The first principal of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating. - Cesar Chavez
I was in my early 20s, in graduate school studying literature (mainly American) and art history (mainly the figure of the artist in fiction). There’s a huge employment market for people who have studied the figure of the artist in fiction, of course. My thesis was entitled “The Solids of Uccello: Near Recognitions of Reality in William Gaddis’ The Recognitions." It was a heady time, indeed. I was studying in an English Department then ranked first in the nation, in a school known as Mr Jefferson’s University that until 1970, just twelve years before, had been an all-male bastion.
The competition was fierce in the English department, though I didn’t realize just how fierce for quite some time. I thought it was all about the love of literature—and it was, in large part, but with an undercurrent of beating the other M.A. students for the few, precious slots in the Ph.D. program. It was particularly competitive if you happened to be a woman (though I didn’t know that either), because many longtime professors there still weren’t sure if going co-ed had been such a good idea after all.
There was only one tenured female professor in the department who, in a memorable conversation, told me that she had suffered deeply to get there and her intention was not to help other women by making it easier for them, but to ensure that every other woman suffered as much as she did so they would understand and appreciate the journey.
Evidently you cannot help without torturing the ones who follow you, I thought. I, myself, would rather sweep a path for them, show them the landscape, be—as Sun Tzu says in The Art of War--a local guide.
Friends like these you do not need, I thought as I sat across from this woman. “Is this what Walker Percy had in mind when he wrote about ‘handing one another along?’ I asked sweetly. Having studied his work in her class, it was a fully appropriate question, I thought. She was less amused.
One American literature professor stood out for me—I took many classes with him during my time at Mr Jefferson’s University—smart, demanding, a man who knew how to teach—in an institution that, frankly, put more emphasis on research and publishing than teaching. But this professor was a shining light, sure to get tenure. I loved his classes—funny, hard, smart. I would use the word “brilliant,” but you and I both know that word is taken.
I did well there, made all As my first year, and was named a DuPont Scholar that January. I noticed a difference in how the old guard treated me afterwards, as if I had emerged from the swamp of first year to become a Real Possibility for the Ph.D. program. It was a culture built on achievement and a department in which—quite literally—a “B” was equal to a “D” and even an “A-“ was nothing to write home about.
Those were heady days. My best friend there, Ken, used to crack me up with his Marlon Brando “On the Waterfront” impersonation: “I could-a been a critical theorist,” he would wail as we worked on papers that very nearly sucked all the life out of Melville and Eliot and Yeats.
My biggest learning there began on the evening of February 28, 1983, the night of the last M*A*S*H episode. I lived in Tucker Dorm at the time and those of us in the dorm had planned a party in the basement to watch the two-hour finale together.
Just as the episode started, my roommate ran down the stairs.
“Patti, your professor is on the phone.”
Today, I feel the claustrophobic feeling I had when 9/11 occurred, when Katrina hit, when the tsunami swallowed people up, when I first toured Auschwitz as a teenager. It is the weight of knowing, the knowing we must all hold. Once we know, we can't not-know.
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