The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Oh?” Naomi said. They were on the phone together the morning after that odd dinner party, each drinking coffee from a Webster College mug at her own desk, in their side-by-side buildings on the Billings Lawn.

  But she was not as impressed by this as Francine seemed to be. If a potential applicant was ambitious enough to approach a visiting dean of admissions on his own behalf, he was also ambitious enough to have read (or claimed to have read) a book by the college’s president. Besides, a lot of people had read her book. After she’d become Webster’s president, in fact, her publisher had reissued Divide and Conquer, and it had done rather decently. Not, of course, New York Times best-seller decently, but name recognition and reliably-present-in-your-better-bookstores decently.

  Francine, though, had laughed. “No, the other book. Your first book.”

  And then Naomi had been surprised, because this was newsworthy. The book that had begun life as her doctoral thesis at UMass had barely made it into print as No Boys Allowed: The Battle for Shulamith Records 1972–1986, and was now well and truly out of print. Not even the surprise ascension of its author to the presidency of one of the country’s most selective colleges had been enough to bring that title back.

  Shulamith Records had been a “women only” recording collective, steered by a core group of lesbian/feminist separatists in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Shulamith caught some of the updraft from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, held each summer on the other side of the state, and operated out of a communal house a few blocks from the UM campus. Even in its pre-internet lifespan the collective had managed to tap into a truly subterranean vein of feminist, lesbian, and feminist/lesbian cultures, a feat that could only be explained by the true hunger of the women in those cultures for anything that reflected back their realities and concerns. But Shulamith had also managed to bring genuinely powerful voices into the open, especially those of Louise Kamen, a folksinger from Georgia, and Rosanna Powers, a stunning Cherokee with a silken alto, who posed bare breasted on a rusted-out car on her album cover (an image that instantly became the lesbian equivalent of the famous Farrah Fawcett poster, published the same year). The collective grew and grew, nurturing its two stars and touring them to intensely grateful audiences around the country, while taking chances on even more experimental artists, as well as comedians and poets. Every Shulamith job, from artist to publicist to childcare provider for the offspring of collective members, was held by a woman. It was their manifesto. It was also, as things unwound, their downfall.

  “Women only” meant…only women. But what was a woman, anyway? This was a question no one was bothering to ask in 1975, because, after all, feminism back then was about acquiring male privilege, taking the night and the jobs and the control of the physical body back from the patriarchy. Women were on the move, but the going was tough; who’d want this struggle if they weren’t female by birth, de facto controlled and disenfranchised? Who, in other words, would choose to be women if they weren’t actually born that way, if they’d been born, in other words, into male privilege, automatically endowed with everything feminism was toiling to acquire? (And by the way, could you even do that back then?)

  You could do that, though just barely, even in the mid-’70s. And indeed, someone at Shulamith actually had done it before turning up in Ann Arbor and taking on the position of mastering engineer (a job that had not existed for the collective’s earliest albums, which was why the first thing this person did on arrival was to remaster them).

  She had come from Alabama, where her early life had been, frankly, hellish. Born Joseph Ignatius Owen to a family of former sharecroppers, she hadn’t even bothered to come out to her family. (Come out as what? She didn’t even have a name for what she was.) Instead she’d joined the navy, and at the other end of the Vietnam War she found herself in San Diego, where a miraculous being, an actual postoperative transsexual, brought Joseph to her own gifted and compassionate surgeon. The woman who emerged would be named Josie Owen, and she would never see her family again. She picked up a degree in sound engineering at a San Diego community college and headed to Michigan, to the thrilling collective she had heard of (like every other lesbian in the country, she owned the debut albums of Louise Kamen and the stunning Rosanna Powers), where her singular ear and skills put Shulamith’s sound quality on a par with the major labels in New York and LA.

  She didn’t keep it a secret. She was structurally female, but she couldn’t quite pass, and she knew it. Even if that weren’t the case, though, she would have told the truth; she was that kind of a person, and she was tired of living a falsehood. But was Josie Owen a woman because her anatomy approximated that of a woman? Or was she a woman because she had chosen to be a woman and declared it to be so? Or was she not really a woman, and if not, why not? Because the state of Alabama still knew her as Joseph? Because her honorable discharge from the navy, which had paid for her education, still knew her as Joseph? Because her family in Alabama had no idea what had become of Joseph? Or how about because each and every one of the 37 trillion cells in her body was home to a Y chromosome?

  This question would tear the Shulamith Collective apart. Even after Owen herself withdrew, citing her pain at the pain she was causing, moving with her partner to Maine, where she founded her own recording studio in Portland, the women who remained in Ann Arbor could find no peace. Had they expelled their mastering engineer unfairly? Had Josie Owen come into their midst with some evil, disruptive subversion already in mind? What did sisterhood mean when it preached the ether of womanhood but could not untie itself from cold, earthbound biology? The group disbanded for good in 1986, with one small faction drifting to Northampton, Massachusetts, and the rest dispersing.

  Naomi had first heard of Shulamith as a college student during the collective’s heyday, when she’d traveled to Michigan with Daniel and a couple of their friends to experience the Womyn’s Festival. Poor Daniel had not truly believed that he—evolved and feminist as he considered himself to be—would not actually be allowed onto the festival’s woodland site, and when a towering woman in a reflective vest and the police hat of a made-up jurisdiction stopped their car and would not permit them to pass, he had thrown the kind of fit that your basic male chauvinist will throw when prevented from accessing his traditional privileges. The two couples argued with the guard and then with the festival organizers. Daniel and the other man attempted to present their progressive credentials, and then commenced a general debate on feminism, and when neither of those worked, they threatened legal action to expose the festival’s blatant discrimination (which did much to lighten the mood), and when this, too, failed to work the foursome turned their car around and went to the nearest town and had a two-hour screaming argument over chicken sandwiches and iced tea at a diner. The upshot of all this was that Naomi and her friend, Kimberley, dropped the men off at a nearby lake, set them up in a rental cabin, and drove back to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, where they put up a tent like everyone else and settled in for two days of bare-breasted music and sisterhood. They did not specifically tell anyone that they were a couple, but they didn’t specifically say they weren’t, either. And the music was beautiful. And the sisterhood was powerful. And they were glad they’d done what they’d done.

  Shulamith had a big presence at the festival, naturally, and Naomi brought some of the albums back to Cornell, where she listened to them whenever Daniel was out. Eventually the albums moved with her to New Hampshire and then to Amherst, and when she discovered, in a chance conversation in a vegetarian café in Northampton (Rosanna Powers was playing over the sound system) that the collective had broken apart over a transgender engineer, Naomi had known instantly that she’d found her thesis topic. No Boys Allowed might not have made much of a splash in the wider world (its great moment was an essay of grudging praise by Mary Daly in off our backs), but it had proven crucial to her hiring at Webster, where the faculty then boasted not a single feminist scholar. Right place, right time. And if the boo
k passed quietly out of print a few years later, Naomi’s far more mainstream and accessible Divide and Conquer came quickly on its heels, and was still often read, even by certain boys attending high school in Texas.

  “Well, I hope you got his name,” she had told Francine on the phone. “Because if he ends up at Webster I’m definitely taking him to lunch.”

  By the time Naomi returned to the office that afternoon, the dean of students was waiting, hunched over his phone and tapping away furiously. Mrs. Bradford was out (she preferred an afternoon break to lunch), but Bob Stacek—the selfsame Bob Stacek who’d long ago passed her the buck of the Radclyffe Hall mess—had made himself at home. From his briefcase, open on the glass-topped coffee table in the waiting area, folders and papers unfurled, and a takeout coffee cup sat on the glass in a crusting ring of light brown goo. “Hi, Bob,” said Naomi, with a sinking heart.

  “Oh. Hi,” he said. He looked for a moment at a loss, as if he had forgotten her name, and couldn’t quite recall what she was doing here in the president’s office.

  “I think I told Dean Martell three thirty?”

  “Oh?” He shot a look over her head, at the wall clock. Ten past three.

  “Just let me make a quick call,” she lied, noting that she was not required to make a power play here, only that there was something about Bob Stacek that made her want to do just that. He did not like her. He had never liked her in a personal way. For the past five years, however, he had also not liked her in a professional way.

  Was it because Bob Stacek, Webster’s dean of students for nearly eighteen years, understood that Radclyffe Hall, the disturbance he hadn’t wanted to handle himself, had led directly to Naomi Roth’s presidency? Did he imagine that a similar transformation might have come to him if he’d dealt with the matter of Neil Jones-Givens himself? Naomi did not know and could not bring herself to care. She went into her office and closed the door, and spent the next few minutes answering the email of a sophomore’s mother who had taken issue with her son’s midterm grade in an introductory government course, the professor’s teaching style, the course’s reading list, and the entire department’s scholarly emphasis on what she called “left-wing socialisms.” It was not an entirely unpleasant way to spend a quarter of an hour.

  She heard Mrs. Bradford return. She could just make out the disapproval in her assistant’s voice, undoubtedly at the sight of that coffee cup on the tabletop. And then, a moment later, the genial greeting of John Martell, the dean of residential life. Naomi sat for a moment, listening to the murmur of their conversation through the thick door, delaying the getting up, the opening, the falsely hearty tone of her own welcome. It shouldn’t be an adversarial meeting. There was no reason for it to be an adversarial meeting. She wasn’t sure why she was dreading it this much.

  “Hiya, John,” she said when she finally made her move. “Bob? You want to come in?”

  Bob Stacek started to gather up his papers. Even in this he had an air of being put upon, as if someone had encouraged him to spread out in her waiting area, to make himself at home. She offered them tea but both declined, and she decided not to ask Mrs. Bradford for any, herself. Then she closed the office door again and went back around the desk to face them in their Webster College chairs.

  “I take it you two spoke on Monday, so I’m hoping you can bring me up to speed. What is going on out there? It looks bigger every time I walk across the Quad.”

  “It looks bigger because it is bigger,” said Stacek, as if she were a preschooler.

  “Also it got down to the twenties over the weekend,” said Dean Martell. He was a big man with a gut that overhung his brown tweed pants. He had been the dean of residential life since the previous year, having taken a leave from the art history faculty, probably because he’d thought the position wouldn’t be terribly time-consuming and he could do some work of his own. (Not an unreasonable assumption. After all, once you sorted out the annual strife surrounding the housing lottery, what could happen? Mechanical issues went to Buildings and Grounds; disciplinary issues went to the dean of students. And there was hardly going to be another Radclyffe Hall scenario.) But somehow the protest at the Stump had crossed a borderline the moment the students had unfurled their sleeping bags and driven their stakes into the well-tended grass of the Quad. Now this was a housing issue, according to the dean of students. Naomi did not know that she agreed with him, but she had no problem roping in Martell. She appreciated having another body in the room. It took a bit of the sting out of Stacek, having him there.

  “I saw a lot of down sleeping bags,” he was saying. “But, you know, those can be very warm.”

  They certainly can, Naomi thought.

  “I wonder how many of them are going to class and keeping up with their work,” Stacek said.

  “Well, but…what’s it about?” she asked, with impatience. There’d been a shantytown once, on the Quad, years earlier, when the trustees were talking about divesting from South Africa. She’d brought Hannah, then seven or eight, to the Quad, to hear the speeches one day, and naturally she had signed the petition for divestiture. But Webster had been out of South Africa for years. The college burned clean fuel and recycled every substance known to man, and Webster Food Services had even weeded out factory-farmed animals and genetically modified produce. What was getting them sufficiently worked up to forswear their beds and showers and sleep out?

  “You don’t know?” said Bob Stacek shortly.

  “I do not.”

  “Well,” said Dean Stacek with rich disapproval, “I’m shocked that you don’t know this already, but the issue is apparently Nicholas Gall’s tenure decision.”

  Naomi felt the impact of this work its way through her.

  “A tenure decision?” said Dean Martell. “You mean that he got tenure?”

  Stacek turned his attention from Naomi to the man seated beside him. “That he didn’t,” he said. He was making a meal of this.

  “But…how’d they find out about a negative tenure decision?”

  This was an excellent question, Naomi thought. Tenure decisions, after all, were not made public, so Gall must have said something himself. But why? Who’d want to call attention to the worst news an academic could receive? She herself had been terrified of being denied tenure when her number had come up twelve years earlier: Where could she go with that cloud over her head and a small daughter in tow? The life of a professor cast adrift from the tenure track was a vista of adjunct positions, itinerancy, and bitterness. Or it would have been, she knew, for her. But maybe this Nicholas Gall had a different way of looking at such a catastrophic event, or maybe he was close to his students in a way that Naomi, who loved teaching, never had been. She couldn’t imagine sharing any kind of personal information, let alone a setback of that dimension, around a seminar table or, worse, with a lecture hall full of Webster undergraduates—that just wasn’t in her DNA as a professor. But Nicholas Gall was popular with the students. Very popular. She remembered that from the file.

  “So you’ve been out to speak with them?” Martell was asking Dean Stacek, but this time Stacek was the one to demur.

  “It wasn’t necessary. Two of them came in to see me. A girl named Chava Friedberg and a boy. She wanted me to know that this group considers the denial of tenure to a professor of color to be an outrage. Her group represents Webster’s conscience, she was kind enough to let me know.”

  “Terrific,” Naomi said, though she hated to agree with him.

  “Because we’ve apparently become estranged from our dearest principles. And it’s a betrayal of everything we stand for, et cetera, et cetera. And I almost said, You know he’s a plagiarist, right?”

  “Wait,” Martell said, glaring at him, “you didn’t say that really.”

  “I’m not an idiot,” Stacek snapped. “I’d rather not be the reason Gall sues us for violating the privacy of his tenure proceedings.”

  Naomi exhaled. There was that, at least.

  “
Anyway, according to Chava Friedberg, Nicholas Gall’s tenure decision indicates that the very soul of Webster has become tainted, and we’ve lost our activist roots and other general nonsense. Apparently the college pays lip service to difficult ideas like diversity and engagement, but we’re not really diverse because there’s so much wealth in the student body, no matter what the ethnicity is, and we’re not really engaging because fewer and fewer of the students are going abroad, and the ones who are going are avoiding the hard places. They’re going to Florence, in other words,” Dean Stacek said pointedly, naming the annual art history program Dean Martell had established and for which he frequently served as the on-site faculty member.

  “Florence is the best place on earth to study art history,” Martell said defensively. “Always has been, always will be.”

  “But we canceled Kenya, and Vietnam. This was mentioned.”

  “Vietnam, three people signed up for the last two years we offered it,” Naomi jumped in. “And Kenya, two years ago a girl came home with malaria. I had her father threatening to sue us. And after the bombing at the stadium in Nairobi, everyone pulled their kids out for the following year. Look, nobody would love it more than myself if we had a thriving study abroad program. It doesn’t seem to be what our students want right now.”