Retaking College Hill: A Novel Read online

  Retaking College Hill:

  A Novel

  By Walter Donway

  Romantic Revolution Books

  Retaking College Hill: A Novel

  Copyright © 2021 Walter Donway

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  ISBN: 9798450103808

  Published by Romantic Revolution Books

  279 Stephen Hands Path

  East Hampton, NY 11937

  USA

  Visit https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00B5H5SA4

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

  I have borrowed Brown University as a fictional setting, but none of the novel’s events, trends, or problems are references specifically to Brown

  Many ideas in this book attributed to the character Isabel Fairfield are to be found in the books of Manhattan Institute Senior Scholar Heather Mac Donald [sic], especially The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (St. Martin’s Press, 2018. No particulars of the character Isabel Fairfield are intended to be modeled on Heather Mac Donald, who I never have met.

  Dedication

  To Brown University

  My alma mater (1962-1966)

  May the fever of Postmodernism peak

  And the great university again educate.

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Coming Home

  Chapter 2: The QuotaVersity

  Chapter 3: Jupiter and the Limits of Philosophy

  Chapter 4: “I Knew at Last That I Would Die.”

  Chapter 5: The Sink Hole

  Chapter 6: Battle Lines

  Chapter 7: “Facing Fearful Odds”

  Chapter 8: Under the Big Elm

  Chapter 9: The Lonely Lab

  Chapter 10: Sufficient unto the Day

  Chapter 11: Old White Guys

  Chapter 12: Dinner Conversation

  Chapter 13: Bye, Jessica

  Chapter 14: Humble Bias Pie

  Chapter 15: “Lying, Dying, Liars”

  Chapter 16: Eggs Alone

  Chapter 17: Single Sex

  Chapter 18: The Fortress and the Beast

  Chapter 19: The Birds

  Chapter 20: Nothing Happens

  Chapter 21: The Russian Bear

  Chapter 22: Disagreement as Enemy Action

  Chapter 23: “Your Friend, Jules

  Chapter 24: Spartacus

  Chapter 25: Spartacus on Full Scholarship

  Chapter 26: A Postmodern Argument

  Chapter 27: Rogue Operation

  Chapter 28: Crisis Management

  Chapter 29: The Story After the Final Chapter

  Chapter 30: Right of Rebellion

  Chapter 31: Brought Down

  Chapter 32: Acting President

  Chapter 33: Guns, Injunctions, and Safe Houses

  Chapter 34: The Balance of Forces

  Chapter 35: Will the Real University Stand Up?

  Chapter 36: “Not a Philosophical Problem”

  Chapter 37: “Scoop Up the Flag”

  Acknowledgments

  Why Not Review “Retaking College Hill”?

  Recommended Reading

  About the Author

  “America is in crisis, from the university to the workplace. Toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture.

  “Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton? Oppressive. American history? Tyranny.

  “Professors correcting grammar and spelling, or employers hiring by merit? Racist and sexist.

  “Students emerge into the working world believing that human beings are defined by their skin color, gender, and sexual preference, and that oppression based on these characteristics is the American experience.

  “Speech that challenges these campus orthodoxies is silenced with brute force.”

  --From Manhattan Institute description of The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, by Heather Mac Donald (St. Martin’s Press, 2018)

  “A coalition of 64 Asian-American groups has filed a complaint against Harvard for discriminating against Asian-American kids in admissions. They’re right to assume there is a quota system at work. But they’re wrong that it is targeting Asian Americans. In fact, it is discriminating in favor of Blacks and Hispanics.

  “The complaint, filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleges that for Asian-American students to gain admission, they have to have SAT scores 140 points higher than white students, 270 points higher than Hispanic students, and 450 points higher than African-American students.

  “The Coalition’s complaint is based on a false assumption: that admissions decisions at elite colleges are based on smarts–and represented by high SAT scores and grades. Yes, those metrics count – a lot. But they come into play only after an applicant’s ‘tag’–his or her target group is assigned.”

  “The Secret Quotas in College Admissions,” Steve Cohen, Forbes, July 6, 2015

  Chapter 1: Coming Home

  Damian strode up College Hill. Easy! After three years in the Navy, he was fit. Too damned fit. If he never worked out again, it would be too soon. He’d made that vow to himself to stay sane during the Navy’s final, brutal (Damian thought: “sadistic”) underwater diving test--when he thought he would freeze, drown, or swim for eternity through the crepuscular, undulating, undersea flora.

  But here he was hiking the hill. By choice. When he exited the Trailways bus station, downtown, he had sauntered along the taxi line, nodding to eagerly gesticulating drivers. In the end, he opted to take-in some landscape before he faced the Upper East Side, the university, and his father.

  This was a homecoming. He had been graduated from this university three years ago. And because his father, Konrad Kossak, dean of the college, lived here in a historic old home on Keene Street. Whatever his differences with his dad, Damian had missed him almost every day.

  Lugging a backpack in the late August sun, he leaned into the hill as he passed the famous art school with its modernist buildings, terraced into the side of the hill on his left. In the Navy, you whittled down your possessions until you could carry them. Clothes, boots, rain gear, extra shoes, brush, and toiletries. Sixty pounds.

  He was coming home to dad because upon discharge he had nowhere else to go. Because dad was home, the only one he had. Because only this place had he managed to love.

  As he climbed out of downtown, the state capital derided as ‘the armpit of New England,’ but lately ‘renewed,’ Damian marveled at how a famous college could spawn its own ‘college town’ like a jewel creating its own setting: ivied brick buildings, cobblestone streets, Colonial-era buildings and houses with wrought-iron fences and gates, alluring half-hidden gardens, dignified stoops.

  This was how the faculty insisted on living, every street zoned for perpetual charming stasis--even as they demanded indignantly, righteously, that everything elsewhere yield to change. For them, eternal Eighteenth-Century New England charm.

  “You can stop, right there!” Damian spoke aloud. Snapped the command at himself as he surmounted the crest of the hill. He saw the soaring brick bell tower, the brick walls enclosing the College green, the long façade
that included the student union. Did it change? Never.

  “Stop!” Damian ordered. It was just architecture. Was he already spoiling for an argument? About architecture? Yes, it would be thrilling for dad to do something, shake the damned pillars of the temple of political correctness.

  If his dad were Samson.

  “Stop, damn it!”

  Damian hadn’t realized that he had barked the order. Habit. But he already was at the archway beneath the old student union that led to the College green. A girl was grinning at him. Well, something between a frown and a laugh.

  The U.S. Navy hadn’t left Damian less handsome by giving his blond hair a buzz cut. Or shaping his six-foot frame into a lean, taut V from his waist to his broad shoulders. He was a standard-issue Navy non-com. A walking cliché! Broad-shouldered, handsome sailor, deeply tanned face, square jaw, and blue eyes that seemed fixed on receding horizons.

  She gazed, smiling. Cute. Dressed for August in the ‘uniform’: short-shorts, bare midriff, black halter. Flawless slender legs, jutting quarter-deck. Damian conceded a grin, a fractional wave, but he wheeled left, across the street, up the hill past what used to be the women’s coordinate college, toward Keene Street. Home.

  He walked a block and a half past buildings that were concessions to modernity, including the biomedical sciences ‘tower’ six stories high. Prize of a wet-cat fight, a yowling brawl, over the zoning of the ‘historic’ Upper East Side. Today, any modern building of the university was like that. Victory of a ‘cause.’

  Abruptly, he halted, perspiring. It was mid-afternoon. What made him assume dad would be home? Shit! Of course, he wouldn’t. Not the dean of the college, and emphatically not dad. Not at 2:30 p.m.

  He turned on his heel and headed back toward the College green. Dad would be in his office in the administration building. At his desk in his ample top-floor suite, next to the president’s, or at some meeting. From that position of power, propinquity to the president—and given his far longer association with the college—couldn’t dad do something about what was happening? The stuff Damian read about in emails from dad, from classmates, in the Alumni Monthly?

  The College green. Damian stopped for a look, remembering. Buildings of brick--or granite with soaring fluted columns—weathered, cloaked in clinging ivy: It all connoted enduring ideas and values worth perpetuating. Else why build with stone, plant elms now 200 years old? Why proclaim this a safe harbor for voyagers seeking unchanging truths and values—like reason, objectivity, justice?

  He had been at sea too long. With his thoughts and books. Getting back might not be comfortable, after all. Time he got realistic about what dad had accomplished. A professor of classics turned dean. In a university tumbling into the future propelled by a juggernaut called ‘Postmodernism’. Dads could do anything--when you were six. Perspective.

  He stepped from the arch’s shade into glare and started across the green. Home should not change, he thought, not the soul’s home. A refueling dock for values, truths, that sent you forth. Not return with the last of your fuel and discover it had turned into a casino.

  At the end of August, he had not expected much coming and going. Before invasion by freshmen and returning classes, the lush sprouts of a new academic year. But the vast green was deserted. Empty but for a tight cluster of half-a-dozen figures hurrying toward him, already crying out to him. Vigorously shaking posters on sticks. Fuck.

  “Sir! Sir!” Young men and women. Or, as he thought to himself, ‘kids.’ The girls slender in torn jeans and t-shirts, holding high the posters, calling out. And with them some big guys in T-shirts with cut-off sleeves revealing glistening sculpted biceps, candidates for the football team.

  This was his welcoming? Damian halted.

  “Sir!” Some co-ed, he noticed, with tattoos sliding out from beneath the hem of her shorts. Long hair. Earnest frown.

  “Sir! We are asking people not to enter or cross the College green without signing our petition on climate change!”

  Damian took a few defiant steps forward.

  One of the men, a black guy who looked like a half-back, put his palm on Damian’s chest. So far, it was a gentle gesture. Just a flat palm preventing Damian from advancing. On the guy’s face was a smirk.

  Damian sequentially resisted a half-dozen counter moves now instinctive from ceaseless combat training. He said, “I’m coming to see my dad, Konrad Kossak.” He added, “Dean Kossak?”

  The young man turned to the others for a reading.

  “Doesn’t matter!” pronounced one of the girls. She looked at Damian and smiled. Her secret weapon. She said, “Just sign the petition. It’s crucial. To save the earth.”

  She was holding out a clipboard to him.

  “If I sign just because I need to see my father, it doesn’t mean shit.”

  “Nothing matters,” the girl said, “but the survival of the Australian coral reefs.”

  Damian had expended his meager budget of tolerance. He surged forward against the hand. In return, he was shoved backward. He retreated a step, regaining his balance. He could not have said exactly what feeling wiped clear his mind of anything but the command: strike!

  His hand flattened and stiffened, he balanced on his toes, locked his eyes on the neck of the attacker. He felt his weight shifting forward to strike with the full weight of his hips and shoulders.

  “Here! Wait, wait!” He felt a hand on his biceps, restraining him. “Hold on, now!”

  Almost overpowering, Damian’s impulse to whirl and fell this new assailant.

  “I can take you where you want to go,” said the voice behind him.

  It was a campus cop, brown uniform. Nothing had changed, thought Damian. He felt his surging imperative to attack drain away. Then, he recognized the short, sturdy black man, and said, surprised, “Peter Coppage?”

  The guard beamed. “Damian! Welcome home! You’re back to us!”

  It took Damian by the throat. It had been so long. So much away-ness. Too much loneliness. And here, his welcome home by a campus guard he had known only in passing.

  It didn’t matter. Peter was first. First to say, “Welcome home!”

  Damian put his arms around him. Pressed him to himself. He said, “Peter, Peter.”

  “What a surprise!”

  “Just going to see dad.”

  “Come on, then!”

  The demonstrators seemed unprepared to resist the campus guard. The girl who had thrust the petition at him gave him a sidelong, impish grin. She ran a hand over her ponytail, fluffing it.

  Fucking crazy.

  “How long has it been?” Peter was gripping Damian’s elbow, steering him across the green.

  “One Navy stint long,” said Damian. It was a sigh. “What in hell has been happening, here? How are Debra and Becky?”

  “You tell me,” muttered Coppage. “Craziest shit. That bunch that waylaid you were civil. They didn’t shove their faces at you. Or scream ‘Your opinion doesn’t matter! We’re not going to let your denial destroy our planet!’ or ‘Why are you still teaching here if you don’t even understand settled science?’ Chem. professor got hit with that last week, he was telling me.”

  “Deb and Beck?” Damian reminded him. He’d like to enjoy homecoming for at least an hour.

  “Deb and Beck couldn’t be better. Deb likes to audit grad courses—it’s just one great perk of my job. Beck gets free university pre-school.”

  “Just to be here,” said Damian, sweeping his arm toward the green.

  “Enjoy the view,” said Peter sourly. “You won’t like the rest.”

  He added, “You get a grip on yourself--fast! What you were fixing to do could have killed him. Then, what?”

  Chapter 2: The QuotaVersity

  In the cooler, dimly lit first-floor corridor of the administration building, where Peter had left him, Damian had the inspiration to use his cellphone. No, it was not second nature, yet. Not even close. Too few wi-fi hotspots in the Persian Gulf.


  “Dad?” he asked.

  “Shirley,” shot back a lively voice.

  College secretaries were a casualty of the computer revolution. Nothing to type. But, at the top, the dean-and-up level, they continued to exist as appointment organizers, trip planners, and call screeners.

  “It’s Damian!”

  “Oh, my God!” It was an ecstatic delight or a good facsimile. “We didn’t know exactly when! Welcome home, honey!”

  ‘Honey’ would die with secretaries like Shirley Read, who was mid-sixties. He was about to reply when he heard: “Damian? Damian?”

  “Dad!”

  “Fucking wonderful! Shit! How the hell are you?”

  Dean Konrad Kossak, senior ivy league college administrator? Was Shirley listening? Maybe this was supposed to be Navy-speak, just for Damian.

  “I’m downstairs, Dad.”

  “How did you get across?”

  “I assume you mean the green, not the South Atlantic. The Atlantic was a piece of cake.”

  “They stopped you?”

  “Waylaid. Shoved. Peter Coppage saved my assailant in the nick of time.”

  “Oh, shit! You weren’t going to punch one of our black students?”

  “Any guy who shoves me. I’m color blind and equal opportunity.”

  “Unlearn those phrases in a hurry. This is a super-bad moment for a dust-up. And by the way, we aren’t ‘color blind,’ here. We are sensitive to diversity.”

  “I’ll come up. Give me a minute.”

  “I’ll come down, then.”

  “I can find my way. Stop at the men’s room. Long bus ride, walk up the hill.”

  “You still drink Diet Pepsi only?”

  “Cold one would be orgasmic.” Then, he wondered if dad was on speakerphone and Shirley could hear. Even 10 years ago, he suddenly recalled, she used to bring such thoughts to his mind. Hot for 55.