The Land of the Dead

from Harássment: A Novel of Ideas (Samizdat Press, 2003)

Chapter 1

The Land of the Dead

I walked into Busiris Technical University in the fall of 1971, direct from graduate school, all green and golden and filled with the idealism of the sixties. I came a curious mixture of innocence and experience, having lived through eight years of revolution in higher education, aware of its failures (in graduate school I had spun a composition class around Paul Goodman’s books Growing Up Absurd and Compulsory Miseducation), and confident that its broken promises could be redeemed. Confident, in fact, that redemption was at hand. I arrived enthusiastic about a system of post-secondary education that appeared ready to render life in these United States more decent, more humane, more enlightened, more open to worthy persons of previously disenfranchised classes, and generally more relevant to the real world than what I had known growing up in the fifties and early sixties.

In a word, I believed.

We all believed in those days: Jack, I, Lou Feracca, Marcus DeLotta, Ben Allan Browne, even, in their own weird way, Ted Jones, Virgil Cutter and Victoria Nation. In many respects this story is the history of lost faith, for only in the context of our great expectations for liberal arts education can the rage of a Charles Creed or my own ironic cynicism be understood. Jack’s story is the story of our entire generation, which refused to move mentally from the liberating sixties into the boring ‘70s, or the ideological ‘80s, preferring alienation to accommodation.

As Camille Paglia has observed, “Sixties radicals rarely went on to graduate school; if they did, they often dropped out. If they made it through, they had trouble getting a job and keeping it.” Those who managed promotion and tenure did so only by learning to keep the lip buttoned. Some of those who managed promotion and tenure later opted out of an increasingly lost cause encrusted with meaningless “professional activities,” codes of cultural correctness, and midget-minded colleagues. “This is fucking hopeless,” observes Crash Davis in the movie Bull Durham. “Fuck this fucking game. I fucking quit.”

“Let the silence of our leaving be our only reply,” Charles suggested in 1985, paraphrasing Phil Ochs, one of his favorite lost causes.

Still, an attempt was made. There was a moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What became of that moment is the subject of this book.

Busiris Technical University was admittedly not the optimal environment for educational reconstruction, but, being less than ideal, it offered a legitimate test case. Berkeley, Harvard, Northwestern—they’re easy. Brilliant faculty, brilliant students. Huge endowments, long and illustrious traditions. How can you go wrong? So what can you do with Illinois Normal Tech? With Ma Frickert’s Finishing School for Young Ladies? There’s the real test case. For all its faults, B. T. U. is just your average private American college. There are better, and there are worse. All valid experiments require a representative sample.

Even in the summer of 1971, driving a rented U-haul across the long miles of I-80—Oakland to Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Omaha, Davenport—I understood that Busiris would be a far cry from the vision of my ideal first job which had sustained me through the four-year grind of a Stanford Ph. D.. My ideal was a large, multi-cultured, generously funded state institution kinetic with the clamorous passion of colliding idea. Ivy League, S. E. C., Big Ten, P. A. C. Ten. Busiris just wasn’t that kind of school. It was closer to my alternative vision: a less affluent but pastoral liberal arts college, green with ivy-covered cloisters and brown with tweedy sweaters. In my mind’s eye I recalled picturesque Old Main, Victorian elegant with its high arched windows, red bricks, neo-Gothic chapel (later a lecture hall, by my day the admissions office), and soaring clock tower. At the opposite side of the Busiris Quad sat old Busiris Hall, its gray stone facade batailed along the roof line, three arched cathedral-like doors below a mock rose window, magnificent oak trees shading two wings—recent additions—on the north and south sides. Busiris Hall and Old Main were buildings worthy of Northwestern, Washington in St. Louis, Knox or Illinois Wesleyan.

But Busiris wasn’t that kind of a place either. Busiris’ grandeur was a botched and mottled beauty. Dwarfing Busiris Hall and the oaks rose the incongruous green and yellow monstrosity of Radio Busiris, an erector set tower bristling with aerials, antennae, cables and dishes. Clearly visible on the far side of campus lay the half-cleared steel rubble of the old field house (soon to become a parking lot), nothing more than a large Quonset hut airplane hanger bought cheap after World War II. In it had played the fabled basketball teams of Busiris’ dynasty years, the teams that raised popular support and funding for the new field house, nearly completed in 1971 on what had been the main campus parking facility. The new field house was a basic block of gray bricks and windows, bigger but not necessarily better, with none of the Quonset hut’s character . . . or home court advantage.

The campus was bounded on one side by Washington Avenue, with its tacky frat rat bars and cafes, and the tackier Brady’s Buck Bonanza, a college clothing and supplies shop that specialized in Busiris monogramed merchandise and fronted, for an undetermined length of time around 1976, for a call girl operation employing Busiris coeds and run by the B. T. U. chief of security. The other three sides were an angular C of three- and four-story dormitories, cheap tan brick with sliding windows set in black metal frames, classic fifties style, monuments to that golden moment when President Martin Stoddard converted World War II veterans’ benefits into Busiris’ first and only real period of sustained growth. By 1971 the buildings looked archaic and shabby.

As did the tan brick Busiris Student Center. And the tan brick Busiris Buckstore.

“Mark-down Tech,” Jack used to call the school. “Everything done on the cheap. What clothing manufacturers call a second: designer material but crooked seams or misaligned buttonholes. Kids who can’t make Purdue, Northwestern, or the University of Illinois, but are rich enough to afford four years’ play at a private college. They come to Busiris. A university that’s a second, filled with faculty and students who are also seconds. The sooner we admit that, the sooner we’ll be in a position to do something about it. Assuming that anyone wants to do something about it.”

Busiris had a good technical component in those days and a still-powerful basketball team. For their daddy’s bucks, kids got engineering and basketball, fraternities and sororities. Parties began on Thursday afternoon, continued through Monday night chapter meeting. On Tuesday everyone had a hangover. Thursday afternoon everyone was off buying new cocktail dresses and kegs of beer. On Wednesday you could teach. One semester Lou Feracca finagled a one-course reduction for something or another, then scheduled his three remaining classes to meet Wednesday only. 9:00-12:00, 1:00-4:00, and 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Wednesday was the only day kids showed up, he claimed, so why not him?

What brought me to Riverton was the fact that Busiris was a job at a time when the market for English teachers was just beginning that long slide into desperation from which it has never recovered. I am no longer ashamed to admit (although for a many years I was) that I had no other offer in 1971. 1971 was a bad year for beginning English teachers, and things went downhill from there. I was lucky to land four interviews and one firm job offer. Those without a Stanford Ph. D. had fewer options than I. Busiris promised a paycheck and a couple of years to build my vita, polish my teaching skills, collect the references and glowing student evaluations that would bring a real job at a more prestigious institution.

In an odd way Busiris was a good place in the early seventies. Behind the times as always, Busiris had in 1971 only just arrived at its moment of expansion. While other schools were cutting program and faculty, Busiris set out to build a College of Liberal Arts as strong as its College of Technology and Engineering. Becoming “the Northwestern of Downstate Illinois” (the phrase echoed and reechoed through the corridors of Busiris Hall and Old Main) meant offering a full smorgasbord of courses in Far Eastern history, Chinese and Russian language, Mexican and African culture . . . as well as the full range of British, American, and comparative literature courses. The English department, which for eight decades had contented itself with producing semi-literate engineers, seized the moment to hire a trio of linguists, two Miltonists, a Chaucerian, another (published) Shakespearean, professors of classics, mediaeval, dramatic and non-dramatic Renaissance literature, two creative writers, and a handful of comparative literature people. Charles Creed was one of three recent Ph. D.’s in American Literature. I was to be the man in Victorian prose. The credentials of most of these new people shamed the credentials of the senior faculty who had hired them: Cornell, Penn, Northwestern, Stanford, the Iowa Famous Writers School of Famous Writers.

If Busiris was not quite first rate in 1971, it had a shot at becoming first rate by summer of 1981 . . . even sooner if administration could be persuaded to hire a few more hotshots from Big Ten or Ivy League schools.

Jack said it best: it was an age of faith, an age of folly.

Thus it was that with a profound hope for the future, and a profound ignorance of those economic realities which would shape American higher education in the seventies, I arrived with my wife in Riverton, Illinois, on the banks of the Illinois River, in what William Gass none too affectionately describes as “the heart of the heart of the country.”

Charles, though younger, had preceded me by a year. I had met him briefly during my interview at the school, and hung on him, on Lou Feracca, and on Jeremy “Ted” Jones most of my hopes for the future of the English Department at Tech.

In a private moment during my interview, the three had drawn me aside.

Jones made the pitch: “This is admittedly an odd place and a long way from respectability. You’re a smart person. You can see for yourself what it’s like. However, while it lacks enough conscious to remedy its ignorance, Busiris is conscious enough to sense its deficiencies. And to feel apologetic and a little insecure.”

“It is therefore dangerous to itself and others, including you,” Feracca added.

Jack elaborated: “Mediocrity fears excellence and seeks mainly to surround itself with more mediocrity. Actually, mediocrity favors a mediocrity that is just a little more mediocre than itself, so that it can appear borderline excellent in comparison. Understand that basic principal, and you’ll understand how all bureaucracies turn inevitably to shit, why good people leave, why assholes stay. Why the assholes end up, finally, in control of everything, including your future.”

“Professor Creed is being just a trifle bitter,” Jones told me.

“We lost a very dedicated and excellent teacher this year,” Jack said.

“We lost . . . a good, competent teacher.” Jones gave Creed a long look.

Jack went silent.

“Busiris is like any other institution in that regard,” Jones insisted. “People come and people go. We try to keep the good ones and wave the bad ones farewell. Sometimes we lose a good one. Progress is always intermittent. One step backward for two steps forward. That’s the art of politics.

“Hell, even I give only even money that Busiris survives to 1980, but we kick the assholes good every chance we get, and we terrorize the timid when an important vote comes up, and progress is being made. You would be progress. We could use you. Some other good people are coming this year, a man from Penn State, a fellow from Cornell, a very attractive young lady from Emporia State in Kansas. Dr. Creed here was hired last year from Kent State. Five years ago I’d go home at night thinking, ‘My God, am I here all alone?’ but today, something is clearly happening . . . even if I don’t always know what it is.”

Feracca nodded in agreement. Jack shrugged his shoulders. “Besides, if you’re any good, you won’t be around here longer than three years,” he added.

This scene I had kept locked in my heart through the late spring and early summer as I finished my dissertation, cleared the final hurdles of written and oral defenses, gathered in mid-August our modest belongings for the trek across the Great Divide, and weathered in late August the humiliating experience of apartment-hunting in a middle-brow, Middle American city where an assistant professorship at the local college was neither lucrative nor prestigious. The college was no help at all, and Creed, Feracca and Jones were out of town. After three days in The Kickapoo Court Motor Inn, Linda and I settled for a two-bedroom second-floor walk-up eight blocks from campus, just beyond the student district, for $275 a month, over a third of what would be my take-home pay.

“Everyone has to start somewhere,” Linda said.

“It’s only temporary,” I promised.

“I’ll get a job,” she said. “McDonald’s is always hiring.”

If our apartment was disappointing, my office assignment was not. I was pleased to learn that Creed and Tucker would be sharing an office on the top floor, south wing of Busiris Hall, in the very shadow of Radio Busiris. To either side, Virgil Cutter and Lucy Kramer, a pair of old gargoyles. But Lou Feracca and another new hire were just down the hall, and Ted Jones would be around the corner.

My desk had been occupied during 1970-71 by Marcus DeLotta . . . about whom nobody was talking. Everyone was walking about the occupant of the other desk in the office.