Folklore might have been an archipelagic discipline, but it wasn’t vast. Folklorists read widely in the field, even beyond their own specific areas of interest. Still, it wasn’t a folklorist who first realized what Nicholas Gall had done.
The monograph, “The Mountain Whippoorwill” and Lowe Stokes, had been tucked away in the very folder Professor Kinikini now held, and that folder had been resting on the granite countertop of his colleague Diana Arditi’s kitchen in West Webster. Arditi’s teenaged daughter Sabrina had just settled in on one of the bar stools to drink her morning smoothie when she began to amuse herself with the contents of the folder, and by the time her mother got downstairs, ready to drive her to Webster Regional, Sabrina was already shaking her head. “Really?” the girl said, in a caustic tone that—without even knowing what her daughter was talking about—her mother was already taking personally.
“The Mountain Whippoorwill” was obscure, arguably, but its author was a little bit less so, and Sabrina had in fact prepared an oral report for tenth-grade English (Twentieth-Century American Poets) on this very person. She recognized language from the Poetry Foundation website that she had herself cut and pasted into her report, then laboriously rewritten, fulfilling at least the intention of original work. Gall hadn’t even done that much.
Plagiarism, plagiarism, Naomi thought, scanning the printout from the website, which Kinikini had brought for her. It was an ugly word, ugly to anyone who’d ever attempted the delicate but gut-wrenching task of setting words onto paper (or its technological equivalents). Words might feel universal, but they were not, because when they were put together they made patterns, and those patterns were as personally composed as any line of music or labored-over pigment on a canvas. The theft of words, however, stalked every university, no matter its prestige, and fighting it felt, at times, like whacking away at the Angel of Death from Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments: thick green smoke winding its way down every hallway and into every classroom.
Once, a few years earlier, Francine had told her about some website that sold academic papers and custom-made application essays, and Naomi had spent an hour examining it, clicking around with a sick fascination. There were actual testimonials on the site, praise from its satisfied customers: “Plagiarism is completely off bounds for my professors!” a boy from Memphis, Tennessee, had written. “So whenever I order a paper at EssayHelp.com, I always check the Plagiarism Secure option, so I can be completely sure my essay is not copied from anywhere.” A girl in New York City had said: “The most embarrassing thing is to get caught trying to pass off some already published work as yours! I don’t want that to happen, so I always check the Plagiarism Secure option. It’s worth the extra money to be sure.”
Hilarious. Also appalling. Also tragic.
Not to mention epically pervasive. Never had this been more clear to Naomi than in a class she’d once TA’d back at UMass, when she was a doctoral student. The course was a big survey of twentieth-century political activism and social movements, and Naomi’s assigned seminar group had had the usual mix of the clever and the dense. Naomi’s favorite student was a young woman from Holyoke, Massachusetts, whose family had emigrated from El Salvador a few years earlier. The girl was sweet, serious, hardworking, and genuinely interested in the subject matter—everything one could desire in a student—but her relationship to the English language was not a peaceful one, and while she could communicate well enough aloud, the written assignments she turned in were usually broken and illogical. When the girl submitted her final paper, Naomi knew right away that they were both on thin ice. The paper began with her typical choppy and mangled prose, then suddenly morphed into a beautifully argued overview of patterns in American activism. On and on, with nary a comma out of place for eight delightful and thought-provoking pages, only to conclude, on the ninth page, with another paragraph of tortured sentences, signifying nothing.
What to do about it? Naomi liked her student personally, thought of her as diligent and serious, and knew perfectly well that she was the first person in her newly American family to attain the heights of a college education. The dilemma kept her up for a few nights (well, two-year-old-Hannah was also keeping her up, so that wasn’t much of a stretch), and then, all at once, she arrived at a perfect solution.
At the next class meeting she announced that a serious matter had come up. A person in the seminar group had plagiarized his or her paper, she informed them. This person would not be named, but if he or she phoned Naomi at home that evening to discuss the matter, Naomi promised that they would not fail the course or be reported to the disciplinary committee. The student would, naturally, be required to submit a new paper, and could expect a lower grade, but that was of course far preferable to failing the class and facing the serious penalties of plagiarism.
That evening, as she was feeding Hannah, the calls began, and by the time she had put her daughter down for the night, fully half of the class had checked in. Every time she picked up the phone, Naomi had had to suppress her shock and pretend that the caller was the very student of whom she’d spoken. The tenth and final call was from the plagiarist. The original plagiarist.
That was bad. But it was also, in a way, understandable. College students were young (almost always). They were dumb (often). They were figuring things out (one hoped). If a person were going to make a mistake in life, and making a mistake could be a powerfully formative experience, then making it as a college student would be the best of all possible times for that to happen. For Mr. Gall, on the other hand, the window on forgivable plagiarism, to the extent that it had ever been open, was now long closed.
Things had moved quietly but quickly after the alarm raised by Diana Arditi. The committee was summoned to a special meeting and the matter was revealed, discussed, and made official. Within days a formal charge of plagiarism was levied against Professor Nicholas Gall and Gall was invited to respond, as was only fair. He did not. He simply continued to teach his course, even as the wheels of his fate made their inevitable rotations. Perhaps he was simply lazy. Perhaps he had his head in the sand. Perhaps he was panic-stricken, and understandably so. It occurred to Naomi now, for the first time, that perhaps he simply handed over the matter, in its entirety, to his students—inadvertently, in a moment of weakness? or willfully, venally?—deputizing them to rail against the system. However it happened, whatever the order of events, there were tent poles in the Billings Lawn only days after Gall held the official tenure ruling in his hand.
Still, as soon as Kinikini had wrapped up his sorry account and taken the file and the monograph away, she started picking the story apart. Academia, like any other world, was full of the lazy and uninspired, but most confined these tendencies to the post-tenure portion of the run, when they could settle in for a nice long stretch of lowest common denominator teaching and research. Gall, who’d never had trouble filling his courses, and who was still the only dedicated folklorist in the anthropology department, looked very much like a faculty member the department might like to hold on to, however lukewarm he was about participating socially or bureaucratically. The only thing standing between him and that attractive life was publication, and Gall had a completed doctoral thesis that was fully adaptable and ready to go out to publishers. He had elected not to pursue this obvious avenue, but why? Writer’s block? Depression? Had his interests wandered into some other area, and he couldn’t bring himself to start over? Or perhaps the thesis itself was problematic in its academic integrity. It might have gotten past the auditors of his own graduate program, but academic publishers typically sent books under consideration to independent reviewers in their field. It had to have been either laziness or deceit—two roads in a yellow wood: both well traveled, both utterly unacceptable. And a person like that? Well, the sooner Webster got shot of him, the better.
The irony was that, apart from Gall, Webster’s current tenure class was actually phenomenal: the brilliant young mathematician, two historians with major books a
lready published, the biologist on the verge of greatness, a film studies professor who wrote frequently for Rolling Stone and Esquire, and a poet whose second collection had won a Pulitzer. They were superstars any great university would be thrilled to employ, but they had chosen to make their academic homes at Webster. And there were half a dozen other newly tenured faculty members who might not be destined for the cover of the Webster Alumni Monthly but were still solid scholars who’d done the work and, more important, followed the rules. Each of these men and women had earned their tenure confirmations, and the security and respect that went with them. And unless Naomi found a way of bringing this Nicholas Gall problem to some reasonable conclusion, every one of their positive tenure rulings would be, in some way, devalued.
They had certainly grown spoiled, these last years, when it came to getting, and keeping, the people they wanted. It hadn’t always been like this. In the bad old days, for two hundred years at least, Webster College had orbited what would become the Ivies, taking those students who might or might not make it through, academically speaking (which was saying something, as the Ivies themselves were concurrently admitting large contingencies of the less than intellectually distinguished). The graduates of Webster might not have been the brightest lights in their high school classes, but they ascended—en masse, so it seemed—to long and lucrative post-college careers, usually in business. And they were very loyal to Webster, especially when, in due course, they sent their sons to the school to have the same great time they’d had themselves: drinking in the sticky basements of their fraternity houses, cramming for finals, road tripping to Smith and Holyoke, cheering the tough little football team with their war-painted faces and yelping their made-up war whoops. That had been good enough for a very long time, but it hadn’t been good enough for Oksen Sarafian.
How on earth had Webster managed to find Oksen Sarafian? As in her own case, the college hadn’t had to look far. Sarafian was a professor of education, a theorist on childhood learning whose ideas made Rudolf Steiner schools seem Old Etonian by comparison. He’d come to Webster from Harvard, but really he’d come from France, and long before that his family had come from Armenia, and it was hard to say which of those multiple origins made him most difficult for Webster’s Old Guard to accept. With his long black hair, European tastes (in fashion and food), and distinctive accent (French flattened by Boston), Sarafian attracted attention from the moment his custom-made loafers first set foot on the Billings Lawn. The students loved him. He held an open house in his home every Sunday night, and Webster undergraduates began gathering, in greater and greater numbers, to talk about everything—what was happening in the wider world, how things were changing. Naturally they also talked about Webster, and how it worked, and how it was broken.
There had never been much of a counterculture at Webster. Partly due to the uniform wealth and social stature of the students and partly because, for most of them, college was an interlude of recreation, interrupted by a few sadly necessary academic obstacles to be negotiated. But Sarafian, somehow, made even the heartiest partier set down his beer for a moment, and consider. Why not? There was something about him that seemed to make the earth tremble, just a tiny bit, and that wasn’t as bad as it sounded. The tiny frisson of a new idea, well, it had an unnerving effect on people, even people who weren’t prone to thinking about much. And one February night, only a few years after Sarafian arrived at Webster, as the trustees gathered for their usual midwinter conclave, a truly stunning percentage of the student body assembled at the Stump and walked calmly to the steps of the Webster Inn, shutting down traffic on Webster Avenue and backing up to cover half the Quad. Their purpose was to politely ask that Oksen Sarafian replace the college’s longtime (too longtime) president, Thomas MacDiarmid, class of ’28 and protégé, himself, of that product of good German stock, Charles Myer Stone. And because the unstated agenda of that very gathering was to oust MacDiarmid (who showed not the slightest intention of retiring, ever, though he’d been asleep at the wheel for years), the trustees listened. Perhaps their earth, too, had trembled. Perhaps they understood that Webster’s best future lay in a direction they themselves had not yet considered. Only six months later the new president was speaking from the steps of Billings Hall to a sea of wooden chairs stretching across the Quad, conjuring a Webster of women and minorities, art and scholarship, an intellectual utopia for every student, including—especially—those students the school had turned its back on, centuries before: men and women of Native American descent.
It was the very first moment of the new Webster, the curtain rising on their own present multicultural utopia, with its international stature and crazy competitive admissions profile. And yet, even with his great bravery and ambition, how amazed Sarafian would be today if he could see how far his vision had extended. That same Webster of the fraternity basement and the road trip, that enclave of the white, the male, the Protestant, and the academically complacent…now it was a place of rigorous intellectual discourse, profound diversity, thrilling social conscience—a place where young and engaged people took injustice so personally that they were willing to sleep out in the cold and the mud to register their dismay. This was the Webster Naomi herself had come to love, and the one she was honored to lead. She wished that Oksen Sarafian were still here to be walked around the campus, introduced to what he’d made, and to the Jewish female (feminist!) scholar who now sat at his old desk. She wondered how he’d be handling the kids out at the Stump. She wished she could ask him.
The afternoon began. Naomi took her lunch at her desk, in case some of them—in case he—decided to come early, but no one came. She had downgraded her meeting with Douglas Sidgwick to a phone call, and after they hung up she went over the list of Native American alums he’d compiled for her. A novelist in Seattle. Two attorneys, one in Memphis and one in New York. Four for whom no profession was listed, but whose children had also attended, or were attending, Webster. A professor of American history at Amherst and two physicians, one in Minnesota and one in Arizona. She had heard of the novelist. One of his books had been made into a film. She hadn’t known that he was a Webster grad, and indulged in her typical moment of Websterian pride in his achievement.
Douglas had done a good job. There was a geographical balance, a generational balance, a balance of men and women. It was exactly what she had been looking for, and before she even rose from her desk she had drafted an email, inviting them to participate in the advisory committee for a conference on the long and conjoined history of Native American students and Webster College. “That this complex and meaningful relationship has been, till now, unexplored by the college is something I don’t fully understand, but I do mean to rectify. To me, the story that began with Webster’s Indian Academy and progressed to our current Native American studies program, one of the finest in the country, is both fascinating and important, and I believe that our graduates and our current undergraduates will all benefit from a clear-eyed perspective on it. I would like to invite you to help plan this event, so that we can share your experiences with the Webster community, and help us all to understand our common journey.” To the Amherst professor she wrote a slightly different email, asking him to chair the committee and proposing that they meet soon if he was interested, either at Amherst or at Webster, or somewhere in the middle, to talk about it. She forwarded these documents to Mrs. Bradford, to have them proofread and sent on. Then she glared at the clock over the office door. Four thirty. Still, no one from the protest had come.
Suddenly, Naomi was furious. Why was she obligated to sit here, just waiting for them to meander over so they could deign to reveal what it was they wanted? Why should her own day be reduced to this pathetic act of attending, this debasement before somebody else’s self-perceived grievance? She felt like a teenaged girl, wallowing at home, waiting for a boy to call—something she had not done even when she actually was a teenaged girl.
“I’m going out,” Naomi said to Mrs. Bradford,
charging through the outer office.
“I thought you were having dedicated office hours for the protesters.”
“I was. But they haven’t favored me with their attendance, as you see.”
Mrs. Bradford looked past Naomi, into the office, as if the students might have slipped past her somehow. They weren’t there.
“Well, what if they come?”
Tell them to go fuck themselves, she thought.
“Tell them to wait,” she said.
“All right.” Mrs. Bradford looked amused.
“And get their names. Everyone signs in. If they don’t sign in, I don’t see them.”
“All right.”
She went outside. It was late in November now, and in two days everyone would leave for Thanksgiving. At least, she hoped they would leave. She hoped that the protesters, in particular, would leave, rediscover the delights of warm beds and hot showers, and return to campus content that they had fulfilled their obligation to Professor Gall’s honor. Then we can all return to that fusty old business of getting educated, she thought as she stomped over the mildly slippery ground. She was halfway across the Quad before she fully realized that she had no destination, and Naomi stopped for a moment, looking around at the options. To her left, the Stump itself, now ringed by a network of tents and tarps. If there were students in there, right now, they were under cover, keeping warm, discussing, at least (she hoped, she truly hoped) something vaguely edifying.
Well, she was hardly going there.
To the right: town. But she had no real reason to go to town. What college president aimlessly wanders the few streets of her own little college town on a weekday afternoon, popping into stores, peeking into windows? Shopping? Did the male presidents of Princeton and Yale go shopping when they were fed up with the grind of running a first-rate university? She had a brief and unpleasant reverie in which she was chatting with Christopher Eisgruber and Peter Salovey at an NAICU reception, when one of them (which? did it matter?) said, with an accompanying sneer: You were seen shopping on a Monday afternoon. What do you have to say for yourself?
The Devil and Webster Page 12
