Byron's Lane

by Wallace Rogers

  Theories, assertions, and bad debate technique spread across the joined tables. Like pooling water, they managed to find and fill the lowest places. His students’ points of view and the boisterous, disjointed way they presented them smothered thoughtful examination of the esteemed principle of separation of powers. Still, I doubt I would have listened as carefully if they had talked instead about important aspects of the week’s lectures. Like Adams’s students, I needed to be entertained if I was expected to learn something along the way.

  Two spokespeople emerged from among the assembled students. One of them slipped into his remarks that he was the student senate’s president. He looked the part of a campus politician and resembled a young Trotsky: bespectacled and goateed, darting dark eyes. He had the loud confidence of someone who had never faced a problem that wasn’t solvable. He claimed his leadership position in the student senate had afforded him considerable experience making tough decisions.

  “Look, here’s how we handled the plastic water bottle crisis last spring. It’s relevant to this discussion. We balanced the right of free choice while, at the same time, we addressed an important environmental issue. We stopped the sale of water in plastic bottles at the university bookstore and dining halls, and we got the university to stop using college funds to buy bottled water. But we didn’t say that students couldn’t carry it around or drink it.”

  The student senate president postulated that unraveling an international crisis was a four-step process—the same process he’d applied to the plastic bottled water controversy. “First, you define the issue,” he said. “Then, you figure out a way to clearly describe it to outside observers. Next, you identify all the players with a stake in the outcome. Finally, you develop an action plan that addresses the problem and includes something in it for all of them.”

  He described each step as if he were reading a recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies. I recognized his process. The four steps came from a self-help book that had held a place near the top of the New York Times bestseller list for two months last year. The author had offered his manuscript to us, but I’d passed on it, and his agent eventually took it to Simon & Schuster. Ever since I’d made my bad business decision, Maggie’s father had found ways to remind me about it.

  The student senate president did not reference his source, and a competing point of view was articulated by Adams’s Nordic protégé.

  “I’m training to be an elementary school teacher, but even I know that whenever a political decision or public policy is made, unintended consequences have to be considered. There’s no place for that kind of examination in Troy’s four-step approach. A careful, systematic look at all the alternatives, including analysis of how similar situations were handled in the past, needs to be done.” To summarize and support her argument she quoted Harry Truman: “‘The only thing new in the world is the history we don’t already know.’”

  A nice touch, I thought.

  Her comments inspired a question from a classmate, who referred to the girl as Anna, about historical symmetry.

  “A little empathy, lots of respect, and a shared sense of justice should be considered in the policymaking and decision-making processes, too. Troy’s approach leaves no room for that,” Anna answered.

  Her assertions were the same Adams would have likely made, had he joined the debate. The more she spoke, the surer I was that the discussion on how Adams had graded her test was not the first that had involved just the two of them. His influence was all over her.

  But the president of the student senate carried the day. Worse, over the next thirty minutes, he managed to forge a consensus. “It’s more important to act quickly than it is to act deliberately,” he claimed. Anna’s Truman quote was matched by a quote he mistakenly attributed to “one of Shakespeare’s characters.”

  “All’s well that ends well,” he maintained.

  The theme of the play he referenced described Adams’s love life more than the management of political decision making. Adams’s Eliza Doolittle wilted under her student president’s barrage of interruptions.

  “Define the issue. Explain it in simple, easy-to-understand terms. Identify the stakeholders. Give something to everybody. And do it fast,” he repeated.

  Anna was out-gunned by someone advocating a weaker position who could talk louder than she could. Her adversary never addressed the issues she’d raised. He flung his talking points around the room until they covered the walls and the tables and hung heavy in the air. The outcome of the discussion was as frightfully fascinating as its runaway dynamics.

  “Look, the United States Constitution was written in the 1780s. In order for it to provide almost any useful instruction about how something ought to be done, it needs to be applied in the context of the twenty-first century,” Troy Trotsky maintained.

  I watched Adams squirm in his seat when his class decided that it was impractical to involve 535 members of Congress in a decision as important as whether or not we ought to go to war. He put his head in his hands when one of his students said the media could handle “the checks-and-balances thing.”

  Agreement arose among those who offered opinions that Congress was hopelessly dysfunctional and incapable of playing a useful role in the process. His class decided that the president and his advisors should make war policy and all of the decisions associated with it. Matters like going to war had to be considered and acted upon quickly.

  Anna was overwhelmed. Adams jumped into the debate to try to save her.

  “How do we hold the president responsible if he makes a bad decision? How do we change course before we’re forced to deal with the disaster he’s created?”

  A young man sitting next to the senate president responded: “If the president screws up, we won’t reelect him. If we don’t want to wait until the next election, or if he’s in his second term and can’t run for president again, we impeach him.”

  A few grunts of support rumbled through the room. Buoyed by the favorable response, the student elaborated: “Given the Monica Lewinsky thing back in the nineties, impeaching a president doesn’t seem that difficult to do.” A third of the class nodded in agreement.

  A young man sitting close to me spoke for the first and only time. “If the president’s action produced a bad outcome or caused a bad unintended consequence, people probably wouldn’t be able to figure that out, because the problem is probably too complex to be explained in simple terms. Besides, the president controls the microphone. Anyway, most people will have forgotten about the issue in a month or two.”

  The student senate president jumped back into the discussion. “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make a noise?”

  Half the class laughed. I could almost hear Adams suck air into his lungs through his suddenly wide-open mouth, as if the class had collectively punched him in the stomach.

  Anna, Adams’s comely education major, spoke next. “I wrote my class paper about Ronald Reagan’s presidency. His foreign and economic policies are the source of a lot of our problems today. Hardly anybody realizes the mess he made of things because it can’t be explained in two minutes, or in one- and two-syllable words. And even if somebody could, nobody wants to listen. It’s old news. My dad thinks Ronald Reagan’s face should be carved on Mount Rushmore. And every year that passes, he believes that more and more. So I guess you guys are right.”

  The color drained from Adams’s face. His apprentice had deserted him. Worse, she’d used what he had taught her as her rationale for capitulating.

  Adams once confided in me that his passion for teaching was too much driven by his eagerness to work with an audience of malleable minds. He told me he had to work hard at checking his impulse to lead a discussion rather than facilitate one. His body language shouted that he was struggling to suppress his instincts. Lucky for him, he was saved by the bell.

  The debate was abruptly ended by the sound chairs make on wooden
floors when they’re pushed back from a table. Time was up. Class was over.

  Most of Adams’s students had escaped the requirement of answering a direct question or offering an opinion during the free-range discussion that had consumed the class period. The silent ones gratefully marched out the door and into the hallway, knowing there were only nine more Fridays left in the semester.

  Adams and I were the only people left in the room. It was suddenly as silent as an empty warehouse.

  “What just happened here?” he asked me across bare tables and scattered chairs.

  “All I can think of is my favorite Daniel Moynihan quote,” I answered. “‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.’”

  I shook my head, shrugged my shoulders, and we smiled at each other. Adams had just bumped up hard against further evidence that he was becoming an anachronism. He laughed out loud as he packed a dog-eared copy of the Constitution and his notes and a textbook into his black canvas daypack. He was a step away from being completely out the door before I could grab my jacket. I hurriedly followed him out of the building and chased him across the quadrangle.

  The colloquium at which Adams was scheduled to make a presentation was a good walk across the campus and had already begun.

  *

  Sorenson Hall was the largest building on the university’s west bank. It housed the College of Business Administration and all its graduate studies programs. It was an imposing six-floor gray-green glass box, wedged onto the edge of a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. The loud echoes our first steps made on the polished gray tile floor as we crossed its sprawling lobby announced our late entrance.

  The colloquium had started at ten o’clock. It was quarter past ten when Adams opened one of the lecture hall’s double doors and rushed down the right-side aisle of the amphitheater to take his chair at the table in its pit. I picked up a one-page program from an empty desk pushed just inside the room and slipped into an aisle seat in the back.

  The title of the event was “A Symposium on American Foreign Policy Since the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks”—so read the canary-colored sheet of paper that I held in my hands. Adams had campaigned hard to be a presenter, and had even written a paper on the subject. But he wasn’t officially invited to be a speaker until after a shorter, reader-friendly version of his research paper was published as an op-ed piece in the Washington Post. Adams’s graduate degrees were in public administration, not international studies, history, or political science. The academicians who organized the symposium claimed he wasn’t qualified to talk about American foreign policy. An editorial in the university’s student newspaper and a robust national response to his Washington Post article forced the university’s political science and history faculties—the event’s sponsors—to add another chair at the front table.

  Thanks to the dust-up surrounding Adams’s inclusion on the panel, attendance at the colloquium was twice as large as expected. Three of the faculty members at the head table shifted uncomfortably in their seats and scowled as they watched Adams try to sneak down the terraced aisle to the front of the room without drawing attention away from the session’s first speaker.

  Adams could only stay long enough for his twenty-minute presentation and the designated question-and-answer period that followed it. He would have preferred to be able to participate in every aspect of the program, but his calendar was full that Friday. He was due back at his campus office by noon to keep appointments he had made weeks before with two of his graduate students.

  Adams’s presentation was a critical analysis of the tortuous political justification for preemptive military incursions in foreign countries charged with harming the United States or threatening its interests. It was a critique of America’s tendency to support despots and dictators because they provide stability, security, and sustainable partnerships. His argument was mostly a moral one, buttressed by historical case studies of good intentions gone badly. In the end, he asked the panel and the audience to consider one question: “If the long look of history has judged our efforts to affect regime change in Latin America and Africa arrogant misadventures and political fiascos, why will history, fifty years from now, look differently at our attempts to do the same thing in the Middle East?”

  Adams’s Washington Post piece had ended with the same question. I leaned forward in my seat, folding my arms on the back of the empty theater chair in front of me, expecting the same kind of thoughtful response his guest editorial had generated.

  I was disappointed; so was Adams, judging from a frown on his face that he held for the next fifteen minutes, the entirety of his presentation’s scheduled discussion period.

  Student and faculty radicals enthusiastically embraced what Adams had said. They painted his presentation as an indictment of America’s “endemic imperialistic tendencies—consistently evident in U.S. history since the run-up to the Spanish-American War.” All four of the people who offered that opinion used the same phraseology in statements they masqueraded as questions. Adams was afforded no time to respond.

  “Let’s see if we can get back to the presentation,” the session’s moderator directed, after the last “questioner” concluded his remarks.

  An equal number of conservatives in the audience made opposing assertions. The endorsements from the Left had made Adams’s conclusions easy to mislabel and criticize—never mind that the conservatives, like the liberals, had to twist his premise to prove their point.

  An old man in the audience wearing a bowtie stood up and raised his hand. Adams pointed to him.

  “Your observations are laden with moral relativism and a typical 1960s ‘Blame America first’ analysis of current events,” the man announced. Scattered applause splashed through the audience. The man sat down.

  A faculty member from the economics department spoke next.

  “Dr. Adams, need I remind you that the world is vastly different now than it was before September 11? Historical lessons don’t apply anymore. The United States is in the middle of what’s likely to be a never-ending war on terror. That needs to be acknowledged.”

  One of the tenured doctors of philosophy in attendance questioned whether Adams’s academic credentials and job experience qualified him to be taken seriously. She made no reference to his presentation.

  No one asked Adams to expand upon his points. I counted seven statements made and no questions asked. After the chairman of the history department ended the morning’s discussion and declared the meeting adjourned for an early lunch, Adams wearily climbed the amphitheater’s steps.

  Outside in the warm sunshine, a hot-dog vendor had his cart set up on the edge of a parking lot, just beyond the extending shadow of Sorenson Hall. Sitting under an old maple tree, my back up against its wide trunk, we ate a quick lunch: two hot dogs, a shared bag of Fritos, and two Diet Pepsis. Cross-legged on the grass, facing me, Adams admitted that he was disappointed that no one asked him to elaborate on the points he’d tried to make in his presentation. Still, he was confident that the theme of his presentation had not been lost in the rarified air of the lecture hall. “I’m fairly sure my remarks will inspire some thoughtful analysis during the colloquium’s afternoon session,” he said, cautiously adding, “I wish I could be there—just to make sure my point of view isn’t misrepresented.”

  I quietly consumed my food without sharing my opinion. I suspected that his forty-page paper had been scrutinized by his detractors and his supporters like it was scripture from the Bible’s Book of Revelation. His words and ideas were just as likely to be used to support wildly divergent points of view as they were to provoke a thoughtful discussion. It was best that Adams not have to witness the free-for-all.

  After twenty minutes, we struggled to our feet, placed our garbage carefully on top of an overflowing waste can, and headed off in the general direction of Adams’s campus office. Between smiles and hellos to and from students and faculty members, w
e lamented the morning’s happenings.

  “There was something important missing from your class discussion today,” I said, “and a Grand Canyon full of misinterpretation of your remarks at the symposium. When people make decisions today, do they understand that they need to be accountable for the consequences? Do you think those kinds of considerations play a role in the decision-making process anymore?”

  Adams’s answer came fast. “Do we really have to be accountable anymore, Tom? Like my class said, we focus on fixing the problem—and fixing it fast. Consequences and accountability only matter when the fix doesn’t work.”

  He paused before continuing. “We’ve been doing things that way since our Byron’s Lane days. Baby Boomers expect to be defined and measured by their job and the social standing it provides them. Both depend on how effective we are as decision makers. It’s tangled up in how we’re wired. But I agree with you, Tom,” he concluded. “There were a lot of essentials missing in both those debates.”

  I barely heard Adams laugh. He was getting ahead of me. I had to walk faster.

  When we were side by side again, he continued: “I’ll bet we’ll be able to say these same kinds of things about the conversations you’ll be privy to this weekend at the resort up north. By the end of the day, you and I won’t have been exposed to anything we haven’t seen reported or heard discussed on TV news and radio talk shows. And that’s too bad.”

  Adams looked straight ahead as he walked. It was as if he were talking to the buildings that surrounded us rather than me. He speeded up his walk again, bounding up the steps of the impressive century-old ivy-covered building that housed his office. Barely getting inside before the door he had swung open had closed on me, I ran up a flight of stairs behind him, gasping for air by the time I got to the place where the stairs emptied into the middle of a dark hallway.