The Devil and Webster by Korelitz Jean Hanff

Author:Korelitz, Jean Hanff [Korelitz, Jean Hanff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, Humour, Adult
ISBN: 9781478934868
Amazon: 1478934867
Goodreads: 30842480
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2017-03-21T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

This Is the Place

Mud season (known in some other parts of the world as “spring”) would almost entirely preempt winter that year. The same cold that had settled in so early the previous fall, bringing the leaves down fast and hard on the Webster lawns and quads and bestowing extra discomfort (and nobility!) upon the Stump protest, would leave sheets of dense Massachusetts mud in its wake. The physical encampment—those tents and shanties and the no longer quite so luxe toilet trailer—remained in situ, but now the student movement on the Billings Lawn no longer seemed tied to the Stump. After the Sojourner Truth House incident the Webster protest expanded to consume the entire campus—dormitories and classrooms and naturally the administration buildings. Some critical algorithm had been reached with the joining of feces and hate language in the basement on Fairweather Road, some epidemiological tipping point attained, and by the time Webster College arose from its innocent slumber the next morning the entire campus was locked in a paralysis of outrage.

Overnight, too, every one of the movement’s missing elements had been located. The action that so recently lacked a name and a public leader now possessed both of these, as if someone had made a late-night run to the activist superstore and loaded up the van. The students, unlike the college’s own press office (which had barely progressed since the days of the Radclyffe Hall debacle), were fully capable of interfacing with the world, and by late morning, position papers were being distributed, and the new entity, Webster Dissent, had a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and a website, loaded with photos: the campus, circa 1955, in all of its pre-Sarafian maleness and Caucasian-ness, and the stalwart encampment (minus toilet trailer), and the grievously wronged professor, Nicholas Gall, and (she was shocked to see) the smeared abuse on the Sojourner Truth wall (well-lit images, and perfectly composed) and also, of course, the college president, Naomi Roth, whose highly unflattering image was accompanied by her office phone number and email address. Media inquiries were directed to [email protected] and interview requests for Professor Gall and the young, charismatic Webster student Omar Khayal (sophomore, anthropology major, hometown: Bureij, Palestine) were directed to an 800 number that, when Naomi tried it, went straight to a recording, instructing her to leave her name, number, and email address. The voice delivering that instruction? One she knew very, very well.

By Monday afternoon, poor Mrs. Bradford had been bedeviled by every news outlet she could personally have named, and many she’d never heard of. Naomi, sensing that to leave this tsunami of intense type-A personalities to her elderly assistant was hazardous—both to the college and to Mrs. Bradford herself—phoned Bob Stacek, the surliest person she knew, and deputized him to deal with these requests, an opportunity she figured he’d enjoy. From then on, Mrs. Bradford would forward the calls to Stacek’s office downstairs, and Stacek would inform one and all that the president would be unavailable until the trustees had met to confer about the situation.

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