…A Dangerous Thing (2 page)

Fox was bitter, too.
 
He enjoyed smoking, but he went to great lengths to conceal the fact that he did so from the students and administration.
 
While the habit wasn't exactly forbidden on the campus at present, it certainly wasn't encouraged, and Fox did not want anyone to catch him in the act.
 
If he was forced outside, he wasn't sure he could find a place to hide.

"Besides," Tomlin said, "everyone knows that Burns should have been the new dean."

Fox brushed ashes off the front of his shirt, a hideous, predominately green paisley job with puffy sleeves and a collar with at least seven-inch points.
 
He'd paid a quarter for it at a garage sale, and he didn't want anything to happen to it.
 

An alligator-shaped ashtray sat in the middle of the rickety card table that was the only furniture in the small room, aside from the equally rickety chairs, and Fox tapped his cigarette on the alligator's side to remove the remaining ash.

"Burns didn't want to be dean," Fox said, looking at his shirt front again to be sure he hadn't set himself on fire.
 
"He was invited to apply, you remember."

Both Fox and Tomlin stared at Burns, who wished he were somewhere else.

"It's not my fault you don't like the new dean," he said.

"It's your fault you didn't apply," Tomlin said, waving a hand and trailing a plume of smoke through the air.
 
"You could have saved us from all this."

"Sorry about that," Burns said, though he really wasn't, and no matter how they tried, his colleagues could not make him feel the least bit guilty.

    
Burns had no desire to be a dean.
 
As a department chair, he was still pretty much in control of his own life.
 
He could leave his office and go to the library if he felt like it, or just walk around the campus, or even go to get a haircut.
 
He could go home whenever he wanted to, within reason, but deans were eight-to-fivers, forced to remain behind a desk for most of the day, writing reports and waiting for the phone to ring.
 
If they did get to leave their offices, it was usually to attend another in an endless series of brain-numbing committee meetings.

Besides, Burns still enjoyed the classroom too much to want to move into administration.
 
When Franklin Miller, HGC's new president had invited Burns to apply for the open position, he had steadfastly refused to do so.

Fox crushed out his cigarette in the hollow of the alligator's back.
 
"It just goes to show what happens when you believe letters of recommendation," he said.

As a matter of fact Dr. Gwendolyn Partridge had come very highly recommended indeed.
 
Her former employers had praised her intelligence, her diligence, her leadership abilities, her character, her scholarship, her meticulous attention to detail, and her ability to get along well with others.

"They didn't mention the goats, though, did they?" Tomlin said, looking up at the naked bulb that hung down above the card table.
 
The bulb was wreathed in smoke.

"There were quite a few things they didn't mention," Fox said.

They hadn't mentioned, for example, that Dr. Partridge was quite liberal, at least as people living in Pecan City and connected with HGC understood the term.
 
She was, in fact, an openly avowed feminist, and that was one source of the problems that were beginning to afflict Carl Burns.

Another source was Eric Holt, a new faculty member in the English Department, one whom Dr. Partridge had insisted on hiring.

"There is no real research scholarship being undertaken by anyone in your area, is there, Dr. Burns?" Partridge had asked at their first meeting.

She might not have been the unreconstructed hippie Tomlin thought she was, but she was certainly the right age to have been a member of the counterculture of the early '70s.
 
She still wore her dark brown hair straight and longer than shoulder length, and she made no attempt to color it in order to hide the fact that there were now many more gray streaks in it than there had once been.
 
She wore no makeup to cover the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth.
 
She wore rimless glasses and had piercing black eyes.
 
Burns was not in the least tempted to lie to her.

"No," he said.
 
"There's not really much scholarly research going on."
 
By which he meant none at all.

Of course the fact that HGC faculty members taught a fifteen-hour course load each semester had a lot to do with the lack of research.
 
No one really expected an instructor to grade upwards of four hundred freshman themes a semester, in addition to preparing for classes, sponsoring clubs, and being involved in school activities, while at the same time doing deep scholarly research and producing papers with titles like "Male and Female: Androgyny in the Nancy Drew Series."

"That's why I'm bringing in Dr. Holt," Partridge said.
 
"He's quite a well-known critic and scholar, as you must know, and I'm sure he'll add a great deal of prestige to your department.
 
You can use another teacher, I'm sure."

Burns had to agree.
 
Enrollment, which had sunk to an all-time low under the auspices of HGC's former dean and president, both now departed, had increased already under Franklin Miller's guidance, and another instructor in the English Department would be welcome.
 
So Holt had come on board right after the end of the fall semester, along with Dr. Partridge.

The first trouble arose when Holt was assigned only three classes, at Dr. Partridge's insistence.

"We can't expect him to do his writing and research if he's overloaded with classroom time," Dr. Partridge said, to which the rest of the English faculty responded in unison, "Why not let us have some release time?
 
Then we'll do research, too."

Even Miss Darling joined in the protest, though she was on the brink of retirement and so far as Burns knew had not done any research since the day she completed her master's thesis on Sidney Lanier nearly fifty years earlier.

Dr. Partridge's answer to the instructors' protests was simple.
 
"Dr. Holt is an established scholar.
 
We know the caliber of work that he can be expected to produce.
 
You, on the other hand, are unknowns.
 
If you produce some work and prove your capabilities, then we'll see about a reduction in teaching load."

Since it was virtually impossible to do any research without a reduction in load, Dr. Partridge's answer was a perfect Catch-22 solution that made no one happy, except possibly Holt, and there were many dark whisperings about the supposed relationship between the new dean and the new English teacher, though as far as anyone had been able to find out for sure there was no relationship at all.
 
They had never even been employed at the same school.

Some of the faculty even suspected that Holt was Partridge's hatchet man and that Carl Burns was soon going to be history.
 
Burns knew that such a possibility was not entirely far-fetched.
 
There was an old joke about how department chairmen were like mushrooms:
 
You keep them in the dark, pile shit on them, and then you can them.

As far as Mal Tomlin was concerned, Holt, like Partridge, was just another old hippie.
 
"And that's why you better watch your butt," he warned Burns.
 
"They stick together, and you're not politically correct.
 
That's your trouble.
 
Yours, too, Fox."

That was another problem, all right.
 
The curriculum in both the English and History Departments left a lot to be desired as far as the new dean and her hand-picked professor were concerned.

"The same old Euro-centered bull," was the way Eric Holt put it as he looked over the textbooks that Burns gave him on Holt's first visit to the campus, the week before spring semester classes began.
 
"DWEMs."

"Excuse me?" Burns said, though he knew very well what Holt meant.

"Euro-centered bull," Holt said.
 
"The same old Dead White European Male writers that have been crammed down students' throats for thousands of years.
 
Homer.
 
Virgil.
 
Dante.
 
Chaucer.
 
Shakespeare.
 
Milton.
 
Pope.
 
Wordsworth.
 
Keats."

"Some of those are British writers," Burns said.

"As if that makes any difference," Holt said, slamming the heavy literature book shut.
 
"What your department needs, Burns, is some new texts."

Naturally he didn't say "books."
 
People like Holt didn't talk about books.
 
They talked about "texts."

Burns and Holt were meeting in
Burns's
office in Main, a place that Burns usually found quite pleasant.
 
It had been built in what he suspected was an elevator shaft on the side of Main, and so it had windows looking out on the campus from three sides.
     
Some people wouldn't have considered the campus much to look at in January, but Burns liked the bare branches of the huge pecan trees, the crisp brown grass, the leafless vines that straggled up Main's stone walls.
 
It had a certain bleak grandeur, and Main in winter had always reminded Burns of the House of Usher.

Holt had a certain grandeur of his own, and it was far from bleak.
 
He had a large head with a thick, dark beard; Burns had no doubt that he would set many young women's pulses a-flutter.
 
He was tall and imperially slim, dressed in a dark blue wool-blend suit with a double-breasted jacket.
 
Burns thought that he probably glittered when he walked.

Holt also had an interesting history.
 
Unlike most—all, as far as Burns knew—well-known scholars, Holt had never worked at a major university.
 
He had taught for most of his career at one small backwater school, not much different from HGC.
 
His articles were published in the best journals, but he chose never to read papers at scholarly meetings.
 
With his scholarly reputation, he had beyond question received numerous offers to teach at major universities, but he had never accepted any of them.

He seemed to enjoy the pose of being a sort of learned hermit who liked to hole up in a small academic community and not be burdened with the distractions of a major university, distractions like committee meetings, pedagogical controversies, and departmental politics, all of which he could be insulated from at a small school with a friendly dean on his side.
 
But he didn't want to grow stagnant, or he so said; therefore he had welcomed the change to another small college.

"What new material would you suggest?" Burns asked, though he had a pretty good idea what the answer would be.
 
He had read several of Holt's articles.

"Anything but this," Holt said, laying the book on
Burns's
desk.
 
"Anything but the tired old canon of tired old writers."

"We're in a sort of special situation here at Hartley Gorman College," Burns said.
 
He had never thought he would find himself in the position of having to defend Shakespeare as part of the curriculum, but that was what it amounted to.
 
"Our students come from mostly rural areas, and they aren't particularly well read.
 
We've always felt that it was our job to give them a little taste of some of the works that are part of their cultural heritage."

"There you go," Holt said.
 
He leaned back in the uncomfortable chair that Burns had provided him, perfectly at ease, almost smug.
 
"Did you hear what you said?
 
'Their cultural heritage.'
 
But it isn't, you see."

"Of course it is," Burns said, wishing that he felt as comfortable in the conversation as Holt appeared to be.

"No it isn't," Holt said.
 
"You have quite a few people of color enrolled here:
 
A number of Mexican-Americans.
 
A few African Americans and Asians. These works aren't
their
heritage."

Burns wanted to argue that all the students Holt had mentioned, with the probable exception of the Asians, were probably at least second generation U. S. residents and that the works in the text were as relevant to them as they were to anyone at the school.

But he didn't.
 
He said, "So you're suggesting that we substitute other works, even if they haven't been proved to be of lasting significance?"

Holt didn't sneer.
 
Not quite.
 
He said, "You've heard of deconstructionist theory, I hope?"

"Yes," Burns said, experiencing a sinking feeling.
 
"I guess you're going to tell me is that what it boils down to is that you can't really say that one literary work is superior to another."