Composing a Life

natural disaster; others turn to looting.
    In places like Amherst some grow to feel that the institution is their personal property, so they are more concerned with whether their writ runs than with outcomes. There was an odd mirroring between the distortions in my vision and those of a handful of senior men, equally caused by identification with the institution. I tended to identify my interests with those of the college; they identified the interests of the college with their own. The same kind of complementary distortion often happens in marriage. Women are taught to deny themselves for the sake of the marriage, men are taught that the marriage exists to support them.
    It took several months for me to unravel the sequence of events. Later that spring, I wrote, still indignant, “What hurt most was having my trust betrayed by the Committee of Six. It sounds crazy because you’ve heard me complain about them, the hours and hours of meetings, week after week, but ... some of the stuff that comes through my office is so scuzzy that I really began to rely on C6 to keep me believing in this place. At its best, it represents a sort of distilled aspiration for fairness and clarity. But that was when we were in there with them. When the committee met alone, it bypassed its basic responsibility of advising me—after all, I was the acting administration—and it just ignored its normal standards about gossip and unattributed reports. And they’re not dumb. See, they didn’t have to denounce me, just to express
concern
—there are alums on that board who aren’t even used to coeducation yet.”
    The board, convened in an all-male emergency quorum, ratified the coup. They argued in secret all afternoon, and then made Armour Craig, the senior member of the committee and an alumnus of the college, acting president. A graceful man and a dedicated teacher who had never held an administrative position where he had to make unpopular decisions, Armour told me later that his first thought when he heard of Julian’s death was that perhaps, in the last year before his retirement, he would be made acting president of his alma mater. So unembarrassed was he that his first reaction to Julian’s death was one of personal ambition, that he has made me wonder whether the impulse to service was somehow perverse, like Johnnetta’s long ago willingness to sacrifice her life to marriage to a drug abuser. When I heard rumors, after Armour had been a year in office, that, much to his surprise and distress, he had been hung in effigy by students demonstrating against the abolition of fraternities, I was struck by the irony that perhaps only now was he learning that an administration behaving appropriately and responsibly still runs risks of unpopularity.
    It was a grim spring for me. You cannot keep someone in a position of trust and responsibility when it is obvious that you are lying to them and publicly denying them confidence. My own continuing sense of responsibility kept me from any public complaint. Key people offered me support after the fact, but the bullying and gentlemanly shunning that some of the powerful men on the faculty had always practiced were redoubled, for they had been reconfirmed in their traditional oligarchy by the board. My neck went on hurting, like a nagging form of survivor guilt, and unconsciously I think I felt I was being punished because it was Julian who had died in that terrible twenty-four-hour period, and I, who had spent so much time protecting him and protecting the college from him, should have died in his place.
    When a new president was chosen, he came to the quick and obvious conclusion while still in New York and asked for my resignation, citing a curiously distorted catalog of second-hand complaints. Only a dean who had done a very bad job would have been treated as I was treated, he said, unless it was a matter of sexism, and he had been assured that there was no sexism at Amherst. The deanship was given to another member of the Committee of Six. Thus the college bypassed affirmative-action hiring procedures for the very person obliged to enforce them. There was a good deal of faculty concern about the propriety of these decisions, but there is also a widespread feeling at Amherst that long-term faculty members are governed by different rules than newcomers.
    There are many reasons for the maintenance of such double standards. The classical double standard says that men may violate the public