“The Freshman”

April 16, Wednesday, 5 Washington Square North

It looks as though I am betting double or nothing on my softball season.  I thought I was going to be running both the Sharkeys and a sociology department. A few years ago I served as acting chair, and I was elected chair in a close vote at the end of February.  The election was advisory to the dean, but deans almost always appoint the department’s choice.  My belief in elections was so great that I thought it was only a matter of time until the dean contacted me to talk turkey.  So instead of demanding a meeting, I waited.   March came and went, and two weeks ago I finally heard from him.   He sent an e-mail notifying me that he had chosen as chair someone just hired by the department.  I felt a little like Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie of “Sex in the City” after one of her boyfriends breaks up with her by way of a Post-It. 

There was, not coincidentally, a departmental faculty meeting the next morning.  My colleagues were incensed at the dean’s fait accompli.  But there was a divide between those who wanted the new chair-select to step aside and those who argued that he would “leverage” resources to “grow” the department since he was the dean’s choice.  Many feared that the small world that is sociology would find out about this and think it would reflect poorly on our department.  NYU sociology has been trying to ramp up its ranking from the low 20s–where U.S. News and World Report has had us since the mid 1990s—to the top 10.  This wouldn’t help.  The chair convened a committee to draft a statement of protest.

Since receiving the dean’s message, I’ve been waking up most mornings around three o’clock wondering why the dean wouldn’t appoint me.  What is he afraid of?  I am responsible to a fault, having taken on thankless committee assignments that my colleagues dodge instinctively.  And, frankly, I’m charming.  I know I should feel lucky not to have to take on yet more responsibility, but it feels so embarrassing and insulting not to be appointed after having been elected. 

I had been meeting regularly with my colleague Jeff, my best friend in the department and a pickup basketball mate, to see if we can devise a way to get the dean to reconsider.  Jeff is my age, but about a foot taller and with all-American good looks.  We might as well be Mutt and Jeff, if Mutt hadn’t been the taller one.  Jeff, who wears glasses, has a soft baseline turnaround jump shot, super-human range, and a manner so mild that his basketball nickname was Clark Kent.  The only time I ever see Jeff angry is when someone flagrantly fouls him.   Then he is liable to punt the ball into the rafters.  Too bad there was no ball at the faculty meeting.  I have slowly, painfully, realized that even though the department has expressed outrage at the dean’s move, there is no chance that I will become chair.  Most of my colleagues who voted for my opponent are happy with the dean’s choice.  Most who voted for me weren’t so much for me, I’ve learned, as opposed to my opponent.  The rest don’t care much one way or another.  When Jeff is wrestling with a conundrum, he looks thoughtfully off into the middle distance with his lower lip covering his upper one.  Nowadays he does that all the time.

Since the softball season has started, I’ve been trying to use my extensive team-sport experience to help me deal with the debacle.  I don’t mean the high-school-coach chestnuts about what to do when the going gets tough and the game fish swimming upstream and the like.  I’m thinking about the lessons that pickup softball has taught me about narrative limitations and appropriate behavior.  In these games, the winners stay on the field, and losers sit down and wait their turn to play again.

There are only five story lines in pickup softball, and probably in life.  There is comedy.  A great team messes up–bobbling grounders, throwing the ball away, popping up–but holds it together enough to win anyway.   All’s well that ends well. The team goes on to play again and meet another team, in a kind of symbolic wedding.  Then there’s tragedy.  A team has the talent to win, but because of strategic mistakes, misplays, or failure to play as a team it loses and has to depart the field.  The demise of the team is mourned along the sidelines in funereal silence as softball life goes on without it. In the third plot line, redemption, a team falls way behind, but given a second chance, it perceives and corrects its errors.  Redemption is the most rewarding in the end and can happen during the course of one game, but often requires at least one tragic loss.

By far my favorite is a fourth scenario—total domination, in which the team wins, handily and repeatedly, dispatching one team after another. Francesca takes issue with this one.  She is a little like a character in French new wave cinema.  There is always a script’s worth of well-argued ideas coming out of her mouth, though without cigarette smoke, and she is trapped in a model’s body, remaining willowy, even though she seems to subsist mainly on ice cream and chocolate.  Her face is so pretty–cobalt eyes, auburn hair, button nose, rosebud lips, dimples– that at first I found it unnerving to talk to her, as if simply by looking at her face I might be accused of gawking.  I imagined her pointing one of her elegant fingers and saying, “Look, pal, my breasts are down here.”  But I soon learned that she is practically blind without her contact lenses and anyway is usually too busy theorizing, while gesturing and looking off into space, to notice what a conversation partner might be staring at.  Also, I work a lot, but I play ball, fool around with a camera, train for marathons, and watch as many films as I can.  Francesca has no hobbies.  She is all sociologist all the time.  Probably all our restaurant meals are tax-deductible.  Most of her daytime hours are spent staring daggers at her video screen, as if irked that the computer isn’t entirely getting what she is transmitting to it.

 

Francesca was all sociologist all the time.

 

More than once Francesca has patiently explained to me that total domination does not, strictly speaking, qualify as a narrative, a subject she is writing a book about, because there is no reversal of fortune.  I disagree, because she doesn’t take into account anticipating a struggle and having the happy epiphany of being mistaken.  Chicago fans will think of the Bears in 1985 or the Bulls in 1991, but the examples are many:  Clay versus Liston, Ali versus Foreman, Jets versus Colts, Mets versus Orioles, etc.

Finally, there is the lost cause, which is something akin to the flipside of total domination.  In the lost cause, the team is overmatched with no chance to prevail, but there are several ways to play it.  One is to deny that the cause is lost and act as though it is a tragedy in the making.  Another way is to give up, pout, absorb punishment, and sit down.   A third is to fight to the finish with anyone who will join in–with no illusions about winning—and then sit down.  If the lost cause is identified quickly and played properly, I don’t mind it.  Realizing that the story is going to end with your loving Big Brother or drinking the Kool Aid can be even a little liberating. 

 

 

The lost cause could be liberating.

 

These plot lines are useful for any amateur athlete needing to summarize numerous contests to someone only mildly interested, as, for instance, when I need to report on hour or two’s worth of sporting activity to Francesca, who is usually busily tapping away.  She will say, “How did it go?”  And I will respond with something like, “Comedy, then tragedy.”  She will return with, “Oh, sorry to hear it, Poopy,” without looking up from the screen.  But the standard stories are even more helpful in providing guidelines for acting and feeling when in the middle of them.  My problem is that I have been seeing the chair situation as a close game and a tragedy in the making.  I have been trying to rally the squad with the equivalent of playing tighter defense and scratching out a few runs.  Really, my team is being blown out, and my colleague-teammates have taken off their cleats and have headed to the showers.  So I’ve decided to swing for the fences—or, to change the sporting metaphor, take it right at the dean and see what happens.  I e-mailed him to request an audience and plan to unload on him.  Looking at the issue as a lost cause is far easier on the psyche.  The game being already over, I have nothing to lose.

This morning, ten weeks after having been elected chair, I finally meet the dean in his Henry James building on Washington Square North.   His office is a stately, high-ceilinged room looking out above street level over a children’s playground.  In the film The Freshman, the new NYU student played by Matthew Broderick vaults out this window when he sees his car being stolen.  The word is that the dean leaves visitors with the feeling that he agrees with them.  He is a picture of studied thoughtfulness, as he details the history of his thinking for overruling the election.  The close vote indicated a divided department, not the consensus he was expecting.  As he carefully chooses words, he gazes out the window.  Unless there’s a carjacking in process, I’m facing a filibuster.  He tells me that when he solicited private opinions from the faculty, stroking his well-groomed salt-and-pepper beard, “not a few” colleagues thought that the chair-select’s appointment would clear the way for the department to advance.  And he didn’t meet with me because he had my best interests in mind.  If after our meeting he decided not to select me it would appear as if it were a personal rejection.  His eyes are so liquid that I fear he might start to cry.

The dean’s slow-down discursive offense burns twenty minutes off our half-hour meeting, and I am at a disadvantage because I am afraid my sprinkler system might go off.  Once he regains control of the conversation, I know he will run out the clock, and so I start to rattle off as many points as quickly as I can: I won the election, and he should have met me.  He surely knew that our secret election process, which he had signed off on, was likely to produce a close vote.  What’s more, the personal opinions he solicited did not amount to a democratic election–it seemed to have set aside the election results.  Also, it was wrong to announce the selection of a chair without consulting the department.  And repudiating the vote without meeting me could also be read as a personal rejection—which my colleagues have indeed done.        

I start fast, but I am choked up and find my words leaking out increasingly slowly.  I occasionally peer out the window, too, though I don’t have as favorable an angle on the playground.  I find myself speaking so faux-thoughtfully as I’m making the point about his not meeting me that I have time to think about how slowly I’m talking and how absurd and beside the point this is.  There is nothing I can say that will change the dean’s decision, and my colleagues aren’t going to try to override it.  He is really good, as if he had done graduate work in charm school or the Method.  Still talking, I find myself wondering how the dean would have handled Nardo at the park yesterday.  If I had the dean’s skills, Nardo no doubt would have signed on as our batboy.  And I’m sure people are criticizing the dean all the time.  I wonder how he handles it.  Because the gap between what I’m thinking and what I’m saying has expanded dangerously, I suddenly panic that I’m going to change the movie and blurt out some highly inappropriate Fredo Corleone-esque lines from The Godfather, Part Two:  “I’m smart!  I can handle things!   I want respect!  I was passed ovah!” etc.  To avoid that fate, I just shut up.  

We both stand.  So much for taking it right to the dean.  He admits that, knowing what he knows now, “some things might have been done differently.” We are all smiles as he shows me the door, inviting me to return and chat any time, but I think for a moment about exiting through the window because I know I’ve been robbed. The literary critic Hayden White or maybe Francesca notes that narratives always assume a point of view.   I need to keep in mind, too, that for those who glimpse our games on their way to other parts of the park, they are all comedy.