The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  The “holistic evaluation” that ensued took them each through their respective mugs and halfway through a second, and comprised everything from Douglas’s assessment of their place in the US News college rankings to their stature within the “Little Five,” the mainly whimsical grouping of New England colleges Webster had been attached to years earlier. (That the Little Five had, at certain moments in recent history, been to a tiny degree harder to get into than Harvard was merely an example of how malleable statistics could be, and moved Naomi not at all, but the news had been unexpectedly exciting to Webster grads, and had resulted in a surge of new giving, not to mention an instant classic T-shirt at the Webster Co-Op: Webster College—The Harvard of Massachusetts.) At the moment, Naomi learned, sipping her second mug of coffee, Webster was being regarded as highly attractive by young artists, activists, entrepreneurs, history of science students (they had hired, two years before, one of the country’s most visible defenders of Darwin, a well-mannered but determined firebrand with shoulder-length black hair, constantly in demand to debate Young Earth proponents), and more and more associated with, Douglas Sidgwick said dryly, reality television.

  “What?” she asked, looking up. She’d been, surreptitiously, checking email.

  It was one thing to have her own passing familiarity with reality television, but the notion of Douglas Sidgwick keeping up with Project Runway and Survivor really was beyond. He nodded, referring back to his perfectly organized notes. Webster graduates had, of late, won or come close to winning The Amazing Race, Project Runway, America’s Next Top Model, American Idol, and Top Chef, with a current Webster junior now loping toward victory in the Jeopardy! College Tournament. Naomi, who watched none of these programs (currently watched none of them—she and Hannah had gone through a Jeopardy! phase during a particularly bleak period in their mother-daughter journey), was amazed.

  “Wait, so people are thinking Webster’s a good college to attend if they want to win Project Runway?”

  Sidgwick frowned. “It’s more that we’re associated with a general sense of producing very driven young people. Spunky, creative kids who go for what they want, and prevail.”

  “Well, I hope that’s what it is,” she said, still perplexed. “What else?”

  What else was a survey, currently out to alumni, on the question of adding a graduate program in public health, a not-insignificant move for a college that had been rigorously focused on the undergraduate for more than two hundred years. Even with a pledge to retain the moniker Webster College, the issue was proving heated. Very heated.

  “We should pick a date to stop coding the responses.” Naomi sighed. “It doesn’t sound like the patterns are going to skew massively.”

  “No. Remind me, when would you need to break ground, if you’re going ahead?”

  “Two years from September. There’s still time.”

  “And you think it’s worth it?”

  Naomi shrugged. But Sidgwick didn’t really do gestures, not even the obvious ones. He was waiting for words.

  “I really don’t know. I really don’t.”

  “All right.” He made a note. “And I have two budget call issues for you. I don’t know how involved you want to be at this point?”

  “Not very,” said Naomi. What she did want was to move things along now. “So, can we talk about the Native American conference?”

  “Yes, fine,” he said. “I have a whole dossier for you.”

  She smiled. She was sure he did.

  “But how much do you know in the way of background?” asked Sidgwick, for whom everything that was not happening right this second should be considered background.

  “Oh…the usual amount, I guess. Josiah Webster graduates Columbia, sets up an outpost near Albany to tell Native Americans all about Jesus, gets sent packing by the Iroquois, then another tribe invites him to start a school here.”

  “Well,” said Sedgwick, entirely without humor, “more or less.”

  Naomi, who preferred to remain in the present day, hoped it would be less, but suspected it would be more.

  “Josiah Webster did graduate from Columbia in 1750 and by 1755 he’d set up a few miles south of Lake George, just in time for the French and Indian Wars. So he was lucky it didn’t end right there. But even without the hostilities he wasn’t having a lot of luck with the Iroquois. They weren’t feeling the need for conversion, which is what Webster was selling, though he did offer Greek and Latin, too. That was kind of his bait and switch, I guess you could say.”

  “Right,” Naomi said. She was noting the time on the wall clock over her doorway.

  “But he had managed to attract one student, or more of an acolyte. He’d come to the Webster Indian school from one of the Praying Towns in Massachusetts.”

  “Praying Towns,” Naomi said. “What’s that?”

  “Well, you can think of them as kind of prototype reservations. They were an experiment to encourage the Indians to give up whatever the English considered savagery, which was basically the entirety of their culture. You know how King Philip’s War turned on the death of a ‘Praying Indian’? A convert, in other words.”

  Naomi, who really, really did not want to linger in the eighteenth century, said, “Yes, I know.”

  “So these were whole communities of ‘Praying Indians.’ And one of them was a settlement in Connecticut, called Maanexit, a few miles from where we are now, though eventually we wound up on the other side of the Massachusetts/Connecticut line. And he invited Josiah Webster to come home with him and rebuild the school here. We don’t know his original name, but his baptismal name was Josiah. Also Josiah.”

  “No ego there,” Naomi observed.

  “And that was kind of the official beginning of Webster. The Webster Indian Academy.”

  “And two and a half centuries later, here we are!” she said brightly, optimistically.

  “Yes. Well, but no. Because within twenty years or so there was no more Indian Academy. Or there was still an academy but there weren’t any more Indians. Native Americans. Josiah was dead. Both Josiahs were dead, and Josiah Webster’s son—that was his successor, Nathaniel Webster—was just keeping afloat by taking in the sons of Massachusetts farmers. The ones who weren’t going to Harvard and Yale. But their families didn’t have much money to spend on education. Most of the money, in general, was in Boston and Philadelphia and the South, and to be frank there wasn’t much incentive to keep things congenial with the Indians anymore, because by then things were pretty much settled on that front—we’d won, they were no longer a threat. If they didn’t want to be Christian, that was okay. And meanwhile nobody was going to send their son to study with Indians when they could go to Yale or Harvard and be with their own kind. So Nathaniel found this whaler named Samuel Fairweather, and Fairweather pitched in the money for the establishment of Webster as a new college, distinct from the Indian Academy. And because he didn’t want to lose this donor, he kind of had to give in to Fairweather’s primary demand, which was that there wouldn’t be any more ‘Indian’ in the name; from now on Webster would offer theology and Latin, and whatever else they were teaching at Harvard and Yale, or Nathaniel could go somewhere else for the funds. And that was that. Not a single Native American for two centuries. Not till Sarafian in sixty-six.”

  From the next room—the next room—Naomi heard Mrs. Bradford clear her throat. Without ever having verbally established this fact, the clearing of Mrs. Bradford’s throat had come to mean that Naomi’s next appointment was growing nigh.

  “Douglas? I am so sorry. I am finding this fascinating, but I have the Alumni Council coming in soon and I want to get to the conference.”

  And Douglas was nodding. Douglas understood. Probably. But his brain had to connect every dot before he could go forward. He was like the tribal historian that Alex Haley encountered when he finally made it back to his ancestor’s African village. Why yes, this man could tell the visiting American author about his great-great-great-grandfather,
but only if he started back at the commencement of time. It would take a day or two, or several, but what was time, really, when today was just another day in the life of an African tribe or a 250-year-old American college, every moment of which was as compelling and intricate as this moment, right now? At one of their very first meetings, which had unwisely taken the form of a casual lunch in the pub at the Webster Inn—“unwisely” because Douglas, it would be immediately clear, did not function well in social settings of any kind—he had mentioned that his lifelong project was a history of the college. An exhaustive history, which he intended to call The Devil and Webster.

  But why? Naomi had asked. “I don’t believe we have a history of Satanism. Do we?”

  “No, no. Well, not unless you went back to colonial times, when the Europeans considered every surrounding forest to be home to Lucifer and his minions. But if you think about it, Webster College has enjoyed a long history of capitulation. First, there was a mission; then we went for the money. Then two centuries later, we went for a different kind of currency, and gave the first money back. But both times there was a mouth at our ear, and we listened.”

  She nodded, but really she found the metaphor a mite dramatic. Naturally, over the years, the college had cut its conscience to fit the fashions of the time, but didn’t any institution do that, more or less? And for that matter, weren’t they each, on a personal level, finally products of the only times they knew?

  “Sarafian understood that we needed to do something, to shift something,” Douglas said. “He was a shock to the system in a lot of ways. Foreign born. Not a native speaker. A serious academic, not a businessman. Not an alum—believe it or not there’d only been a few presidents before him who weren’t Webster alums, and most of those were way back at the beginning. And he looked different. He had long hair. He wore the same kinds of clothes the students were starting to wear. He listened to the same music. And he was single, which meant there was a chance he might be a homosexual, which a lot of people couldn’t get past, even after he started living with a woman in the Stone House. Which was another thing, but the point is, he had none of that gimlet eye stuff when it came to Webster. He saw things really clearly, like that we were the safety school. We were stuck in this orbit around the Ivies, and that was unacceptable. And because he saw where all of us were going—the culture and the colleges—he decided we were going to go there first. We were going to coeducation. We were throwing out the quotas for blacks and Jews. And most of all we were going to bring back the Indians. He put that front and center, in his inaugural speech. He said: ‘Webster will recommit itself to its original purpose. We will welcome to this college Native American and First Nations students from all over the Americas.’ It was a scandal.”

  “Oh yes,” Naomi said, defeated.

  “But when they got here, that first group in the late sixties, they were shocked. First football game and there are white boys prancing around in Indian costumes on the field yelping these Hollywood war whoops. A delegation of them went to Sarafian and said, ‘You can have us or you can have the Indian symbol. You don’t get to have both.’”

  There came the distinctive rap that Mrs. Bradford’s knuckles made against the mahogany door. The door opened up enough for her large, pale head to come through. “Alumni Council is here. They arrived a few minutes ago.”

  “Wonderful,” said Naomi. “We’re nearly finished here. Why don’t you put them in the conference room and…is lunch here?”

  “In the conference room.”

  “Good. Well, they can start and I’ll be in in a couple of minutes. Unless, Douglas, would you like to join us for lunch?”

  He gave her a look of real horror. She might have asked him to walk over coals.

  “A few minutes,” Naomi said, and Mrs. Bradford’s head was withdrawn.

  “I’m glad you have so much perspective on why this matters,” said Naomi. “I’m only surprised that it’s never been done. Fifty years since Sarafian’s inauguration. More than eight hundred Native American students. And we’ve never had a dedicated conference. Why is that?”

  Douglas looked as if he was about to answer. At length and in detail.

  “So I want you to know,” she cut him off, “that this is a priority for me. And I want the conference to be as much a part of our institutional story as Sarafian’s rededication was. I want their perspective, warts and all, and I want our entire community—alumni, students, faculty, everybody—to be looking ahead to this as a major event. Now”—Naomi got to her feet; she had no more time spend on this right now—“I want you to do one thing before we meet again next week. I want ten alumni of Native American or First Nations descent we can approach as an advisory committee, and one of them to chair the committee. Send me bios, and contact information. I’ll ask them personally. But I want to move on this.” She stopped. He was still seated. He was making notes in his spidery handwriting. “All right, Douglas?”

  “Mm-hmm,” he murmured, not looking up.

  She left him there, with the door to the outer office wide open so that Mrs. Bradford could keep an eye on him, because who knew how long he would continue to write, still there in his wooden Hitchcock chair with the college crest, before he realized or at least fully understood that he was now supposed to get up and leave?

  Chapter Five

  The Very Soul

  of Webster

  After that, the rest of the day was nearly a pleasure. Chewing over the merits of a dozen highly meritorious individuals (even while chewing far less meritorious turkey sandwiches) proved a satisfying way to spend an hour, and by the time it was over she and the committee had a dozen potential honorees, including two scientists on the current faculty, a recently retired professor of Spanish and Portuguese, a historian whose biography of Aaron Burr had won the National Book Award the previous year, a young alumna who’d founded an orphanage in the Central African Republic, three older alumni who’d given so generously to Webster that they’d all get honorary degrees eventually, the longtime head of the college housekeeping service, two current Massachusetts congressmen, and a folksinging icon of Naomi’s youth whose daughter was due to graduate the following June. Within the next month the committee and Naomi would vote on this list, reducing the number to eight. With luck, letters would go out before the winter break.

  When Mrs. Bradford brought in a plate of cookies and a tray of Webster mugs filled with decaf, the generally understood signal was that it was now permissible to address more personal concerns, and these were accordingly forthcoming. Admissions, naturally, ranked at the top of everyone’s list, and given that nearly all the honorary degree committee members were between thirty-five and fifty years old, each and every one of them seemed to have a child in the zone, or know a child in the zone, or know a child unfairly rejected in (direct?) favor of another child unfairly admitted. It was extraordinary how they all seemed to carry around the academic and extracurricular data of so many young people. Their own children, understandably, but their children’s classmates, rivals, romantic partners? Naomi tried to listen sympathetically. She’d placed her faith in Francine and had no problem singing her praises (read: passing the buck) to these or any other interested parties. (And when it came to college admissions, she had learned, every single parent on the planet was an interested party.) Francine was not, as a rule, an approachable kind of person, but that was probably no bad thing given the unique challenge of being a dean of admissions at a highly competitive college.

  “I personally phoned her office last spring,” a man from suburban Washington, DC, was saying. “My business partner’s son applied early to Webster and was deferred. Seven hundreds on his SATs, and he played varsity football all four years. Of course his father knew my son wasn’t nearly as qualified, but Connor got in the year before, and my partner’s son, they didn’t even waitlist him. It’s crazy.”

  Naomi, sipping her Diet Coke, was half-heartedly rummaging through her well-worn collection of platitudes, wonderi
ng which to select. Perhaps: It certainly is crazy. Applications were up another eight percent last year! Or: They have to make such tough decisions. Aren’t you glad you don’t have that job? Or possibly: Oh, I know, you should see our applicants. They’re all like that! Smart and involved and ambitious. If we were applying to college today, I don’t even like to think about it! And, naturally, by no means: You’re absolutely right. We should never have taken your son Connor. This kid was obviously a stronger applicant. But in the end she didn’t have to say anything. They just wanted to vent, really.

  “And you know, Samantha’s roommate freshman year? She didn’t even really want to be here. She stopped studying, stopped going to class. Finally she wasn’t getting out of bed. One day Sammy came back to the dorm and the girl was loading up her parents’ car. Not even a goodbye.”

  “How awful,” Naomi said, trying to remember if this girl had been brought to her attention. Last year’s freshman class? There were about four, she thought, who’d left before the year was through.

  “But I mean, what is this girl doing taking up a place? There were two girls in Sammy’s class who were dying to come to Webster. And one of them got into Yale. But she wanted to come here!”

  Naomi tried to concentrate on this non sequitur. Or was it two non sequiturs, in sequence?

  “I just don’t know what they’re doing over there,” the woman said. And there were nods and sighs around the table.

  “We’re only as strong as our admissions,” said the man whose business partner’s son had been rejected.

  Naomi, looking around at them, was suddenly concerned. Was this…had this become…a thing? And if it had, when had it? And how had she missed it?

  “I have every confidence in Dean Rigor,” she said. But she had taken note.

  After they’d gone, she walked to the Arts Neighborhood to meet with the head of theater and dance, who wanted to show her exactly how the new dance studios were deficient (it boiled down to the fact that they had been designed by the former head of theater and dance, and not by him), and then she went downtown, ostensibly to pick up a book at the Webster Bookstore but mainly to stretch her legs. She had not been for a walk with Francine for weeks, partly due to her own speaking schedule (September was a popular time of year for alumni groups) and partly because her friend was away on that trip to California and the Southwest. Apart from the dubious brownies delivered to her hotel room in La Jolla, the other highlight of that trip had been a boy at a public school in Houston who’d come up after the Q&A for a chat about Webster’s philosophy faculty. “Then he told me he’d read your book,” said Francine.