Perils and privileges of high office

I have occupied an office (number 49) at the top of the many stairs of the fourth entryway in McCosh Hall for more years than I can accurately declare. We have little by way of what anthropologists call "status discriminators" in the English Department. We all have decals for the same parking lot, and we all have equal access (or lack thereof) to the insufficiently numerous and inconveniently located lieux. So office assignment has to do a lot of "status discriminator" work. Ours is a very old-fashioned and quintessentially American system in which one begins at the bottom — meaning the dark linoleum cellars of McCosh — in the hopes of ascending in due course to the dark hardwood and ogived windows of the two superior Gothic levels. Such ascension demands some minimal seniority but is far from guaranteeing tenure. My immediate predecessor in McCosh 49, my close friend Prof. X, was banished to Boston more than twenty years ago. His immediate predecessor, Prof. Y, is also in New England. On the day he got the word about his tenure decision Professor Y, a wit and the possessor of a merit badge in lanyard-weaving, tied a beautiful miniature hangman's noose, technically accurate in its reduced scale, in the long cord of the central window shade. This memento mori remained with me until just a few years since when the old window shades were replaced by decidedly less picturesque Venetian blinds.

I can trace the lineage of my office back yet further. About six years ago I found myself in a second-hand bookshop in San Anselmo, CA, where surprisingly I came upon an item long sought, namely the little "Golden Treasury" edition of the "Theologia Germanica." This great work of late medieval spirituality made a decisive impression on the mind of the youthful Martin Luther, among many others. The anonymous author is believed to have come from Frankfurt, and for this reason is known in the German scholarship — about the only scholarship on this author — as "the Frankfurter," a fact that amuses the unserious graduate students we tend to get these days. On its fly-leaf is written "George Thomas/McCosh 49." Prof. Thomas, a sterling gentleman who was still living when I arrived here, was the founding chairman of our Department of Religion. I know not how Thomas came to be in McCosh 49, even less how Thomas's Frankfurter migrated to Marin County. But I do know a sign when I see one.

The placement of my office directly across a narrow landing from McCosh 46, a large lecture hall, has countervailing advantages and disadvantages. The landing is often crowded with undergraduates and geriatric auditors, seemingly in equal numbers, either exiting or preparing to enter the lecture hall, and incidentally impeding access to and from my own door. I shall come to a second disadvantage in a moment. The easily compensating advantage, of course, is that I can hear, by simply half opening my door, any number of terrific lectures by terrific lecturers. I began, at a very high standard, with a course in modern European history taught by Arno Mayer, now retired. I was able to eavesdrop on Peter Singer when the buzz was still fresh. I hear Howard Taylor's great jokes and steal them whenever possible. I recently heard a brilliant lecture by my colleague Maria DiBattista that reminded me how I came to take up my line of work in the first place.

Poised midway between my office's advantages and its hazards is the row of permanent garment hooks fitted into the wainscoting outside my office. The advantage they afford is that I can, after my early morning swim, hang up my damp towel and trunks to dry. The hazard is — if the trunks happen to bear the logo "Champion" and the fashionable name of Wilson College — that they will be ripped off. I lost my third and last remaining pair a few days ago, plucked from its hook in broad daylight.

Undergraduate morality, though often vociferous, can be highly selective. There are some students who, upon leaving a final exam on which they have sincerely signed the honor pledge, would without scruple pinch an old lady's bicycle if they were running late for a happy hour on the 'Street'. In selected material categories — umbrellas, bicycles, nearly any kind of hand-held electronic device, and shiny dark blue Champion® shorts — a primitive campus socialism trumps all claims of private property.

Circumstantial evidence suggests that the latest culprit came from Professor Gager's "Origins of Christianity" course. There will always be some local Smerdyakov who cannot simply accept the death of God in a mature and measured manner without acting out in socially inappropriate ways. But tout comprendre is decidedly not in this instance tout pardonner. The lowlife who would rip off my soggy shorts would take the coppers off a dead man's eyes; and he richly deserves whatever social diseases may accrue. Yet though he may drive me to less fashionable swim-wear, he will never drive me from my high office. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.