The Experiment

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Chapter 2

Damn, he said as he tried with little success to load his cufflinks into his dress shirt. The noise stirred the large dog drowsing at his feet.

Anything wrong, dear? she called in from the bathroom. Those words could strike him in different ways. When their marriage was good, as it was more often than not, he felt fortunate to have such a strong, beautiful, intelligent and accomplished woman caring enough to look out for him. It flattered him. When they were indifferent to each other – he called it living apart while living together – he regarded her solicitousness as an annoyance. When they were battling, he saw it as a symptom of her drive to control him, and run the life they jointly lived, the only life she really recognized. Couldn’t she appreciate the fact that he was an individual, an adult human being, capable of faring quite well—or failing—by himself? If anything was going to drive them apart for good, it was this. And he knew that it was his attitude as well as her actions that would be the blame.

I can’t get these damn cufflinks in. God, I hate these receptions! Formal dress, formal manners, mandatory fun.

Here, let me help, she said as she crossed the room. She took first one arm, then the other and deftly thrust the links through the holes in the shirt sleeve. As she did this, he looked at her in admiration. Right now, there was too much on his mind for him to want to pull her to him, leave her dress in a pool on the floor and take her right there. But he could (and did) lust after her. Even after 24 years of marriage, she still stoked the fires within him. He thought she was flat out gorgeous. Not gorgeous as in high-cheekbones, wide eyes, silky hair gorgeous, but gorgeous as in lustrous eyes, make-my-legs-jelly smile, dynamite legs gorgeous. Even when they were butting heads, she still aroused him.

Yes, part of his admiration for her was her physical, but a great deal of it was the life and career she had built for herself. Here was a woman who had worked her way through law school, rose through the all-male world of a big city prosecutor’s office and managed to become corporate counsel to a prestigious university. Oh, and raise three kids (although he regarded himself as co-creator). No matter how hot or cool their relationship, he never lost that appreciation for this woman.

I just get so tired of molding the young minds of over privileged white kids, said John. "What’s the point? Most of them will just follow daddy into the firm, make a bundle, and then play out the string in what they think is the real world. The lucky sperm club is the biggest extracurricular activity on campus.

And then I’ve got to mix it up with a bunch of self-important blatherers who think their shit is on the gold standard and come no closer to the real world than NPR. You know, academics love to play with ideas; to them, they’re toys. In the world outside the groves of academe, there are consequences to be dealt with and ideas have to work. These guys don’t have the foggiest notion; they’re clueless. Oh yeah, and I have to do it in one of the most uncomfortable outfits known to humanity. It’s all a bunch of bullshit

John, watch your language. You’re not back on the street now. You know, sometimes I get so tired of hearing you complain about this place, countered Helen. "What worries me is that it’s coming much earlier in the year than usual. You know you love to teach, you’re too much of a ham not to relish a captive audience. And remember your son is one of those ‘over privileged white kids’, and your daughters soon will be, too. Besides, when the president asks, it’s not optional for me. He’s my boss. You could help yourself, too. The whole university tenure committee will be there tonight."

I like the fact that Paul’s in science. At least he might wind up doing some actual good! But he’s too close to Wainbrod. Everywhere I turn, that fucker seems to be in my face. She glowered at the f word. Paul. The tenure thing. I just wish Paul had some street smarts. Then he’d see through that humbug. I know I’m better off for the way I came up.

Not everyone can move from Queens to the Catholic Ivy League. Besides, your education was anything but working class. That smart boys’ academy—the words dripped with sarcasm—really gave you a leg up.

She moved back into the bathroom. It was an exchange typical of this stage of their marriage. Why did she always have to be so right? Couldn’t she humor him occasionally and give in to his sulks? His complaint was only partially sincere. He really wanted sympathy. She gave him reality. Yes, he loved to teach, but he was getting bored. The tenure fight was draining him. At least the vote was only five weeks away. Hell, he didn’t even know if he wanted to win it any more. It was February and he was tired. It shouldn’t be this way.

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You said you wanted to be an academic. Do you still feel that way?

I don’t know. I still think that universities are special places; environments where everyone’s trying to help everyone else get better. But the kinds of backbiting and spite that I see tell me that it’s no better than the Philly PD. I guess I’m disillusioned. Besides, the teaching is beginning to bore me. Same stuff over and over to essentially the same faces. Once in a while, I get someone of promise, who really interests me. Then there’s a spark that keeps me going.

You mean like your son and Professor Wainbrod?

I wish you wouldn’t mention that; you know how I hate the son of a bitch.

I’m just pointing out a parallel. Could it be that you really don’t want to be at a university, that there’s something else going on here?

What do you mean?

You talk a lot about how you’ve always done what others expected of you. Could it be that you’re here because others want you to be here, even though you don’t want it for yourself?

Yeah, maybe. I came to Windham because they wanted some real world perspective. I went to grad school because I needed a way off the streets. I don’t know. Sometimes—when I’m down at the gym at noon, or having lunch at the faculty club, or doing some research, or just hanging out with students—I feel real comfortable here. But when I have to deal with Wainbrod and his boys, or when I get caught up in the petty concerns of the department hacks, I want to be anywhere but here.

All part of any job. This is no different. So what will you do? Are you going to drop the tenure application?

I don’t know. Maybe. Not yet. I promised some people—there I go again—that I’d see it through, although I have less confidence as time passes that it’s what I really want. Just once, I’d like to get my hands on a real case and get that feeling again. Then I’d know.

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Is there any way we can beg off tonight? he shouted into the bathroom.

You know we need to be there, darling. Harry expects his counsel to be part of the official family and you need to cultivate the tenure committee.

Finally dressed, he got up and looked in the mirror. Johnny didn’t often preen, but tonight he had to admit that he looked good for someone in his Fifties – early Fifties, that is. He was reaching that age when his body began to betray him. Some mornings he would wake up with a pain that he didn’t have before. Later in the day, that pain would stop and something else would hurt. Life was becoming an adventure and he knew that the adventures would mount up as he aged. He fought this with vigorous and frequent exercise. He ran – not jogged- three times a week and played in a noontime basketball game twice a week. One of the nice things about being at a university was the virtually free access to health club facilities. Of course, with the additional money he could make in the private sector, he could buy a gym, so his workout regimen did come at a price.

Yes, he looked good, even though he hated the tux. Cargo looked up lazily, decided that he didn’t disagree, and went back to sleep.

Chapter 3

When they got to Harry Gunderson’s house, the official residence of the president of Windham College, the party was well begun. Grace Gunderson, Harry’s vivacious and politically savvy wife greeted them warmly at the door.

Ah, the Stellas! John, Helen, welcome to our home. Let me have your coats. The drinks are inside and I think you’ll find the bar at the left more to your liking; the old guard is gathered about the other one.

All three chuckled at her terse but accurate assessment of the geography of academic parties. John liked Grace, especially the way she could make herself the extension of her husband when dealing with the care and feeding of the faculty and their spouses and partners. He also liked Harry, who was a straightforward and plain-spoken. Of course, this directness was not necessarily well-received amidst the Byzantine politics of Windham. Harry came to Windham from the corporate world, having run major divisions of several multinationals. So he knew how the world worked, kept touch with it through the boards on which he served, and could raise the money needed to attract the quality faculty and build the facilities necessary to maintain Windham in the highest ranks of American higher education.

Stella also personally owed much to Gunderson. John was recruited as a kind of experiment by a previous president of Windham, Jacob Handler. Handler wanted the students exposed to more practical instruction than the ivory tower afforded, so he raised sufficient funds to endow fifteen new faculty positions. He then recruited these instructors from real world positions. John was in the right place at the right time (as he had been through most of his career), since Handler was an old friend of Ray Steinmuller, Stella’s dissertation mentor at Penn. Steinmuller recommended him, he interviewed well, and Handler hired him.

The resident faculty never liked what Handler was doing, since practical experience meant automatic disqualification for teaching at a place like Windham. When Handler retired, that resentment emerged and the faculty approached the new president, Gunderson, and asked (demanded?) that he remove the experimental faculty and hire more suitably unworldly scholars. Gunderson, however, liked the idea of introducing some reality into academia and flatly refused, backing the new faculty and even carving a place for them in the university’s tenure requirements, assuming they could put up with the entrenched faculty.

Right now, the crusaders for academic rigor were clustered at the bar around the considerable figure of Professor Eric Wainbrod, holder of the Trustees’ Chair in Physics. Even though Stella was too far away to hear what was being said, he could tell from Wainbrod’s broad smile and the laughter of his sycophants that he was regaling them with some fascinating tale from his long academic career as he leaned almost casually on his gold-knobbed cane. No one quite knew what caused him to use a cane, and it was clear from observation that he could move very well without it. John just assumed that it was for effect, a useful prop in creating the image of the serious aging intellectual. Why not a cape as well, he thought.

Wainbrod had captured a bloc of faculty members who shared his desire to see Windham evolve into a research university rather than a teaching college. That debate went on at all serious universities, and normally it was a matter of degree: a little more emphasis here or there. With Wainbrod it was much more radical than that. He opposed anything that would tilt Windham in the least direction of undergraduate education, and promoted everything that would focus it more intensively on research, particularly in the hard sciences. He had, of course, opposed Handler’s experiment and by extension Stella’s presence here, and had broken with Gunderson when the new president had endorsed the actions of his predecessor. He used his faculty acolytes to wage his battles, rarely directly showing his hand. He had managed to place Franklin Douglas from Economics and Carter Scott from Psychology on the university tenure committee. These two, plus the biologist Vladimir Brocklav, formed the majority that ensured no one who did not fit Wainbrod’s ideal would get through the committee.

There were some holes in this scheme, however. Although they saw eye to eye in many things, Brocklav was not automatically Wainbrod’s ally, and certainly not his follower. He had too much ego to ever subordinate himself to a colleague. So while his vote may have been predictable, it was not certain. It had worked last year with Julia Benson, another of Handler’s experiments, but every case was a new adventure.

The second problem for Wainbrod was the department committee process. Each department evaluated candidates for tenure from their own faculty, and then forwarded its recommendation to the university committee. There was always a strong bias at the university level to ratify the judgment of the department, so the real work—examining the candidate’s education, publications, teaching record and university service—was done before the matter went before the university committee. In Stella’s case Carter Scott did double duty, being on both the department and university committees. But Wainbrod had not yet accumulated sufficient numbers of adherents to be sure of controlling every department committee. This was his current task, one that he pursued through the university recruitment committee, on which he had also placed some selected faculty members.

This is what stacked up against John Stella as he pursued his tenure application. He looked down into his drink and grumbled. Helen wandered off toward a group of administrators with a See ya later! That was fine, in fact SOP, with John. They were not a couple who cleaved to one another in public gatherings, but he knew that afterwards they would debrief and neither would miss much of what went on at the party. This was one of their best talents: they were a team, an efficient partnership. Sometimes he wondered whether there was still more than that, but they were a good partnership and he thought they could build on that. But she did look fine in that black dress as she walked away from him.

He noticed Gunderson talking with Anita Hinson and headed in their direction. She was a legend at Windham. Anita was a short, somewhat formless woman with short gray hair, an Irish-American Golda Meir. She was in her early eighties, but when you met her and engaged her in conversation, her personality came through her voice and sparkling blue eyes and the years fell away. She carried the enthusiasm of someone at the beginning, not the end, of a career and was passionate about everything she did. Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, she also sat on the university tenure committee and was one of John’s staunchest advocates, his de facto campaign manager. She took her degrees in math at a time when very few women were in the field, and during her academic career managed to have 10 children, all of whom were healthy and happy. While an undergraduate, she even took a course in the fourth dimension at Princeton with Albert Einstein.

Harry, Anita, good evening.

John, it’s good to see you. Is Helen here?

Yes, over there with the Main Hall bunch. Looks like just about everyone is here, even our favorite physicist, Professor Wainbrod.

Now, John, don’t go there tonight, Anita warned him. You need as many friends as you can get this semester, and you can’t afford to alienate someone with his following.

I think we’re past alienation. Even if it weren’t a question of tenure or not, we have fundamentally different ideas about the nature and role of higher education, and I still have to deal with him as Paul’s academic advisor. With all due respect, Harry, as well-known as Wainbrod is, I don’t think he’s a good teacher, mentor or colleague.

Well, aside from that, what do you really think of him? Harry said with raised eyebrows and a smile. He had a way of steering the conversation away from inappropriate subjects in a light and cordial way. John knew that discussing the merits of a colleague, especially one who brought such high academic prestige to Windham’s faculty, with the university’s president was out of bounds. But his mouth led him there whenever he let bile trump brain. With Wainbrod, it was nearly impossible to prevent.

Harry excused himself, leaving John and Anita to continue without the restrictiveness of the president’s presence. John, you’ve got to be more disciplined than that. Her tone was serious and cautioning. I know how you feel about Wainbrod. Hell, everyone on campus knows it. But in this setting, you’ve got to put that away. I’ve lasted for forty years here, and this is more than a home to me. I hate what Wainbrod and his buddies are doing to Windham: the pressure for research and publications at the expense of teaching, the polarization of the faculty, the insistence on virtual loyalty oaths as a prerequisite for tenure. We need people like you tenured here to restore some balance and preserve the things that make Windham great. To do that you need to observe the proprieties and court the votes you need.

Anita, I’m not sure that I even want that anymore. I like being here—very much—and so does Helen. But I feel stale. The teaching is more and more routine, the faculty relationships are tough, the politics wears you down. I wonder more each day whether I need to be back doing work that matters.

John, what you’re doing here does matter. If you can get these kids to think about what their college education and experience mean for the rest of their lives, you’ve mattered. John, you can’t give this up. But if you do, let me know soon, because there’s only so much left in this 83-year-old body and I’ve got things other than managing your tenure campaign that I want to do.

Fair enough, but don’t sell yourself short. There’s more life in you than in most of the characters in this room. Let’s meet for lunch tomorrow and hash this thing out completely.

OK. Now go and make nice with the tenure committee. There’s Douglas alone over there. Go.

Stella looked over and mentally flipped through the dossier he had compiled on Douglas. He was the poster child for earnestness, stiff-necked, tight-assed earnestness. He was not an exciting or even interesting teacher; some days his lectures would put the students under so deep they didn’t wake up when they hit the floor. But he taught key classes and students knew that the thoroughness of his lectures would prepare them as nothing else could for their major comprehensives, as well as the next level of education. So his classes were always full. Every economics major was there, as well as aspiring MBAs and assorted other young scholars from other disciplines.

Franklin Douglas had no personal life. He took all his meals at the faculty club, and worked constantly. His routine was inflexible, three meals a day at the faculty club, except for Sunday dinner (when the club was closed) at the local Holiday Inn. He wore the same brown suit, brown tie and brown shoes every day (he’d drop the tie on weekends), and those few who had visited his apartment reported that everything was in perfect order, except that he stored his shoes in the oven, which had never been turned on, much less used. In his office, behind the door were two extra pairs of brown shoes, three brown umbrellas (neatly lined up) and a clothes tree with a spare brown suit, white shirt and brown tie. Obsessive was an inadequate word to describe Douglas. By his own admission, he spent holidays in his office, twirling models and checking numbers in his drive to be a fourth-rate mathematician and a third-rate economist. His last article in the Journal of Hospital Finance analyzed the optimal supply chain for bed linens in mid-sized medical centers. He had never talked with any hospital administrators nor had even been in a hospital. Yet this was the jewel