When The Bough Breaks

I envisioned her fifteen years back, dressed in khakis and sweatshirt, marching and mouthing slogans. Radicalism had fought a losing battle with survival, eroded by too much of nothing. But she could still take an occasional hit of nostalgia… "It's especially hard on the faculty," she was saying. "Not the Old Guard. The Young Turks - they actually call themselves that. They come here because of the job crunch, with their typical academic idealism and liberal views and last two, maybe three years. It's intellectually stultifying - not to mention the frustration of earning fifteen thousand dollars a year when the students' wardrobes cost more than that."

"You sound as if you have firsthand knowledge." "I do. There was - a man. A good friend of mine. He came here to teach philosophy. He was brilliant, a Princeton graduate, a genuine scholar. It ate him up. He talked to me about it, told me what it was like to stand up in front of a class and lecture on Kierkegaard and Sartre and see thirty pairs of vacant blue eyes staring back. Ubermensch V. he called it. He left last year."

She looked pained. I changed the subject.

"You mentioned the Old Guard. Who are they?"

"Jedson graduates who actually develop an interest in something other than making money. They go on to earn advanced degrees in humanities - something totally useless like history or sociology or literature - and then come crawling back here to teach. Jedson takes care of its own."

"I'd imagine they find it easier to relate to the students, coming from the same background."

"They must. They stay on. Most of them are older - there haven't been too many returning scholars lately. The Old Guard may be shrinking. Some are quite decent, really. I get the feeling they were always outcasts - the misfits. Even the privileged castes have those, I suppose."

The look on her face bespoke firsthand experience with the pain of social rejection. She may have sensed she was in danger of crossing the boundary from social commentary to psychological striptease, for she drew back, put on her glasses and smiled sourly.

"How's that for public relations?"

"For someone new you're certainly got a handle on the place."

"Some of it I've seen for myself. Some I learned."

"From your friend the scholar?"

"Yes." She stopped and picked up an oversized imitation leather handbag. It didn't take her long to find what she was looking for.

"This is Lee," she said, and handed me a snapshot of herself and a man several inches shorter than she. The man was balding, with tufts of thick, dark, curling hair over each ear, a bushy dark mustache and rimless round spectacles. He wore a faded blue work shirt and jeans and high - laced hiking boots. Margaret Dopplemeier was dressed in a scrape that accentuated her size, baggy cords and flat sandals. She had her arm around him, and looked maternal and childishly dependent at the same time. "He's in New Mexico now, working on his book. In solitude, he says."

I gave her back the photo.

"Writers often need that."

"Yes. We've gone round and round about that." She put her keepsake back, made a move toward the cheese and then retracted her hand, as if she'd suddenly lost her appetite.

I let a silent moment pass, then performed a lateral arabesque away from her personal life.

"What you're saying is fascinating, Margaret. Jedson is set up with all the enrollment it needs - it's a self - perpetuating system."

The word "system" can be a psychological catalyst for anyone who's flirted with the Left. It got her going again.

"Absolutely. The percentage of students whose parents are also Jedson graduates is unbelievably high. I'll bet that the two thousand students come from no more than five to seven hundred families. The same surnames keep cropping up when I compile lists. That's why when you called it a family before I was taken aback. I wondered how much you knew."

"Nothing until I came here."

"Yes. I've said too much, haven't I?"

"In a closed system," I persisted, "publicity is the last thing the establishment wants."

"Of course. Jedson is an anachronism. It survives the twentieth century by staying small and keeping out of the headlines. My instructions were to wine you, dine you, see that you took a nice little stroll around the campus, then escort you off the grounds with little or nothing to write about. The Trustees of Jedson don't want exposure in the Los Angeles Times. They don't want issues like affirmative action or equal opportunity enrollment to rear their ugly heads."

"I appreciate your honesty, Margaret."

For a moment I thought she was going to cry.

"Don't make it sound as if I'm some kind of saint. I'm not and I know it. My talking to you was spineless. Deceitful. The people here aren't evil, I have no right to expose them. They've been good to me. But I get so weary of putting up a front, of attending quaint little teas with women who can talk all day about china patterns and place settings - they give a class here in place settings, do you believe that?"