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that Mulcahy was, in truth, never a Communist; once a certain ball gets
rolling across the well-manicured lawns of a liberally-minded bastion like
Jocelyn College, the momentum is hard to stop. A betting man would be
smart to put the ranch and dog on Mulcahy-which makes me wonder if
a contemporary counterpart of Mulcahy's, equally threatened by an
impending pink slip, might consider giving over one of his classes-say, a
semester before the ax is scheduled to fall-to an announcement that he
can no longer keep his sexual lifestyle hidden inside the closet. Done with
the same finesse that won the day for Mulcahy, I suspect that the con
would work, if only because no contemporary college wants to be seen–
in print, much less in a court of law-as homophobic.
Or take the curious case of
A New Life,
Malamud's novel about an ide–
alistic young English instructor from New York City who finds himself out
West and surrounded by philistines of the first water. One succeeds in
Cascadia's English department by not making waves and by doing one's best
to introduce engineering students to the mysteries of subject-verb agree–
ment. As Professor Fairchild, department chairman and embodiment of its
ethos, puts it:
Our main function, as I always tells everyone we employ here, is to
satisfY the needs of the professional schools on the campus with
respect to written communication. In science and technology men
must be taught
to
communicate with the strictest accuracy, therefore
we teach more composition than anything else in this department.
Our literature offerings aren't very diversified or extensive but they're
adequate to our purpose.
The purpose, of course, is to be the consummate service department. In
such a world, students get pretty much what they want-which is what
they think they need-and the faculty is relieved of the pressures that
come with the territory of English departments on the make: not only to
publish, but also to read and think about the inextricable relationship
between a literate public and a healthy democracy. Rather than a collec–
tion of individuals (who can be problematic or worse), the department
Fairchild imagines in his mind's eye is low-speed, placid, and most of all,
conforming: "There are two kinds of people I deplore in the teaching pro–
fession. One is the misfit who sneaks in to escape his inadequacy elsewhere
and who ought to be booted out-and isn't very often; and the other is
the aggressive pest whose one purpose is to upset other people's applecarts,
and the more apples the better."
