Far Out Man (eBook)

Eight

The Trolls On The Net

“When I woke up I thought I had slept funny the night before, because the side of my face hurt and my shoulder was killing me,” Jack explained. “Then I realized I was lying on my back on the sidewalk surrounded by an angry mob.”

“So campus security took you to Henry Ford Hospital?”

“Yeah, and by the time I got out the university had already begun the proceedings against me. I went straight from the hospital and got there just in time to hear their decision. This whole thing really sucks, Baxter.”

“I agree that it sucks. And it’s the first time in the history of academia that a faculty advisory committee made a quick decision. But it’s the best deal you’re going to get.”

This was not the advice Jack wanted to hear. He had come to Baxter Fineman’s office to develop a battle plan that would let him keep teaching, but his old friend and colleague was advising him to give up the ghost.

“I can’t just walk away from this fight. If I give up it will make it easier for students to do this other professors.”

“You need to do what’s best for you, Jack. Your fellow professors aren’t exactly going out of their way to help you. Even the union is backing away from this one.”

Baxter was right about that.

He was right about a lot of things, that’s why Jack had come to talk to him. Baxter was a law professor at the university and a long-time friend. Over the years his proud Afro had gradually yielded to total baldness, and his piercing gaze was now assisted by thick glasses, but he remained a fierce warrior fighting to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.

Baxter’s office was in Old Main, an iconic campus building that looked like a low-budget version of Hogwarts Castle, complete with turrets and a big clock. Jack had come there hoping to find a magic spell that would make the nightmare of the last week vanish. Instead he got advice that was as easy to understand as it was difficult to accept.

Shut up, take the deal, and go.

Jack found it hard to do any of those things.

“You’re right about our colleagues,” he said. “A few of them said nice things about me, but no one protested too loudly. Nobody threatened to quit if they forced me out.”

“They all support you. But we have to pick our fights, Jack. Nobody knows that lesson better than me. I learned it the hard way, I don’t want you to do the same thing.”

“Tanner doesn’t support me. He picked his fight and won by a knockout.”

“That’s the professor who told the students not to let you through?”

“Yeah. My boss, the head of the English Department, can you believe it? The university isn’t disciplining him.”

“He didn’t actually punch you, someone else did.”

“And I ended up in the emergency room with a concussion. Campus security says they don’t know who punched me. No witnesses have come forward, and for some reason the security cameras on the mall weren’t working that morning.”

“So that’s it. Justice won’t be served, but you can make the best of a bad situation. It’s not just the video, you have a history of students filing grievances against you.”

“I push my students because I want them to understand the material on an emotional level as well as an academic level. I want it to change their lives, and it has. For every grievance against me there are ten lives I have changed forever for the better.”

“The university doesn’t keep track of lives changed for the better, Jack – but it does keep track of student grievances. Sometimes you push too hard. Yourself included.”

“What do you mean?”

“You understand the material on an academic level better than anyone in the world, you’ve been published in all of the prestigious journals and your work is highly acclaimed. But on an emotional level, the capability you demand of your students?”

“Yes?”

“Well, no one would describe you as laid back. You’re not exactly a hippie, Jack.”

“I’m not asking them to be hippies. I have standards I ask them to meet, a certain level of commitment. You can’t just bullshit your way through my class. The university doesn’t understand that. They don’t want me to enforce the same rigorous standards of excellence they would apply to math or science.”

“The university is actually on your side, more than you know, but the public pressure is enormous. They’re not forcing you out, they’re asking you to go on a sabbatical.”

“They’ve frozen my tenure until I return. I’ll lose a year.”

“It’s a year off with pay to do whatever you want. By then this whole thing will have blown over and you can go back to teaching. It should be easy for you, you’ve got that thing that Finnish thing you’re always bragging about – scissors?”

“Sisu.”

“You’ve got sisu. Grit, guts, perseverance, whatever it is. You can take it.”

“I have to take sensitivity training, too.”

“Isn’t that what you English professors call irony? That’s what you’re trying to teach in your class every day.”

They looked at each other across Baxter’s massive old desk and shared a laugh, which felt good. Jack hadn’t enjoyed many laughs in the past few days. Someone in his last class had used a smart phone to shoot video of him quoting lines from A Confederacy of Dunces. They edited it to make him look like a maniac who was yelling at his students, and ended it with him shouting the line about paranoia and mongoloids.

It was put it online with the title “Crazy College Professor Goes on Hate Rant.”

The impact was immediate and devastating.

Over the course of a weekend, while he was holed up in his house ignoring his cell phone, laptop and TV to write the Great American Novel, he was branded an insensitive monster by an online jury that seemed to grow larger and angrier by the hour. Past transgressions, real and imagined, were posted and shared. The iconic issues of the Sixties he had discussed in class – dropping out, drugs, civil disobedience, casual sex – were portrayed as values he demanded his students embrace.

The hastily convened academic review panel assured Jack that all of its members believed his version of events – he was set up, the words he was quoting were taken out of context, he was a good person and a great teacher. They also assured him that it would be in the best interests of the university to relieve him of his teaching duties immediately. His replacement would grade the class on a Pass/Fail basis that wouldn’t affect grade point averages, and he would be allowed to leave on a sabbatical until things died down.

“So you don’t think I can take the university to court?”

“You can take them to court if you like, you might even win. Freezing your tenure was especially egregious, a bridge too far in my opinion – we could take them on there. But if you go to court they will no longer be on your side. The gloves will come off, and it will cost you a small fortune to have every dumb thing you ever did or said in your entire life made public.”

“What if I can find the students who did it? I have a pretty good idea who it was.”

“Whoever posted the video hasn’t broken any laws.”

“The way they edited and posted the video makes it look like I’m some kind of lunatic spewing hateful insults at my students.”

“The trolls who attacked you…”

“Trolls?”

“You’ve never heard the term ‘trolls’? A troll is someone who goes online and attacks other people.”

“I don’t do a lot of that Internet stuff.”

“You might want to learn a little bit more about it, if for nothing else than self-defense. The trolls who attacked you actually got a two-fer, in terms of hate speech. Some people consider the word ‘mongoloid’ to be an insult to Asians, others consider it an offensive way of referring to mentally challenged people.”

“I told you, they took what I said out of context and edited it to make me look bad. Isn’t that against the law?”

“What they did with the video was unethical and immoral, but not illegal. You’ve already lost in the court of public opinion, going after them would only make things worse.”

“You know I’m not hateful or prejudiced.”

“You are the most loving and unprejudiced person I have ever met. Almost to a fault, I might add. You believe people are basically good, but that’s not always the case.”

Jack looked down for a moment, then spoke in a soft, sad voice.

“She believed it, so I believe it,” he said. “I have to or else nothing makes sense.”

He raised his eyes and his voice and spoke again.

“I might make an exception for the little shits who did this to me. If they had put half as much thought and energy into the class I would have given them A’s.”

“You know their names?”

“Yeah. There’s three of them. I call them the Wise Guys.”

“You have proof that they did it?”

“No, but I’d bet my pension it was them. They were worried that I was going to bring their grade point average down.”

“Like I told you, Jack, whoever did this didn’t break any laws. It’s not going to help if you confront them, it might even...