But it wasn’t time for that now. He gestured inside his office. I took a seat.
“Hazel is downstairs,” I said.
He checked his watch. “She’s early.” He faced me. “What can I do for you?”
“I have a question about today’s discussion,” I said. I squared my shoulders. I was serious about this. “Do you really think that the passage is about sacrifice and denial, or just one or the other?” A subtle grin crossed his lips, and heat flared in my skin again. I crossed my arms. How was it that a simple grin on his face could make me angry? “Or were you screwing with me? Because I can see why denial might be a part of sacrifice, but I’m not sure I agree that it’s just one or the other.”
“But your argument was about denial, and denial only.”
“As yours was about sacrifice, and sacrifice only,” I retorted.
Our eyes locked, each of us waiting for the other to make a move. After a few moments, he continued slowly, “Did your view change?”
“Maybe. Did yours?”
“What you said, and what I said, are only two ways to interpret the text. But there are millions of ways to find meaning,” he gestured around us, “What you do with that meaning is based on the experience. We can’t untie ourselves from our interpretations of these texts.”
This was irritating. I hadn’t asked for a lecture on subjectivity; I had asked for his opinion. But I wasn’t going to get anywhere with him, was I?
But damn it, I had to try.
“But what doyouthink, Dr. Evans?”
He linked his fingers together. “Does it matter what I think?”
“Of course it does. You’re the authority.” And saying that aloud pissed me off. He was some authority figure to be academically torturing me like this. The universe knows how many students he had tormented this way.
Not to mention that under his gaze, it was impossible to forget how he had tortured me, teased me in other ways.
He glared back at me. “No, it doesn’t matter.”
“Then what does?”
“Your reading of the text, Mara. You read the text, correct?” The grin returned, and I wanted to wipe that smug look off of his face. “What matters is whatyoudo with it.”
I wanted to scream. It was the worst non-answer imaginable. I expected condescension and pretension in graduate school; it was almost a given. But this was beyond reasonable.
I grabbed my bag from the ground and stood. “Thank you for your time,” I hissed. I stomped around the corner and clenched my fists.
He was only doing the contest for tenure. He didn’t care if we won; what he needed was the credit to say that he had participated. In the end, it boiled down to the fact that Dr. Evans did not take me seriously. Imagine trying to deal with someone like him in a contest where professors and students were supposed to come together to create something new, something genuine. Pure collaboration. This man couldn’t even give me a straight answer off of a reading assignment if he tried.Thatwas why he had never done the contest before. He was the worst kind of teammate. To him, no one was ever right. Not even him. That was the only point he truly wanted to make.
But he might have been an assistant professor going up for tenure, but I was one hell of a first-year doctoral student. I just had to figure out how to play his game.
