Trigger Warning Sample Chapter

1

It’s really depressing how even small pieces of good fortune are followed so often by their reverse.

I had plenty of opportunity to contemplate this universal truth as I sat, stood, and walked through the interminable orientation process for my new job at Crimson College. I had spent all of the spring semester trying to get this job, and all summer making plans for what I would do when I started it. But now that I was finally here, I was hoping that this portion of the job, at least, would be over. And the future wasn’t looking too good either.

In marked contrast to my previous faculty jobs, which had been notable largely for their professional neglect, my current position as a VAP (Visiting Assistant Professor) of Russian involved a multiday onboarding process. Over the previous two days I, along with the largest and most contingent-heavy group of new faculty in Crimson College’s history, had toured the campus and the dorms, done several exquisitely humiliating team-building exercises, and attended lectures and orientation sessions on the library, IT facilities, campus security, and the zeitgeist of the current crop of undergrads.

Which apparently was stressed out. We were given several training sessions on how to recognize drug abuse, binge drinking, suicidal ideation, and potential warnings that a student was about to flip out and commit a mass shooting. As part of that, campus police did a short session on what to do during an active shooter event, from which I gathered that if anyone did come strolling into your classroom with their finger pressed down on the trigger of an AR-15, you were well and truly fucked.

“Nothing,” we were assured by several different deans, “like that is going to happen at Crimson, of course, but it’s always better to be prepared. Everyone is very happy here. The worst we have to deal with is the Gang of Six.”

The first dean who brought up the Gang of Six then skipped on merrily to talking about town-and-gown outreach without seeming to notice the excited murmur that went through everyone at the sound of this intriguing name. The second dean who mentioned it hastily corrected himself and refused to answer any questions about it. By the time it came up again, during the session with campus police, everyone was burning with curiosity, and when the particularly mousy-looking dean who had dropped the name tried to pretend that she hadn’t said anything about it, several of the new faculty members insisted that we be informed what was going on.

“It’s an anonymous group with an anonymous website,” said Brian Michaels, the chief of the campus police force, when the mousy dean gulped and refused to say anything more. “We’re keeping an eye on them.”

“Are they making death threats? Planning mass shootings?” demanded several voices at once.

The mousy dean gulped again.

“No,” said Brian Michaels. He was a big burly man in his fifties, with pale blue eyes, the kind of skin that puts the “red” in “redneck,” and hair that had once been blond now going to gray and buzzed almost completely off. If I had to guess, I would have said that he wasn’t much for book learning, but that he was clever and shrewd about “real world” things. I had the impression that he was having a hard time not snorting or rolling his eyes.

“They,’re, uh, how shall I put this, writin’ blog posts about social justice issues,” he said. “We have no reason to believe that they pose any threat of violence at all. But they’ve expressed some, uh, discontent with certain aspects o’ campus life, so the college administration has decided to keep an eye on ‘em. We always get a few unhappy customers—the Men’s Protection Alliance has been blatherin’ on for months now—but they never actually cause trouble.”

This led to a fierce debate amongst the incoming faculty about the ethics of monitoring student groups and student social media activity, and for a moment it looked like a shouting match might break out between someone from the B School (business) and someone from English, until Brian Michaels broke it up and told everyone we needed to finish up, because we were on a strict schedule, and he wasn’t going to get in trouble for making us late for our next training session.

The day was capped off with an outdoor picnic where we hobnobbed with two fresh deans, the Provost, and the President. That had been so much fun I had seriously considered bursting into tears afterwards, and wondered why I had ever agreed to take this job. Oh right, because I needed the money.

Now, at quarter past eight in the morning, I was pushing my way through the Georgia August heat in search of Lee 032, where the mandatory diversity and inclusivity training was scheduled to be held.

I had parked in the faculty parking area on the far side of the athletics center and hoofed it past the tennis courts, around the outdoor track and the football practice field, over the beach volleyball area, filling my shoes with sand in the process, past several dorms, and across the back quad to Lee, the main administrative building. Which may or may not have been named after Robert E. Lee. The college was cagey on that subject.

Sweat was trickling down my sides, soaking my bra and panties, by the time I found an open entrance to Lee. The chill of the air conditioning hitting my wet clothes was welcome at first. By the time I had circled the first floor twice and found the stairs to the basement, where Lee 032 was housed, I was feeling distinctly chilled. And I still had four more hours in here to go.

Lee 032 was a windowless basement space that looked kind of like a church rec room. Round tables, laid with tablecloths in Crimson College colors (crimson and cream, a combo that looked sort of but not exactly like Harvard’s), had been set out around the room.

“There are name tags and place cards.” A woman in a uniform-y non-uniform of a crimson blouse and cream pencil skirt stopped me at the door. Her name tag said Tanika Scott, Assistant Dean of Faculty Development. She looked at a table diagram in her hand. “What’s your last name?”

“Halley,” I told her. “Rowena Halley. Russian.”

“Goodness! That’s not something you hear every day. Welcome to Crimson, Rowena. Here’s your name tag. You’re at table four. Over there.”

I took the name tag and followed her pointing finger to a table in the back corner of the room. The back corner was fine with me. Maybe I could catch a brief nap or at least check my email while I was there.

Another woman was already sitting there, scrolling through her phone. She was tall and fit and looked about my age, so mid-thirties, and had weathered skin and dark blonde hair that had been cut in a very short pixie that flirted with the boundary between attractively gamine and aggressively mannish.

Lesbian, ex-military, I guessed.

“Oh hey,” she said, looking up from her phone as I approached. “Take a seat.” She pulled out a chair for me. “Mel,” she said as I sat down. “Well, Melissa Wilson, but everyone calls me Mel. Arabic.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “Rowena Halley. Russian.”

“Nice. Oh hey, are you at our table too?”

A short, slightly plump woman was hovering uncertainly behind me, like she wanted to join us but didn’t quite have the nerve. She was wearing big glasses, an oversized blouse and maxi-skirt, and was the only black person in the room other than Tanika Scott and the woman standing in the background wearing a caterer’s uniform.

“I think so,” she said diffidently. “I’m, uh, Chloe. Chloe Taylor. Chinese.”

“Well don’t just stand there, take a seat,” Mel told her. “And welcome to the torturers’ and terrorists’ table.”

I laughed. Mel winked at me. Chloe swallowed and sat down without looking at either me or Mel. Up close, I could see that her big glasses hid beautifully clear smooth skin, marred only by scars on her temples, presumably from a lifetime of aggressive hair straightening.

I had just opened my mouth to say something comforting to her when my phone pinged at me. I glanced at the screen, and my heart skipped a beat. It was a WhatsApp message from Dima.

“Everyone turn off your phones, please!” a heavyset woman called out in a singsong voice. “And welcome to Crimson!”

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Campus Confidential Sample Chapter

1

They say knowledge is power. Those people must never have gotten a PhD.

Case in point: the way I sidled into the room my first day at my first job. If my power corresponded to my knowledge, I would have stridden in like a conquering hero. But my knowledge of the sigmatic aorist or the Onegin stanza only seemed to weigh me down as I slithered into the faculty meeting room, smiling like a meek little idiot and wishing everyone would stop staring at me.

“You must be our new Russianist. Rowena Halley, right?” The speaker was a big bear-like man, a rarity in a foreign language department, where the faculty tended to be mainly female and inclined to the childish or the wizened. His joviality, though, had the manic edge common in academics, honed through decades of politically correct bullying into a weapon capable of inducing suicidal depression in everyone who encountered it.

“Yep.”

“They say you’re from Georgia.”

Now everyone was staring at me, like they’d never seen anyone from Georgia before. Which was all too possibly true.

“Originally,” I said.

The all-white group did a collective grimace as they bit down on their reflexive desire to berate me about racism and segregation. No doubt it was coming.

“But I did my PhD in Indiana,” I continued, triggering another collective grimace at the mere thought of the Midwest.

“Indiana…” said the bear-like man. “That must have been…different. Was it the first time you saw snow?”

“I lived for several years in Moscow. So no.”

“Moscow! I bet you have lots of opinions about Putin!”

There was a chorus of titters.

“Is what they’re saying about police harassment true?” continued the bear-like man, his eyes avid. “It must not be safe to be an American there these days, is it?”

“It’s at least as safe as it is here in New Jersey,” I said, and sat down on the one remaining empty chair, between a woman who was vaguely familiar to me from my Skype interview for the position, and the only other man in the room. The woman was wearing chunky gold earrings and a thick necklace that hinted enough at Central America to leave her open to accusations of cultural appropriation, so even though I couldn’t remember her name, I was guessing she was from the Spanish program. The man was slender and had bristly dark-blond hair, dark-blond stubble covering his face, and looked like he hadn’t yet turned thirty.

“Good to see you again, Rowena,” whispered the woman, but didn’t remind me of her name. The man gave me a sideways flicker from his eyes, and then went back to looking straight ahead, stony-faced. His left leg, though, was quivering slightly under the table, hidden from everyone except me, as if he could barely contain his pent-up energy and desire to be out of this room.

There was an awkward silence, and then printed agendas were handed around and the meeting broke out, starting with pointed introductions to the one newcomer—me.

The bear-like man was John Greene, Associate Professor of Spanish and chair of the Department of Modern Languages. Of the other fifteen faculty members there, eight also taught Spanish, and three taught French. The Spanish instructors kept inserting bits of Spanish into their speech, some with better accents than others—John Greene’s was particularly shaky—causing the French instructors to laugh sycophantically and nod to show that they, too, spoke a Romance language.

Aside from the Romance contingent, there was one German instructor, one Chinese instructor, one Arabic instructor (the man sitting next to me), and me. We all sat in nervous silence as the Spanish contingent discussed business that had nothing to do with us and swapped in-jokes, with John Greene occasionally making little digs at Georgia until he got caught up in an argument over something that everyone kept referring to as “C. Diff.”

“Why is everyone talking about c. diff?” I whispered to the woman sitting next to me. “Was there an outbreak of diarrhea here last semester?”

She gave me a weird look, but got distracted by the argument over whether or not the Department of Modern Languages was adequately supporting C. Diff’s mission.

“It’s the Committee for Diversity, Inclusiveness, and Fairness,” the man to my right whispered, bending close enough that I could feel his stubble brush my ear. “C-D-I-F. It’s a student-faculty collaborative, interdisciplinary initiative to increase the presence of under-represented minorities and engage in town-and-gown outreach in order to encourage local members of the community, especially potential first-generation college students, to apply to TLASC.” He delivered the words in an inflectionless whisper, but when he broke away, his whole body was now quivering, I assumed with suppressed laughter.

Meanwhile, an argument had broken out between a Spanish and a French instructor over item three on the agenda, the cross-listing of survey literature courses with tempting titles such as “French Neoclassicism: An Introduction” as comparative literature, or CLIT (pronounced See-Lit), classes.

I looked down at the agenda to confirm my suspicions of the spelling of the course identifier, and then sideways at the woman sitting to my left, but she sat there impassively. If she had ever found it amusing to teach classes labeled CLIT 101, those days had long since passed. The man to my right was running his hand over his face, maybe from tiredness, maybe because his stubble itched, or maybe from the desperate need to keep from exploding with mirth. I fought the urge to ask if Introduction to Differential Equations was labeled DICQ 101 on the course bulletin, and narrowly won.

The argument was settled in favor of foreign language instructors teaching courses cross-listed as CLIT 101 as they apparently always had in the past, but with a motion to request that the courses be listed as FORL first and CLIT second, instead of the other way around, as they currently were.

“After the latest curriculum survey they’re obviously planning to reduce the foreign language courses as much as possible, maybe phase out the requirement altogether!” said the French instructor who had been arguing in favor of getting the courses listed as FORL first and CLIT second. “We need to remind them that we’re still here!”

“Which is why we want to get in on the CLIT listings!” cried the Spanish instructor who had been arguing against her. “Raise our visibility!”

“I’ve heard they’re thinking of cutting the CLIT program entirely,” put in a third person, a bird-like woman whose tiny stature was balanced out by a large mane of wispy, hay-like hair that appeared to have last been brushed sometime back in the Bush administration. The first Bush administration. I couldn’t remember her name or what she taught, but odds were it was Spanish.

There was a vociferous outcry against the perfidy of budget cuts aimed at foreign language programs, which united the room long enough for us to move on to the next item on the agenda: the promotion of our LCTL (pronounced “Lictle”) program.

“Now, I know you haven’t been here long, Rowena, if I may—you don’t mind if I call you Rowena, do you? I know how touchy some new PhDs can be, especially young women, about being called by their first names—of course you have to stand up for yourselves, I understand that, and in the classroom you should, but here we’re all not just colleagues, but friends—but you must have talked about growing our LCTL program during your interview? In fact, that’s part of why we hired you, isn’t it?—because you had some really good ideas for outreach and development for our LCTLs, which is something we really want to do; the Provost has named it a priority, and anything the Provost wants that might raise the profile of foreign languages on campus, well, we want to get behind that, and it’s always so exciting to bring in promising young scholars, even from places like Indiana; I mean, maybe you have some great ideas you’ve gotten there that you can share with us”—there was a reflexive giggle from a number of my new colleagues at the thought of great ideas coming from Indiana—“and so, why don’t you and I, Rowena, meet after this to talk about some of those ideas, just the two of us, to really hammer out some plans?”

John Greene fixed me with a bright stare at the end of his speech. I smiled weakly back. Before I could say anything, we had moved on to item five, the cut in the office supplies budget and how this would force us to act in a more environmentally responsible manner by not printing out so many handouts (the man to my right looked down at the printed-out meeting agenda, caught my eye, and then looked swiftly away, rubbing his hand over his face once again) and then briskly to item six, student mental health reporting.

“After what happened last semester”—there was a pregnant pause, during which everyone, even John Greene, appeared to shrink a little in their seats—“the Office of Student Wellness has instituted a new protocol for notifying them and the authorities of students who appear to be a danger to themselves or others. There was some question over whether the new mandatory reporting rules violated FERPA, but it was decided last week that they are in fact FERPA-compliant, so everyone will need to do the online training seminar prior to the start of classes, which I don’t need to remind you is in two days’ time. Rowena, you’ll have to do your regular FERPA, Title IX, and Health and Safety training at the same time. It’s all online; shouldn’t take more than an hour or two, but it has to be done before classes start or we could be facing a potential lawsuit.”

Now John Greene did wait for me to promise that yes, I would complete the FERPA, Title IX, Health and Safety, and Student Wellbeing training within the next 48 hours.

There was some grousing about more mandatory online training, and a little tiff between two Spanish instructors, but no further explanation of what had happened last semester, and with that, my first faculty meeting as a real professor was over.

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