Page 13 of Close Reading

She pauses at the door. “Thursday,” she says.

“Thursday.”

The door closes. I think about the care in her hands on the papers, and the weight she was carrying.

I close my laptop. I drive home to the noise and the dogs and the boys and the homework and the life I built after my own loss, and I am grateful for the noise because the noise is evidence of a choice I made: to be loud, to be surrounded, to build in the opposite direction from silence.

And I think about a woman who chose the other direction. Who chose the silence, the precision, the careful structures. Who built something beautiful and functional and airtight and who was, today, for one afternoon, unable to fully keep the weather out.

I don’t know yet what it was built to survive. But I know, the same way I know that a forest’s canopy is the smallest visible part of the system keeping it alive, that the structure goes deep. The roots are old. They have been carrying something heavy. And today, for whatever reason, the weight was closer to the surface than usual.

I want to be the person she lets in.

7

MARGOT

The faculty meeting is in the large conference room on the second floor of Prescott Hall. Twenty-three tenured and tenure-track faculty summoned by the Provost’s office to discuss what the agenda describes as “strategic repositioning of the humanities curriculum in alignment with institutional priorities.”

I read this line twice before leaving my office. The first reading was for content. The second was for what the content was designed to obscure: that my department is being discussed in the passive voice by people who have already decided what they intend to do and are now performing the consultation they should have conducted before the decision was made.

I know this language. I have been reading it for two years, since the first budget memorandum that used the phrase “evolving landscape” to describe what was, in plain terms, a deliberate reallocation of resources away from the humanities and toward the departments whose names contain words donors can point to when asked what they’re paying for. Science. Business. Technology. Words that sound like products. Comparative Literature does not sound like a product. Comparative Literature sounds like something that happens in libraries, and libraries do not have lobbying budgets.

I sit in the third row. Far enough back to observe, close enough to be heard without raising my voice. I do not raise my voice. Volume is the first thing people notice in an argument and the last thing that changes their minds. The argument, properly constructed, does not need amplification. It needs precision, and evidence, and the willingness to say what the evidence shows even when what the evidence shows is that the institution is lying.

Dr. Alan Marsh, Associate Provost for Academic Affairs, presents the overview. Alan Marsh is a white man in his mid-fifties, athletic build, light brown curly hair kept short, always in a suit—today charcoal, well-cut, the suit of a man who understands that appearance is its own argument. His principal talent is the ability to speak at length without committing to a position, a skill he has refined over twenty years into something approaching an art form. He can fill a twenty-minute presentation slot with language so carefully calibrated to sound supportive while saying nothing that you find yourself nodding along, and then you leave the room and you sit in your car and you try to recall a single specific thing he committed to, and you cannot, because he did not commit to anything.

“Evolving landscape.” “Fiscal responsibility.” “Reimagining the role of humanistic inquiry.”

Gerald is beside me. He is holding a printout of the meeting agenda, and I can see his handwriting in the margins, not notes about the meeting but the word marginalia and beneath it a reference number from his monograph bibliography. He is working on the monograph during the Provost’s presentation.

I look around the room. Nadia Bloom is not here.

Nadia and I taught in adjacent classrooms last spring, her Introduction to Philosophy on one side of the wall, my Comparative Literature seminar on the other. We fell into the habit of talking after class, ten minutes in the hallway while students filed past, the kind of conversation that happens between two people who share a wall and a schedule and, it turned out, a conviction that the humanities are not a luxury the institution can afford to hollow out. She is sharp and precise and her students adore her. She teaches three sections and an upper-level seminar on feminist epistemology. She has been doing this for six years on a contract that renews annually and pays roughly a third of what I earn for a comparable teaching load.

She was not invited to this meeting. A meeting about the future of the departments she teaches in, and she was not invited, because adjuncts are not faculty in the way the administration means the word faculty. They are labor. Contingent. Renewable. The institution does not consult the people it intends to make unnecessary. It simply makes them unnecessary and describes the process as restructuring.

I am going to remember Nadia’s absence.

The discussion period opens. Cautious statements from History. The chair of Sociology asks about the timeline and receives an answer about the process, which is not the same thing.

Then a voice from the back of the room.

“Can you clarify what ‘strategic repositioning’ means for departments whose enrollment has actually increased over the past three years?”

The room turns.

Late 20s. Tall, lean, dark brown skin, carrying herself with an uprightness that reads as confidence and that I suspect is at least partly performance. Her bag is good, the kind you invest in when you are building a professional self. Her question was precise.

Dr. Marsh begins a response that is not a response. She does not let him finish.

“Because Comparative Literature’s enrollment is up eleven percent since 2020. History is up eight. Philosophy is holding steady. If the repositioning is fiscal, the numbers don’t support cutting these programs. If it’s ideological, I’d like to understand the criteria.”

A silence. The quality of a room in which something true has been said by someone who was not supposed to say it. Marsh continues his non-answer. The meeting continues.

Afterwards, I note her name from the sign-in sheet as people file out: Tess Okafor. PhD student, History, second year. Someone behind me says she emailed the Provost’s office three times to be allowed in the room. She asked the question no tenured faculty member asked. She asked it because she could see the numbers. She asked it because she has less to lose, or because she believes she does, and both of these things tell me something about what tenure costs.

Gerald puts his hand on my shoulder as we file out. “Well,” he says. It is warm and it is Gerald and it means something.