I write in praise of Professor Cassandra, my colleague of 32 years who is retiring but never was shy. I called my friend Cassandra because so often my buddy foresaw the future and forecast what other faculty at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] refused to believe could happen. Even after what Cassandra had foreshadowed came to pass, colleagues refused to believe what had happened. Thus was Cassandra twice-cursed: like mythical Cassandra possessed of the power of prophesy but disbelieved; beyond mythical Cassandra given to accurate recollection but disregarded.
Cassandra was honest and honorable. Honesty and honor are rare among the Puget clowns but not on that account treasured. Puget clowns prefer colleagues who are sycophants, some born, most bred, and not a few broken. Cassandra was not a Puget clown.
My favorite reminiscence of Professor Cassandra is the time Cassandra slammed books into a pile, proclaimed, “Fuck it!” [¡Haltom’s First Law!], and stormed out of a meeting of the doggedly feckless, desperately faithless, deliberately factless Faculty Senate. The senators in flagrante delicto had been fussing again, as always striving to find a way to seem to care about but not to do anything about the demise of junior faculty, especially junior faculty denied tenure for teaching while being female. Professor Cassandra had seen such dawdling duplicity too often and the immediate rehearsal was too much to bear.
A prissy senator, Dr. Pecksniff, the day after the senate meeting faulted Dr. Cassandra for so rudely interrupting the dithering of posturers and pretenders. I opined that the provocations were more than sufficient to drive one to profanity. Dr. Prissy Pecksniff could not agree for, as despicable cowards do, Professor Pecksniff clung to the civility and decorum that tend to incapacitate institutions and institutionalized alike. For Professor Pecksniff as for so many Puget clowns, injustices were to be lamented loudly while the Cahulawassee River [James Dickey] formed another Lake of Oblivion—calling it "another Lake Jocassee" [likewise from James Dickey's Deliverance] might be reckoned waggish or bookish or both—over colleagues strangled and tossed aside. Those who recalled what departments and the Faculty Advancement Committee and administrators had done would soon shut their mouths or drown. Soon faculty and campus would resume insisting—as a colleague did in a recent plenary meeting of the faculty—that The Faculty Code and the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had insured that promotion and tenure at this university would never be gendered. [Yes, and the check is in the mail, I’ll respect you in the morning, and I won’t cum in your mouth.]
After years battling injustices, Cassandra gave up on the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996]. Dr. Cassandra did not give up all at once. I hold it a testament to integrity and perseverance that Cassandra did not surrender sooner. Swimming against the river and the lake for a third of a century is a challenge. Cassandra gave up on faculty governance, but not until Cassandra had chaired the Faculty Senate and tried, mightily but unsuccessfully, to get the FAC to follow the faculty’s bylaws. [It took more than eight years to get the FAC to conform minimally to the bylaws.] Cassandra gave up on more than one department, but not before Cassandra used a named chair to try to build some camaraderie. Cassandra never gave up on the students. Thus did Cassandra die to the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] in segments yet preserve what matters most—the students.
Cassandra was hired by and into a department that, like Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon, would be what it used to be. That is, over Cassandra’s 35 years the department ticked up then dissolved into the mediocrity of years before. When Dr. Cassandra arrived, the department was at best desultory. Male faculty stalked and preyed upon students. This or that professor kept in his departmental desk a flask of booze or a Playboy with snapshots of a colleague. This honored [full] professor was provided a named chair despite his having offered the world no refereed publication. [I am certain he has in his long retirement polished the manuscript he always spoke of – LOL.] A departmental colleague admitted that the celebrated intellectual knew “the first line of every book ever published” but wondered if the celebrated intellectual knew any other lines of any other books. A formerly respected [full] professor helped to found “Women Against Women Academics” [WAWA] to defend predators against rumors that, Professor Wawa insisted, had been found unfounded [and this enabler did so until the worst predator confessed to Professor Wawa]. Another colleague was already counting the years and days until retirement. I have more reminiscences, but you get the picture of what greeted Cassandra in the 1980s and into the 1990s.
From time to time the department seemed to improve in the 1990s, albeit that newbies who committed too much candor were driven from the department or discovered that even lesser schools sported lesser and fewer vices. Some of the newcomers denounced a professor who battered an undergraduate. Other untenured folk thought it unseemly that a senior colleague forged academic credentials. Professor Cassandra rejoiced that superior faculty joined Cassandra’s department and other departments and reveled that such notable improvements were not the butt-kissers and bootlicks and steaming frauds recruited by the crime family in the House of Reptiles [Jones Hall]. Cassandra deemed it miraculous that, unlike the scammers and schemers who had conspired with The House of Reptiles to run and to ruin departments and the university prior to Cassandra’s coming, the newer toadies were spurned by the better sort of faculty. Alas, Cassandra lamented that talented tyros impervious to patronage [perhaps because they realized how little The House of Reptiles offered or delivered to genuinely talented teachers or publishers] could not be bought or even rented and so must be driven out. If they committed candor in faculty meetings, refused to join or to excuse WAWA, or otherwise did not indulge the liturgy of respectable, sensitive colleagues who emoted regret at yet another colleague’s unjustified, unjustifiable denial of promotion, tenure, or swag, the improved younger faculty must go.
Thus Cassandra saw the inexorable Darwinian logic propagate Puget clowns within the department and across the university. By the 21st century self-promoting prima donnas and self-serving operators replaced teachers and publishers. As a result student-centered activities defined the worth of faculty less and less. Cassandra could not hold back the tide of whiners as Wyatt Hall became the Whinery. It was all Cassandra could do to preserve the jobs of instructors who were among the best teachers or publishers or both in the department. [By some coincidence, these were with a single exception women.] A department that had progressed regressed to its prior mean mean. A writing component that so enriched the curriculum and populated the department with majors was dishonored and discarded. Writing instructors diminished in influence and respect. Fatigued with what we might politely term “procedural irregularities” [because “corruptions,” while accurate, is so unkind], Cassandra retired from a once bustling undergraduate department as it faded to a boutique.
Cassandra sought asylum in African American Studies [AAS]. Cassandra had helped to found AAS, which at its beginning was about aspiration more than branding, education more than self-promotion, and social justice more than marketing. Cassandra focused on teaching and rediscovered the joy of shrugging off burdens of deception and pretense and grandiloquent badinage in favor of inducing students to see and to discern and to think. Having come back around to teaching as Cassandra had foreseen it, Cassandra declared victory and left the slog to the Puget clowns. “Smart lad, to slip betimes away / From fields where glory does not stay. /” Housman, A Shropshire Lad, XXXII
Note well that Cassandra did not slip away before serving two African American students in a characteristic manner. While “the UPS Three” incited an ill-considered, risible letter that dozens of thoughtless faculty were eager to sign, and even as the Division of Student Affairs was conducting a kangaroo court against three students, two of whom were African American, Cassandra served the students rather than mentors turned tormentors. One final time Cassandra spoke truth to power, both the power of administrators mad with authority and appearances and the power of a faculty mob. Cassandra declined to cultivate the strange fruit that administrators and faculty harvested. www.bing.com/search?q=strange%20fruit%20poem&pc=cosp&ptag=G6C999N1234D010518A316A5D3C6E&form=CONBDF&conlogo=CT3210127
I have not bothered with Cassandra’s curriculum vitae. As Cassandra fades from institutional recollection, the collective CV of the department that hired Cassandra drops by at least half. Anyone who sees irony in that has not yet apprehended the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996]. Cassandra, being an actual scholar who published, resembled amid the College of Puget Clowns Chesterton’s donkey: “The tattered outlaw of the earth, / . . . Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb, / I keep my secret still.”
Good thing Professor Cassandra kept secret still, for Robinson Jeffers tells us what becomes of truth-tellers:
The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers
Hooked in the stones of the wall,
The storm-wrack hair and screeching mouth: does it matter, Cassandra,
Whether the people believe
Your bitter fountain? Truly men hate the truth, they'd liefer
Meet a tiger on the road.
Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religion-
Vendors and political men
Pour from the barrel, new lies on the old, and are praised for kind
Wisdom.
Poor bitch be wise.
Poor bitch be wise.
No: you'll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men
And gods disgusting—you and I, Cassandra.
