A Rambling Wreck: Book 2 of The Hidden Truth

by Hans G. Schantz

  He dressed it up in flowery, abstract language, but the message was clear. The ends justify the means. Because our social justice ends are just, we can form a lynch mob to hound an innocent man from his job just to score some political points. I finally understood the social justice perspective: when your end is achieving ultimate power, so you can enact what you perceive to be ultimate good, the ultimate in evil means are justified. I suddenly realized why I’d had such trouble with social justice rhetoric. The goal was not to convey a message. The goal was to hide the true meaning behind a cloak of euphemism and cloudy vagueness. He couldn’t very well say, “I believe in killing any who oppose us and stand in the way of our quest for power.” Instead, he would say something like, “We deplore the extreme measures that may prove necessary, but a certain temporary curtailment of normal rights are an inevitable consequence of the evolution to social justice.” You could defend any atrocity, conceal any crime…

  “Can I count on you to help us out?” Professor Gomulka interrupted my reverie.

  “Yes. Yes, of course, Professor,” I assured him. “I understand. I understand it all, perfectly.”

  “You’ll approach Professor Chen about resigning?” Professor Gomulka forced me to commit myself.

  I took a deep breath. “Yes, I will,” I said, betraying Professor Chen a second time.

  I swung by the physics building and waited around the corner while loud voices talked behind the closed door of Professor Chen’s office. The dean and a couple of others left, walking past me. One corner of the dean’s mouth quirked up as he passed – a subtle acknowledgement of his junior ally in social justice. Professor Chen appeared shell-shocked.

  “Peter,” he welcomed me warily. “What brings you here to see me?”

  “I understand you are in trouble, Professor,” I began.

  “Peter,” he said softly but with a burning intensity. “You must not reveal what you know. They will kill you, and me, too keep their secrets safe.”

  “I understand the danger we’re both in,” I assured him. “I will keep your secret. They will not hear of it from me. My concern is that all the publicity and attention you are about to receive will draw more attention to your work. If they scrutinize it, if they realize what can be done with the data set you and Professor Graf have assembled…”

  “I know,” he nodded sadly.

  “I think,” I drew a breath to calm myself as I prepared to complete my sin by disowning my professor a third time, “I think you may need to resign.”

  He looked at me a moment. “I have already decided to resign,” he explained. “Professor Graf will be a good steward of our research group. Can I count on you to continue to help her out and make sure she does not ask the wrong questions or draw dangerous conclusions from our data?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I’d done it again. Just a couple of years ago, I cluelessly poked around old books at the Tolliver Library. I started a chain of events that led to five deaths, including my parents. Now I’d managed to destroy a professor’s career and put him, Professor Graf, and maybe the whole research team in jeopardy.

  Amit and I alerted the FOG, but Professor Gomulka was right – by acting quickly, the SJWs had the initiative. Amit and I joined the SJWs handing out flyers along Tech Walk, as was expected of us. Professor Gomulka called in a favor with CNN and they interviewed Madison. She explained how shocked and traumatized she felt. “I felt unsafe. I was literally shaking with fear and rage,” she explained. “Literally!”

  The dean opened up a “Safe Space” with cookies, coloring books, and Play-Doh for students who had been “traumatized” by Professor Chen’s terrifying shirt. “It’s not just a shirt,” the dean insisted. “It’s the pattern of institutionalized sexism and systemic oppression that the shirt so vividly illustrates. Our counselors are standing by to help any Tech student who feels threatened or alienated,” he assured the student body.

  “These sexist attitudes are precisely why so many women are turned off careers in science,” proclaimed Professor Gomulka at the Friday noon rally by the Campanile. “We demand that Professor Chen apologize for his disgraceful behavior and resign!”

  I showed up to Friday’s lab meeting early. Sarah was already there. “I can’t believe what your friend wrote. ‘This pervasive environment of toxic hyper-masculinity deters even strong, independent women like me from careers in science?’” She rolled her eyes as she read from the article. “Like that journalism freshman taking business math would so totally be doing quantum mechanics if only Professor Chen’s scary shirt hadn’t frightened her away.”

  Defending the indefensible is never fun, but I’d had to do it countless times before in high school debate.

  “She’s trying to help the cause of women in science,” I offered.

  “She’s certainly not helping the cause of women in science, or journalism, for that matter,” Sarah insisted indignantly. “Professor Chen and Professor Graf make a great scientific discovery, and instead of focusing on their achievement, your friend wants to critique a shirt? A fashion critique is the extent of the analysis that alleged journalist can ‘perpetrate?’ Besides, any more ‘help’ like that and I’m going to be out of a summer job, because this research group will be shut down. I’ve already been accepted to grad school, but I was hoping to work here over the summer. Now that’s in jeopardy.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Apparently they’re pressuring Professor Chen to issue a formal apology on Monday and resign,” she explained. “They’re hinting to Professor Graf that she should take over the research group and how wonderfully enlightened it would be to have a woman in charge to show the physics department isn’t really a bunch of mean, nasty, sexist bigots after all. Professor Graf turned them down. She’s standing behind Professor Chen one hundred percent! She told me she thinks they’re going to try to force him to resign, and if he doesn’t, they’ll fire him.”

  “You wouldn’t prefer working for a woman?”

  “How can you be for equality and justice and say something like that?” Sarah asked, incredulously. “Being a good boss and mentor depends on the person, not their sex. Professor Chen is wonderful. You know, he helped me get my gamma ray sensor module completed.” She popped open the Styrofoam cooler and pulled out her sensor package. “We’re going to test it in the vacuum chamber, cold soak it, and if it works, launch it in a couple of weeks using a high-altitude weather balloon.” She gestured toward a helium cylinder and what looked like some folded sheets.

  “How will you get the data back? Won’t you lose the balloon and payload when it drifts away?”

  “I’m using a cellphone with GPS. That was the expensive part of the payload. It’ll send text messages with its location.

  “I thought cell phones won’t work at altitude.”

  “Neither will GPS,” she noted. “The cell phone is really only to help us locate and recover the module as it’s drifting down by parachute. We’re using a 70-cm ham-radio data link for real-time telemetry to the chase vehicle. I’ve been working on this all year for my senior project, and I wouldn’t have gotten this far without Professor Chen.”

  “I’m sure Professor Graf could help you.” I felt like such a disloyal weasel.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Sarah shot back at me, defiantly. “Professor Graf and I are not going to stand by while you social justice types throw Professor Chen to the dogs!”

  Wow! Sarah had always been so mild-mannered and even-tempered – completely apolitical. The persecution of her professor had pushed her over the edge, and she was determined to fight back. Good! The Friends of George needed to reach out to her.

  Just then, Professor Graf arrived with some of the graduate students.

  Sarah looked suspiciously at me and then asked Professor Graf, “Did you...?”

  Professor Graf smiled. “It’s all arranged.”

  Professor Chen entered the lab, his head held low, not meeting our eyes. “I have be
en suspended, pending the outcome of the dean’s investigation. The dean has scheduled a press conference for Monday. He demanded I make a formal apology.”

  “Don’t do it,” Professor Graf stood defiantly, her hands balled into fists as she leaned forward against the table. “That's exactly what they want you to do. Your apology won't help anything. They'll just twist it around as an admission of guilt. You're handing them the excuse they need to break your tenure."

  “I honestly think you and the team will be better off if I apologize,” Professor Chen insisted, finally raising his head to meet her gaze. “It's the only way we can put this controversy behind us and let you get on with your work. I have to resign.”

  “Nonsense!” Professor Graf would have nothing of it. “It’s our work, yours too! Your apology is an admission of guilt. The next step will be to use your apology as ammunition to force you to resign. Your only hope, the team's only hope is if you stand firm and fight.”

  “You don't understand.” Professor Chen was clearly taken aback by the intensity of Professor Graf's insistence. “If it's not this, it will be something else. They are going to shut us down one way or another.”

  “Then, we will fight them at the press conference, and we will fight them at your tenure hearing, and on the peer review panels, and at GammaCon, and we will never surrender!”

  I was torn between fear Professor Graf was making matters worse and risking drawing the attention of the Civic Circle, and the realization that she was seriously hot when she was worked up to a high temper, leaning over, giving an excellent view of... I really had to stop my mind from wandering in inappropriate ways!

  Professor Chen wilted under the intensity of Professor Graf's assault. “Is there nothing I can say to persuade you to give up? To just let it go?”

  Professor Graf relaxed a bit. I think we all realized she'd won. “You have to fight,” she said simply. “That's all there is to it. For yourself, and for your team. We will be right behind you, all the way.” I could see the heads nodding around the table. Everyone was with her.

  “Very well,” Professor Chen acquiesced. Sarah leapt to her feet and started applauding. Everyone else joined in. I pretended reluctance, but inside I wanted to cheer. Finally, people were starting to fight back against the cry bullies. Professor Chen looked a bit overwhelmed by the burst of emotion his words had unleashed. He looked a bit misty eyed as he shook his head. “I fear you may have cause to regret your stand.”

  “You just leave it to me, sir,” Professor Graf assured him with a bright smile. “Sarah and I have an idea to turn this around.” She looked at the rest of us, avoiding any eye contact with me. “Will the rest of you please leave us?”

  She knew, or suspected, there was a mole on the team. Good for her. With my “social justice” connection, I was a likely suspect. I'd have to wait until the press conference Monday to learn what she and Sarah had in mind to save Professor Chen and the research group. I had to let Professor Gomulka know that Professor Chen might not apologize at the press conference after all. I waited until Saturday morning to pass on the news, and I slipped the invitation letter from George P. Burdell into Sarah’s box at the physics building.

  I’d put on a few pounds since arriving on campus, so I figured participating in the Hunger Strike for Equality wouldn’t hurt me, not that I planned to be an absolutist about it. I hadn’t been camping since I was in Boy Scouts, and the experience was nostalgic. It was surprisingly satisfying spending the night out on the green near the Campanile in my DEET-coated mosquito net, surreptitiously consuming an energy bar and listening to the whining, hungry insects feast on the even hungrier and hopelessly unprepared SJWs. That’s how I found myself right there at ground zero chanting, “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Sexist science has got to go!” Sunday at lunchtime when those magnificent bastards in FOG unveiled their surprise: a “Barbeque in Support of Professor Chen” just upwind. The SJWs called off the hunger strike a few hours early because, “we’d made our point,” and we went out together for some food at the Varsity. I treated myself to my favorite pick-me-up: a frosted orange.

  Chapter 9: On Death Ground

  I showed up early Monday morning to be sure I got a seat at the press conference. The place was packed. I was watching the back door to the auditorium when she entered. No one else had noticed yet. Professor Graf walked forward at a slow but deliberate pace, taking ownership of the room one row at a time. The audience quieted from the back to the front as she walked past. She looked gorgeous, even more so than usual, turning every head and quieting every conversation in her wake. If I weren’t so intimately familiar with how she looked, I wouldn’t have been able to tell she was wearing makeup.

  “Good morning,” Professor Graf began. “I’m Professor Marlena Graf of the Georgia Tech Physics Department. Not long ago, my colleague, Professor Wu Chen, shared a momentous discovery with the world – an innovation that will save lives by identifying areas of radioactive contamination, a new technique that will enhance quality of life by making deposits of nuclear fuel easier to find, and the realization that anti-matter exists in nature, right here on our own planet. As a member of his team, I’m proud to have contributed to these remarkable scientific breakthroughs.

  “Unfortunately, our team’s incredible discoveries were overshadowed by concern about Professor Chen’s poor judgment in attire. I speak for all the women on Professor Chen’s team when I say we find it highly inappropriate of him to wear a print shirt depicting sexy, attractive women wielding firearms or driving motorcycles,” she said, her voice conveying a stern schoolmarmish disapproval. “This is a place of science, a research laboratory, not a shooting range or a motorcycle rally. So I have collaborated with Professor Chen’s other female colleagues and with the artist of the original shirt to commission something a little more appropriate for Professor Chen to wear to this and any future scientific press conferences and events.”

  Professor Graf held up another print shirt – similar in style to the one that got Professor Chen in trouble. The shirt depicted women in science and engineering. Astronaut Sally Ride floated weightless above the right pocket. Across the back, Madame Curie showed a rather attractive calf as she dueled with a kettle of radium. Hedy Lamarr gazed out with smoldering eyes past a sketch of her spread-spectrum radio design. Sexy, attractive women in lab coats examined test tubes, peered into microscopes, and wrote formulas on blackboards. And was that Professor Graf and Sarah wrestling with a vacuum chamber just below Madame Curie’s kettle? I could hear the crowd beginning to murmur, chuckles and laughter merging with gasps of horror and outrage. Professor Graf handed the shirt to Professor Chen who calmly put it on, a serene look on his face… or was it just resignation to the inevitable?

  Whatever. The shirt was simply awesome.

  “Professor Chen’s critics complained that his shirt sent the wrong message,” she continued. “They complained that we ‘browbeaten and intimidated’ women in science are wilting violets and that the least display of sexuality would have us cowering in fear from the rapacious male overlords of our hetero-patriarchal profession. They proclaim that the power differential between teacher and student or between boss and employee leaves us no choice but to submit without protest to off-color jokes, degrading workplace behavior, or inappropriate advances. They trivialize the horror of rape by equating it with images on a shirt. These fainting-couch feminists and modern-day puritans demand we institutionalize their neuroses by insisting that the least hint of sexuality be purged from the workplace. They would take us back to the Victorian era when table legs had to be covered lest they arouse inappropriate thoughts. Well, we have a different message to send his critics. We say, ‘No.’

  “Autonomy means personal responsibility, not crying to authority figures for help at the least provocation. If we have a problem with a co-worker’s behavior, we accept the responsibility to stand up for ourselves and say so. Mere offensiveness is not harassment. If someone offends you by their speech, you must lea
rn to defend yourself by the same method. To run crying for outside help is to send a message that women are too weak to work with men. Appealing for outside help must remain a last resort, not first aid.

  “It’s true that science has long been male-dominated for the simple reason that science is largely a creation of males. Science was largely devised by men, but now has been augmented and is co-owned by women. Men invited us in as their guests, and now we work together as partners. A sex-free workplace is neither achievable nor desirable. Demanding that men redefine themselves to suit feminist dogma is no more acceptable than demanding women redefine themselves.”

  Professor Graf defiantly defended her boss from the witch-hunt. She proclaimed her independence from the would-be social justice white knights who wanted to reduce her to the status of anointed victim under their protection… and control. They’d offered her Chen’s research group, and she contemptuously spurned the offer of social justice patronage as she would an improper advance from an unclean thing. I’d seen flashes of it before, but she’d kept it well hidden. Now at last she turned on the full force of her personality and her feminine presence. She radiated a power I’d never seen before. I was simultaneously in love, and a bit intimidated by her. The audience sat silent, shocked by the unexpected intensity of her remarks.

  “I stand with Professor Chen against his critics, against the world if need be. You don’t intimidate me, and neither does a silly shirt.” She began to leave the podium.

  The reporters present leapt to their feet and began yelling questions. “Doesn’t Professor Chen’s behavior discourage girls from pursuing STEM careers?” shouted one reporter. “Shouldn’t you be encouraging girls, not turning them away?”

  “I think it’s a good idea,” Professor Graf countered, “to expose more students, male and female alike, to the possibility of a STEM education. I am concerned, however, that those who succumb to the high-pressure sales tactics used in promoting STEM studies may lack the inner drive to succeed. STEM degrees are difficult. If you need to run and hide in a safe space when a professional colleague wears print shirts featuring pin-up models, STEM is not for you.”