Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (27 page)

Actually, I found that I was both excited and apprehensive at the thought of assuming my new duties. I had given many a onetime lecture to college audiences, on a hit-and-run basis in which one disappears forever immediately after the event—but a sustained course to students whose future careers might depend on the quality of their college preparation? This was an alarming, yet challenging prospect.

I spent the summer hopefully structuring away in collaboration with my student assistant, Novelle Johnson, a reformed airline stewardess from South Carolina, who proved to be an accomplished and experienced guide to the academic scene. She patiently led me through the ABCs of classroom procedure; it would be desirable, she explained, to prepare class outlines, reading lists, examination questions, so together we got these ready. The lecture course would be called “The American Way,” a title vague and flexible enough to enable us to explore the American way of all sorts of things, based on my “own social action research” which I hoped meant I would not have to read any sociology texts but would merely draw on subjects I already knew about: caskets, courts, convicts, con men, the rise and fall of Bennett Cerf’s Famous Writers School.... The final section would be “Water-buggers of Yesteryear,” the point here being that the Watergate gang and their counterparts of twenty to thirty years ago cut their teeth in the witch hunt against the Left following World War II. Under this heading we would present the reminiscences of some Old Left victims of the McCarthy era, New Left comments on same, and try generally to link the radical politics of the two eras. To top it off, we would invite the head of the San Francisco FBI to tell all about electronic surveillance of suspected subversives. In the section on criminal justice we would bring in as guest lecturers lawyers, judges, and ex-convicts. In short, we hoped the lecture course would turn into something resembling a variety show.

The exams, I decided, should be designed to bring out the multiplicity of talents I expected to find among my students. Those more at home in some medium other than prose could turn in a poem, song, one-act play, a cartoon strip. All would be invited to translate into English a paragraph taken from a sociology textbook—with the caveat, however, that if they were hoping for a graduate degree in that discipline they might find themselves at a disadvantage if they learned this lesson too well.

The small seminar (honor students, no less! Horrors!) would be a workshop in “Techniques of Muckraking” in which students, working alone or in teams according to preference, would investigate some local institution of their choice such as a nursing home, jail, police department, radio station, and so on.

San Jose is a big sprawling industrial area about an hour’s drive from San Francisco. The university, a unit of the state system presided over from far-off Southern California by Chancellor Glenn S. Dumke and a board of trustees, is vast: enrollment is close to 27,000, comparable in size to the Berkeley campus of the University of California, where entrance requirements are stiffer and where the student body, with its long history as bellwether of radical youth movements, is more sophisticated, more cosmopolitan, and perhaps more world-weary.

Looking back over my journal, I see that events of my first week in San Jose pretty much foreshadowed the shape of things to come.

NOTES
FROM
JOURNAL
,
SEPTEMBER
24
TH

Arrived in a state of high nerves to take up lodgings in the Faculty Club—classes begin tomorrow. Checking in at Prof. Mitford’s mailbox, I found assorted sociological memoranda and announcements, copies of the student newspaper
Spartan Daily
full of wise sayings of deans and information about parking regulations, a penciled note from the secretary of the department saying “Miss Mitford, please go to personnel to take the loyalty oath and be fingerprinted” which I threw straight into the wastepaper basket, and—joy of unanticipated joys!— a letter from a local funeral director saying he had read in the papers that I was coming to teach in San Jose and would “be pleased to put my staff at your disposal to tell your students how we care for the dead.” My class outlines are ready, all neatly dittoed. To my annoyance, Somebody Up There has ordered the title “Techniques of Muckraking” deleted from the seminar outline and replaced with “Sociology 196H,” which sounds boring as hell, so they all had to be redone with the title put back in. Novelle, who is good at ferreting out campus politics, discovered that the order to strike the muckraking had come from Chancellor Dumke’s office.

Some women faculty members took me and Novelle out to lunch in San Jose’s finest eatery—nerves much assuaged by their kindness and several preprandial drinks. In mid-lunch two men came over to our table: a dean, and a spruce young fellow, something like a composite of the junior Watergate set we’d seen on television, who introduced himself as lawyer for the university trustees. I said oh good, I need a lawyer, I just got this absurd note about a loyalty oath and fingerprinting, there’s not a word about either in my contract, so please tell your bosses, whoever they are, to cut out the one-line jokes as I don’t intend to do any of that. He replied sternly that it’s a rule, I would have to comply with these requirements. The dean, looking grave, concurred. “Then ... see you in court!” said I gaily, and on this note we parted.

SEPTEMBER
25
TH

My first lecture—at last I’ve found my true vocation! There were over two hundred students, ranging from fresh-faced late teens to grizzled heads; I loved them on sight. All nerves vanished, I gave them a brief rundown on How I Came to Be a Distinguished Professor (throwing myself on their mercy), and a short intro. to funerals, throwing in all the jokes I could think of about different layaway plans and how one wouldn’t be caught dead in one of the cheaper lines of caskets, showed samples of the Fit-a-Fut Oxford that I’d ordered from the Practical Burial Footwear Company of Columbus, Ohio, passed round copies of my favorite trade mags.
Mortuary Management
and
Casket & Sunnyside
, explained the uses of various embalmers’ aids like the Natural Expression Former (a plastic device which, inserted into the mouth after rig-mo, as we call it in the trade, sets in, can produce a seraphic smile on the deceased face).... It all went off like gangbusters, they were in fits of laughter.

The university public relations office telephoned in the afternoon to say they would be having a press conference to announce my appointment as Dist. Prof., which I thought incredibly cordial of them; and one of the deans called to warn me that the loyalty oath and fingerprinting are ironclad conditions of employment, so I’d better get along to personnel to comply with these. I stiffly replied that I should be consulting the American Civil Liberties Union about that.

SEPTEMBER
26
TH

My muckraking seminar, limited to twenty, is a very different cup of tea from the lecture course. Three of the students, it turns out, are not enrolled in the university, hence are attending illegally, which I find flattering. We’ve decided to meet in the Faculty Club (also, no doubt, illegal, who knows?) where we can have lunch and bring wine to enliven the three and a half hours of class time. My plan: to spend the first several sessions exploring methods of gathering information, which will give everyone time to figure out what particular muckraking project each wishes to pursue. Today, discussed techniques I’ve found useful in interviewing funeral directors, prison administrators, Famous Writers, and so on—how to get them to talk, how to assume various fictional identities to help loosen tongues: pre-need cemetery-plot buyer? Nervous citizen anxious about crime control and prison security? Aspirant Famous Writers School student? And how to double-check information thus adduced by seeking out those on the receiving end, so to speak: survivors who have had to foot the funeral bill, convicts, students actually enrolled in the Famous Writers School....

Another deanish telephone call: Had I gone down to personnel yet? I explained I hadn’t time to think about all that or to consult the ACLU, I’d been too busy preparing my classes and meeting with students, so the oath and fingerprint matters had rather slipped my mind. Professor Alvin Rudoff, head of the sociology department, called to say there is a big flurry going on in the administration about all this, and they’ve been after him to persuade me to comply. He agrees both requirements are absurd and demeaning. I said I’d be back in touch after talking with some lawyers.

OCTOBER
2
ND

The two funeral directors came to address my lecture class—they were more than up to expectations. “We are in the business of serving people,” one announced mournfully, and averred that all this talk of the high cost of dying is nonsense—they would furnish a funeral for as little as $119.50. This sounded like an odd price, and the students demanded a breakdown; the information that the actual price is $117 and the $2.50 for sales tax was greeted with gales of hilarity. A long wrangle ensued between students and guest lecturers about the wholesale cost of caskets—why is it a closely held trade secret? Our undertakers fumbled and fudged over this one, with students in hot pursuit. Novelle’s Roarometer, a device she proposes to invent to measure decibels of laughter in my classroom, would have been wagging its head off during this interchange.

Teaching, then, was heady stuff; so was the fracas over the loyalty oath and fingerprinting that began to build up between me and the college administration. To be perfectly truthful about this, I believe that had these requirements been explicitly set forth in my original dealings with the university, I might after some grumbling have complied; for are we not all inured to such bureaucratic absurdities in myriad aspects of life, from obtaining a driving license to applying for a government job? And what of my colleagues, professional teachers whom I had learned to respect as men and women of principle, and their thousands of counterparts in the state university system—who was I to set myself up as some sort of political purist and initiate a challenge when they had not seen fit to do so? Nor was I seeking, as was later charged, a “confrontation”—I had been through enough of those in my time, and yearned only to be left in peace, taken up as I was with the rigorous requirements of my new job. Yet, having stumbled into this arena, I was reluctant to withdraw. Thus the warp and woof of my days in San Jose consisted of trying to learn more about the mysterious, fascinating process of teaching, and locking horns with the authorities in a series of ever-increasing skirmishes.

The first of these had to do with the loyalty oath. There is something weird about the wording of the California Oath of Allegiance; although extremely brief, it manages to encompass a number of bewildering and contradictory propositions. If it reads like a truncated version of something, this may be because in the middle sixties the ACLU, after arduous battle, succeeded in excising the most objectionable portion, that which required all state employees to swear that they are not now nor ever have been. As it now stands, one must swear to “uphold and defend” the Constitutions of the United States and California “against all enemies foreign and domestic,” and further to swear that the oath was taken “freely and without any mental reservation.” Well (said I to the deans), I think I have done my best to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against enemies, especially domestic ones like you; but the annotated Constitution of the State of California runs to three hefty volumes and covers all manner of subjects. Do I uphold and defend, for example, Article 4, Section 25¾, limiting boxing and wrestling matches to fifteen rounds? I don’t know. Perhaps it should be fourteen, or sixteen? I do know that I cannot uphold and defend the recent amendment which reinstates the death penalty, since in my view it runs counter to the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Nor can I uphold and defend the section requiring the loyalty oath, which I regard as an abridgment of First Amendment rights. But (said they) you must sign if you want to work here, it’s the law. What if I strike out the words “freely and without any mental reservation” and substitute “under duress”? No, that won’t do, you can’t tamper with the oath. Then ... you are requiring me to swear falsely as a condition of employment?

The section of the Penal Code giving the penalty for perjury, one to fourteen years in state prison, is printed right above the oath. But the same Penal Code would seem to contain an equally stiff caveat for university administrators who require employees to perjure themselves as a condition of employment: subornation of perjury also carries a penalty of one to fourteen years in stir.... What, then, if we all end up behind bars as a consequence of my signing? Will it be a race between me and the administrators to see who is rehabilitated first?

We went round and round on this for several days. Eventually I consulted Paul Halvonik, counsel for the ACLU. He advised that since the Oath of Allegiance is a requirement built into the California Constitution, it would take a deal of toppling in court; it might be years before such litigation would be resolved. Meanwhile, refusal to sign would be cause for my immediate dismissal, an event that would doubtless be hailed with unalloyed glee by the trustees. It boiled down to a choice, then, between continuing to teach or being fired and embarking on an interminable court fight over the oath. Why not sign, making it clear I was doing so under protest? Fingerprinting is another matter, said Halvonik; it is not a constitutional requirement, we could probably win that one.

I had not yet broached the oath matter to my classes—we were far too busy with funerals, Famous Writers, and related subjects —but I discussed it at length with Novelle and Professor Rudoff, who agreed with Halvonik’s approach; so on Monday, October 1st (a date that later was to become significant), I went to the personnel office and signed. The previously scheduled press conference to announce my appointment was held a couple of days later; it was surprisingly well attended by TV, all the local press, even stringers from New York and London papers. I took the occasion (to the consternation of the university P.R. people who had called the conference) to explain my position on the loyalty oath and to denounce the perjury-suborning administration.