The Human Stain

Of course she had the credentials. But to Coleman she embodied the sort of prestigious academic crap that the Athena students needed like a hole in the head but whose appeal to the faculty second-raters would prove irresistible.

At the time he thought that he was being open-minded by hiring her. But more likely it was because she was so goddamn enticing. So lovely. So alluring. And all the more so for looking so daughterly.

Delphine Roux had misread his gaze by thinking, a bit melodramatically —one of the impediments to her adroitness, this impulse not merely to leap to the melodramatic conclusion but to succumb erotically to the melodramatic spell—that what he wanted was to tie her hands behind her back: what he wanted, for every possible reason, was not to have her around. And so he'd hired her. And thus they seriously began not to get on.

And now it was she calling him to her office to be the interviewee.

By 1995, the year that Coleman had stepped down from the deanship to return to teaching, the lure of petitely pretty Delphine's all-encompassing chic, with its gaminish intimations of a subterranean sensuality, along with the blandishments of her École Normale sophistication (what Coleman described as "her permanent act of self-inflation"), had appeared to him to have won over just about every wooable fool professor and, not yet out of her twenties—but with an eye perhaps on the deanship that had once been Coleman's—she succeeded to the chair of the smallish department that some dozen years earlier had absorbed, along with the other language departments, the old Classics Department in which Coleman had begun as an instructor. In the new Department of Languages and Literature there was a staff of eleven, one professor in Russian, one in Italian, one in Spanish, one in German, there was Delphine in French and Coleman Silk in classics, and there were five overworked adjuncts, fledgling instructors as well as a few local foreigners, teaching the elementary courses.

"Miss Mitnick's misreading of those two plays," he was telling her, "is so grounded in narrow, parochial ideological concerns that it does not lend itself to correction."

"Then you don't deny what she says—that you didn't try to help her."

"A student who tells me that I speak to her in 'engendered language' is beyond being assisted by me."

"Then," Delphine said lightly, "there's the problem, isn't it?"

He laughed—both spontaneously and for a purpose. "Yes? The English I speak is insufficiently nuanced for a mind as refined as Miss Mitnick's?"

"Coleman, you've been out of the classroom for a very long time."

"And you haven't been out of it ever. My dear," he said, deliberately, and with a deliberately irritating smile, "I've been reading and thinking about these plays all my life."

"But never from Elena's feminist perspective."

"Never even from Moses's Jewish perspective. Never even from the fashionable Nietzschean perspective about perspective."

"Coleman Silk, alone on the planet, has no perspective other than the purely disinterested literary perspective."

"Almost without exception, my dear"—again? why not?—"our students are abysmally ignorant. They've been incredibly badly educated.

Their lives are intellectually barren. They arrive knowing nothing and most of them leave knowing nothing. Least of all do they know, when they show up in my class, how to read classical drama. Teaching at Athena, particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of the eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they're all in the room. They know, like, nothing. After nearly forty years of dealing with such students—and Miss Mitnick is merely typical—I can tell you that a feminist perspective on Euripides is what they least need. Providing the most naive of readers with a feminist perspective on Euripides is one of the best ways you could devise to close down their thinking before it's even had a chance to begin to demolish a single one of their brainless

'likes.' I have trouble believing that an educated woman coming from a French academic background like your own believes there is a feminist perspective on Euripides that isn't simply foolishness.

Have you really been edified in so short a time, or is this just oldfashioned careerism grounded right now in the fear of one's feminist colleagues? Because if it is just careerism, it's fine with me. It's human and I understand. But if it's an intellectual commitment to this idiocy, then I am mystified, because you are not an idiot.