For more than twenty years, Dad taught at Aurora State College which sits in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York in a small town called Hammerville; the town is 161 square miles and has a population of 3,447 people according to the last census. The college is in the northwest section of town on an enclave of 14,200 acres. And yet, despite its impressive size, people who lived in the town their entire lives were hardly aware that this behemoth college existed except for the small group of townsfolk who worked there, mostly in blue collar and service worker positions. While the college is situated on one of the most spacious landscapes of any in the state, its geometrically arrayed gray concrete rectangular buildings, lack of open spaces, and run-down interiors painted with a hideous green, which even the state prison in the adjacent town replaced in their last remodeling effort, made it a particularly uninviting institution.
Dad moved our family up to the town twenty years ago after he got his doctorate in educational psychology. There were only twelve openings in the nation in educational psychology that year, and not being able to get one of them, he took the job at Aurora teaching general psychology. For years, my mom, my brother John, and I endured the brutally cold winters, social isolation, and long mountainous drives to get to a supermarket, so Dad could have the opportunity to fulfill his dream of being a college professor. To show his appreciation, he used his summer vacations to take us to our favorite vacation destinations at which we enjoyed the night life of New York City, cruise ships to the Florida Keys, and white rafting down the Chattooga. Although he didn’t have a tenure track position, we prayed that sometime down the road, dad’s part-time lectureship would transform into a full-time tenure track professorship.
I would like to beg the reader’s indulgence for jumping right into the events of the last semester of Dad’s employment seven years ago because I have no patience for retelling the mundane details of his twenty years of employment at the college, and I assume the reader has no desire to hear them. August 29, 2003, was a routine day on which Dad was sitting in the psychology department’s faculty lounge, chatting with the few faculty and doctoral students who arrived early on campus for the upcoming fall semester, and entered the lounge either by habit or mistake. The lounge, a small pathetic room, littered with a couple of old beat-up sofas and scratched up wooden rocking chairs, seemed particularly desolate that summer, without the hustle and bustle of the plethora of faculty and doctoral students who normally trampled through its oddly shaped and inadequately small space, to grab a cup of coffee or exchange a brief hello while en route to their professorial duties.
For the past couple of years, he sat on one of the room’s creaking rocking chairs for a few hours each afternoon during the last week of August and struck up conversations with anyone who chanced to enter. My brother and I never really understood why he, who never entered the lounge during the academic school year, and rarely spoke with other faculty outside of the routine exchanges related to his job, took this pre-semester period to visit the lounge, and engage in idle chatter with its small group of self-anointed members composed of senior faculty who perceived access to the lounge as a perk for their many years of employment; professorial wannabes like Ms. Childs, a lecturer, who used the lounge as a venue to flirt with some of the older male faculty members that might one day be making decisions on her application for promotion; and a motley assortment of graduate students and upper classman who visited to spend more time with their favorite professors.
Maybe it was because of mother’s chiding him constantly about not being more sociable. “You sit at your desk twenty hours a day and work, but nobody knows who you are–you need to socialize.” “All that work is getting you nowhere-you are still not a real professor,” she would admonish whenever she deemed it relevant. My mother, a Chinese national who immigrated in the 1970’s, learned English, became an assistant principle at a local elementary school, and later managed the only Chinese dumpling factory in upstate New York, believed that anything was possible if you worked hard and hobnobbed with the right people. Dad’s salary was modest, but it wasn’t only the lower salary which bothered her about him being a lecturer; it was the inferior status. When her Chinese friends came over and introduced their husbands as doctors, engineers or executives in corporations, not to mention, university professors; she could never bring herself to admit that her husband was a lecturer, and she would wince every time he boasted of his position as if he were the university president.
Dad, on the other hand, while not averse to attaining a better paying and higher status professorship, viewed his chances for gaining the coveted position as contingent on meeting the rigorous standards of academia which he knew to be “publish, publish, publish”; and on a degree of luck that he perceived as beyond his attainment. After years working assiduously to improve his academic vitae, in which he achieved a respectable if not impressive record of publications, he still found himself in the same low-paying lectureship that initiated his career. It isn’t that he didn’t have his chances–when Dean Hart was there, she assured him that only a couple of publications in prominent journals stood in the way of a professorship. But his insecurities in his first two years concerning his ability to publish in the best journals, telling us that those publications are for the “big boys at Harvard and Yale,” and his failure to see the urgency to publish, opining that he could publish articles, “after I’m more established,” led him to delay.
It wasn’t that he used his time idly; to the contrary, he plunged himself into his teaching, and although his name wasn’t listed in the course schedule (that honor was reserved for professors), his courses were as heavily enrolled as any faculty member on campus. In any case, Hart left the school before he penned his first article in a prominent journal as an Aurora faculty member and was replaced by Dean Roberts who was inordinately disinclined to ever promote him, but more about that later.
And so, after many years of not getting the promotion that he believed he deserved and subjected to my mother’s increasingly forceful exhortations to mingle, he finally decided to join the faculty lounge, at least for that one final week in August of each academic year. And on the third year of doing so, that fateful day of August 29, 2003, which would turn out to be his last, he struck up a conversation with a young Asian lady whom he assumed was a doctoral student, as she clearly didn’t don the stodgy prim and proper demeanor that characterized most of Aurora’s faculty.
He came home that day in a more buoyant mood than usual and excitedly related the story of meeting this Asian doctoral student to my mother who listened with polite attention. Although in the past she had secretly hoped that Dad would use his short stay in the lounge to fraternize with senior faculty whom she believed could help advance his career, she long ago gave up expecting that would happen and now resigned herself to the fact that her husband speaking with a doctoral student, even a newly enrolled one, was about as close to her concept of socializing as he was likely to achieve.
What he didn’t tell us, and what we later learned from mom, was that at 8 a.m. the next morning, he received a call from Dean Roberts.
“Dr. Lambert,” Dean Roberts immediately asserted, without waiting for a reply, “there has been an allegation of impropriety. It is urgent that we meet in my office at 9 a.m. on Monday morning.”
He was flabbergasted, but he tried to maintain his composure. “May I ask what exactly this is about?” he ventured to inquire.
Roberts replied, “We’ll discuss that when we meet. Vice President Smith will be joining us. See you Monday.” The weekend seemed to proceed normally although in retrospect, I’m sure Dad was thinking about what he could have done or said to bring such a meeting upon himself.
Ever since Roberts was hired, he never liked Dad. In so many ways they were exact opposites and not the kind of opposites that attract. Roberts achieved a full professorship at 25 and became dean at barely 30; Dad was the oldest member of the faculty at 50 and still only a lecturer. Roberts had an Ivy League education and rumor had it that his family had big money and even bigger political connections; Dad came from a working-class family, was the first in his family to go to college and got his three degrees from the local state university.
Moreover, he had already done much to incur the dean’s ire. In the dean’s first year, Roberts wanted to hire a new instructor (“young fresh blood” as he called it) to teach a course left unassigned due to a faculty member leaving. Dad, who mistakenly believed that he was doing the dean a big favor by saving the department the expense of hiring new faculty, voluntarily signed up to fill the vacancy, precluding the possibility of the dean’s hoped for appointment. As if that weren’t bad enough, during the dean’s first week in office, he showed up with a petition signed by fifty of his students to request he teach the senior seminar in leadership previously taught by Hart. He was so proud at this touching display of loyalty on the part of his students, he was unable to understand the negative impact it had on the new dean.
As Dad told it, Roberts looked emotionless as he turned to him with that cold, smug, officious manner that he became notorious for, and disdainfully demanded, “What is this?”
He explained that some of the students in his social psychology course were in the middle of research projects on leadership which they wanted to continue the following semester, and hence the petition.
The dean looked at him with the air of a parent admonishing a child, chiding, “There is really no theory of leadership, without a practice of leadership. Theory depends on practice.”
At first, he was startled at what seemed to be the dean’s inapposite platitude but quickly sensed that it was a veiled reference to the fact that, unlike the dean, he lacked leadership experience.
In any case, he merely stammered, “Yes, they are interrelated.” A moment of uncomfortable silence ensued, and then he asked, “So, what are the next steps?”
The dean slyly smiled and said, “I’ll get back to you.”
Two days later, he received an email announcing that from this semester forward, Dean Roberts would be teaching the senior seminar.
And so it went for the next few years, with anything he wanted blocked by the omnipotent dean. He approached Roberts’ office that Monday morning fearing that the dean had somehow found another way to make his life miserable.
When he entered the office, Roberts and Vice President Smith were chatting in low voices, setting the stage for the transgression about to be unveiled. Roberts began, “I suppose you must have some idea why you’re here.” He continued without pause, “Last Friday, Dr. Childs approached me, upset that you told one of our new doctoral students that you would be her dissertation advisor.” He glared at Dad.
He was stunned and blurted out, “I merely told the student that I have some expertise in the research on Asian learning and could potentially serve as her advisor if she wanted.”
“I am dismayed by your impudent attitude,” the dean quickly countered.
“I’m not trying to be disrespectful, and I’m not sure why Professor Childs would be so concerned about what I said.”
“You attempted to coerce a doctoral student to be your advisee, and you don’t seem concerned,” the dean continued the assault. “I am sure you are aware that a student must follow all the procedures in the doctoral student handbook and obtain departmental approval before selecting their dissertation advisor.”
He muttered, “I am concerned. I just don’t understand why Professor Childs didn’t bring this up with me first.”
“It is obvious that you don’t know how intimidating you can be,” the dean retorted.
He was flabbergasted, and replied, “It was not my intention to coerce anybody. I was only trying to be helpful.”
The dean now drew the penultimate blow, “We are disturbed about the inappropriate way you treat students and faculty.”
It was at this point that Vice President Smith interjected, “We understand that perhaps your intentions were not malicious, and we have no intention of punishing you.”
Roberts seemed nervous, as if the Vice President were about to dismiss the charges, and he quickly added, “At this point I think the best way to handle this, and if Vice President Smith agrees, is to remove you from your position until the incident is taken up by the faculty senate. Another instructor will cover your classes. In the meantime, we want you to go to employee counseling to improve the way you communicate. I will follow up with them regarding your progress.”
He was devastated. First, he tried to determine in his own mind whether there could be any validity to this seemingly absurd charge. He could only concede that he should have informed the student of the need to follow the rules listed in the doctoral student handbook and obtain departmental approval, but he could no more find reasonable justification for Childs reporting him to the dean for such a minor oversight than he could for the rather harsh penalty that had just been exacted.
He tried to recall the details of that day in the lounge when he met the new student. As far as he remembered, the room was empty. Childs must have walked in while he was engaged in conversation with the student, but he couldn’t recall her being there as she was gone by the time he left. He knew that Childs was new, and despite the dean’s honorific salutation, lacked a doctorate. Like Dad, she was hired as a lecturer, although still in her last year of graduate school. She was clearly the dean’s favorite, and it was no surprise that she didn’t like him. But to stoop to the level of reporting him to the dean for such a trivial matter seemed inconceivable to someone with his sense of integrity. Nor could he make sense of the severity of the punishment –not be allowed to teach at his own college–a college that he had worked for tirelessly, and without a raise or promotion, for almost twenty years!
Dad was reinstated by a vote of the faculty senate two weeks later, although he never again had conversations with students outside of his classes, and he no longer shared stories with colleagues about his students or his lectures. Being removed from his classes wasn’t what bothered him the most, nor was it having to meet weekly with an “employee assistance counselor,” a young intern from the state university where he himself had graduated many years before, who gave him a list of rules of conversational etiquette to practice and a weekly chart to fill out reporting his progress toward mastering each rule.
What bothered him the most was that someone of the dean’s ilk had such power over him. Even mother, for the first time, had sympathy for his position. She finally seemed to realize that his failure to hobnob was not the only, and perhaps not even the most important, impediment in his quest to gain a professorship.
After his reinstatement, the semester dragged on for six more trying weeks. Then on the last day of the semester, he got a call from the dean’s assistant. Mary had known Dad for almost twenty years since she was hired by Hart just a few months after he was. “Dr. Lambert,” Mary began. He surmised the dean was within earshot because she would normally address him more informally. She continued, “Last fall you turned in a change of grade form for a student claiming that there had been a computer scoring error for her final examination. Dean Roberts needs to see a copy of her original exam and the computerized scoring sheet.”
He couldn’t believe it. It was bad enough his well-intentioned offer to advise a doctoral student was deemed unacceptable, but now the integrity of his grading was being called into question as well. I suspect he was overwrought but I only knew that he stuffed a couple of papers into his already overstuffed briefcase that day and said he needed to go to the dean’s office to turn in some paperwork.
That was the last time we ever saw Dad alive. A sign posted by the student government president was hung in the student lounge later that day. It read, “Dr. Joseph Lambert, a beloved lecturer of psychology at Aurora for the past twenty years, died in a hit and run accident while crossing Roberts Drive yesterday afternoon. Please contact the student government office if you wish to contribute to his memorial service.”
Three days later a notice was put up in the Faculty Lounge, which read, “The Psychology Department announces the appointment of Andrea Childs to the position of Professor of Psychology. There will be a reception to celebrate at 4PM today in Dean Robert’s office.”
*****
Robert Lowinger works as a part time psychotherapist. He has been writing short fiction for his own enjoyment for the past year after retiring as a psychology professor. More recently, he has been working on improving his writing under the mentorship of Lily Brown.