Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) by Rachel Kadish Page A

the conference room. Faculty and grad students file in slowly, the grad students pooling just inside the entrance—unaccustomed to attending faculty meetings, they lean against the wall, hesitant to claim a professor’s habitual seat.
    Entering, Jeff pauses beside me. “This is going to be fun,” he whispers. “Joanne’s been collecting dirt. I predict a departmental steam cleaning. Alas, I happened to have an unusual number of competent students last term.” His blue eyes pop as he mimes the yank of a noose around his neck. He takes his seat.
    The faculty is nearly assembled: the theorists intermingled with the Romanticists, our two Medievalists seated beside a clutch of postmodernists, who as usual look depressed. I settle between Jeff and Steven Hilliard, a literary theory specialist visiting this year from Oxford. Steven greets me as casually as though there were nothing irregular about the presence of a visiting prof at a faculty meeting. When Grub enters, Steven rises to greet him with a genial hand clasp, making me recall Jeff’s darkly approving commentary upon meeting Steven:
You have to be pulling strings somewhere to get that kind of access to the chair. Even with a genuine British accent.
Maybe so. But you also have to be either a masochist or an extreme political climber to attend another department’s meetings by choice—even if some well-meaning faculty member has taken the highly unusual step of inviting you.
    The grad students, as sudden and unanimous as birds on a wire, push off from the wall and fill the remaining seats.
    Joanne, greeting the twenty-odd assembled faculty and dozen graduate students with efficient cheer, is passing out single sheets of paper.
    â€œLet’s see—Tracy . . .” She flips through the pile, extracts a page, and hands it to me. It’s a printout from the registrar’s office. For a moment, my outrage is stalled by wonder at Joanne’s resourcefulness. I have no idea how she persuaded the registrar’s office to do this, but some bushy-tailed computer operator in the bowels of that bureaucracy has compiled a list of the grades issued by each professor over the past year.Joanne—who doubtless pored over the record of each of her colleagues before this meeting—continues distributing printouts until each of us holds evidence of our own handiwork. Then she paces the center of the room, giving us time to digest our sins.
    Scanning my page, I see I’ve given a decent scattering of grades; my average, B, is at least lower than the departmental average, which hovers between B+ and A-. Jeff, however, looks annoyed; clearly he was more generous than he recalled. There’s a deep and unusual silence in the room. Looking around, it’s easy to guess which of my colleagues have matched or topped the already inflated average.
    â€œI’ve taken the highly unusual step of gathering all of us in one room,” Joanne begins, “because graduate students do so much of this department’s grading, and we need to discuss this together.”
    Silence.
    â€œSome of you may only now be realizing,” Joanne intones, “that you’ve unwittingly contributed to a problem that’s hit our university, along with most other American universities. Ultimately this is a problem that can be solved best by following your consciences.” So announces Joanne, proud owner of a conscience.
    â€œJesse,” she says.
    The room is dead quiet. Jesse Faden glares at her.
    â€œYou might want to look at your record.” She offers an efficient nod, as though she hasn’t just breached a fundamental barrier, chastising a faculty member in front of the graduate students. She continues: “As should most of the faculty.” A few of whom look bemused, most of whom look stunned.
    â€œJeff,” Joanne says, “you too.”
    Jeff meets Joanne’s gaze with a look of mild remonstration,