaged its soul to a bunch of carnival hucksters,” Steve mourned into his tomato juice. At the counter, one of the crazies was screaming at the top of his lungs, calling Mike a “toy fucking soldier” and threatening to murder everyone in the diner.
Steve sighed. “You used to be able to get this kind of atmosphere in any Hampshire dorm hall. Now the Red Lion is the last refuge for intellectual stimulation.”
The next day I was told that the faculty had joined the Community Council in voting unanimously to recommend that Zach, Frank, and I be expelled. Sitting in Ninotchka’s Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov class, empty seats on either side of me, I wondered whether unanimously had included Natasha. Had this woman who had spoken so seductively about Dead Souls really voted my presence so offensive that the only hope for peace in our time was that I be removed headfirst? I studied her for signs of disgust when she glanced my way, but then realized that she probably didn’t even know my name and had no clue that I was the person whose fate she had cast her vote on. For that matter, Ninotchka didn’t look like the type who spent a lot of time hanging around faculty meetings. At least, I managed to convince myself of that.
The pressure to publicly apologize mounted. One night in my dorm I received a secret delegation from the activists. Janet, an acquaintance loosely connected with the Butt Buddies who also did a weekly shift in the Women’s Center, stopped by A-1 to talk with me and Frank.
“They’re good people,” she explained of her comrades. “People are just scared. They are scared of what can happen to them here.”
“I don’t care if they’re scared of the Loch Ness monster. I don’t see how that adds up to us apologizing for a party we never even got a chance to throw,” Frank shouted, “and that would’ve been amazing,” he added, still not quite able to accept that the bash would never occur.
“Can’t you just appreciate what they’re going through? Why can’t you guys think about someone besides yourselves? They are willing to forgive you—”
“Forgive!”
“But you’ve got to give them something.”
The drumbeat for our apology grew louder and louder and then, as Thanksgiving approached, began to subside. Having made us pariahs, having demonstrated, protested, and raged against us, they could do little in the face of our unwillingness to be cast out. The dean, after a few more rounds of browbeating, had apparently consulted with the school’s lawyers and decided, much as it pained him, that while we continued stonewalling, expulsion was not in the cards. Other punishments would have to be found down the road. By the time he finally announced our sentences, a month after the kerfuffle began, the campus’s attention had moved on. The dean told us that we were all three being placed on behavioral and housing probation, that Zach, who lived in the mod where the party was to have occurred, was to move ou
t and was banned from living on campus, and that Frank and I had to vacate Merrill House. I realized that in a mere year and a half I had been banned from four of the five houses at Hampshire. This really had to be a record, I planned to challenge Steve.
The dean dismissed us with stern warnings about this being “the last time” and not wanting to ever see us in his office again. Outside, the cold was returning and people rushed from building to building, the passersby barely pausing to cast looks of scorn our way.
“I don’t know if I can ever look this place in the eyeball again,” Frank declared. It would be a while before we would return to semblances of “normal lives” at Hampshire. And then, far worse was yet to come.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Writing on the Wall
The furor over wet T-shirtgate had died down. As December arrived, the campus took cover from the cold, like frontline troops digging in for winter, keeping their ammunition dry and ready to recommence hostilities with the first spring thaw. Winter break came, then Jan term, and eventually I stopped even noticing the leers as I wandered campus.
But while the campus had gotten past wet T-shirtgate, little did we realize that it had only been a prelude to greater adventures for the ongoing PC uprising. The lion had been awakened, had tasted flesh, and its appetite would not be sated until it bathed in blood.
Once again I was hunting for a new place to live. Things being what they were, I wasn’t terribly heartbroken about saying good-bye to Merrill House; the accumulated bad vibes had long since poisoned what domestic bliss I had found in its cinder-block halls. My days on A-1 were capped by the fun of living with Sally, the person who began this party. We showered in neighboring stalls in icy silence.
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