Joyce Oates - Mudwoman

“Well. After I’d been knocked to the ground, kicked and humiliated and threatened—‘You don’t shut the fuck up, you’re dead meat, fag’”—Stirk’s boyish voice assumed a deeper and coarser tone, reiterating these crude words—“still no one came to my aid. Within seconds all witnesses fled the scene—laughing—I could hear them laughing—and by the time some Good Samaritan alerted a campus security cop in the office behind Salvager Hall, I’d managed to get to my feet and stagger out to the street—off campus—a passing motorist saw me, and took pity on me.”

Passing motorist. The phrase struck M.R. oddly.

Like one who has told a story many times, though in fact Stirk could not have told this story many times, the bruised and battered undergraduate related how he’d been helped into the vehicle of the passing motorist and driven to the local hospital ER—“This citizen didn’t worry about the inside of his car getting bloodied, thank God”—where he was X-rayed and treated for his injuries and township police officers were called—“Since this wasn’t an accident, but a vicious attack”—and came to interview him; when he was feeling a little stronger Stirk called Professor Kroll, his politics adviser, also faculty adviser for the local chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom, at whose house Stirk had been before the assault.

Strange, M.R. thought, that Stirk hadn’t called his family in Jacksonville. Stirk had been adamant, the dean of students was not to contact them without his permission.

Where once the university was legally held to be in loco parentis, now the university was forbidden to assume any sort of parental responsibility not specifically granted by the individual student.

Where once the university was likely to be sued for failure to behave like a protective parent, now the university was likely to be sued for behaving like a protective parent, against even the wishes of an eighteen-year-old freshman.

“Y’know what Professor Kroll’s first words were to me, President Neukirchen?—‘So it’s started, then. Our war.’”

Our war! How like Oliver Kroll this was—to make of the private something political. To make of the painfully specific something emblematic, impersonal. For our war meant a division of campus and nationalist loyalties as it meant our war soon to be launched in Iraq.

Somehow, campus politics had become embroiled with such issues as abortion, sexual promiscuity and drunkenness on campus; patriotism was measured by the fervor with which one argued for “closed borders”—“War on Terror”—the need for “military action” in the Middle East. M.R. had followed relatively little of this at the University for she’d been busy with other, seemingly more pressing matters.

Proudly Stirk was telling President Neukirchen that, though it was after midnight by the time he’d called him, Oliver Kroll came at once to the ER. There, Professor Kroll had been “astonished” to see Stirk’s injuries—“disgusted”—“furious.” Professor Kroll had insisted upon speaking with township police officers, informing them of threats he’d personally seen that Stirk had received from “radical-left sources” at the University, in protest of Stirk’s outspoken views on politics and morality. More specifically, in the week prior to the assault, Stirk had addressed in both his radio program and in his newspaper column a “truly despicable, unspeakable” situation that had transpired at the University—the “open secret” that an undergraduate girl had had a third-trimester abortion in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia. Stirk had slyly—dangerously—come very close to “naming names, placing blame”—and for this, he’d received a fresh barrage of “hate mail” and “threats.”

M.R. had been dismayed when one of her staff members brought the student newspaper to her, to show her Stirk’s column rife with innuendos and accusations like a tabloid gossip column. Though the student paper was overall a politically liberal publication, yet its editors believed in “diversity of expression”—“controversy.” There had not been any attempt to censor or even to influence student publications at the University for at least fifty years—such publications were self-determined by students. M.R., like most faculty members, had only a vague awareness of the politically conservative/born-again Christian coalition at the University, that sought converts for its cause. The coalition was a minority of students, probably less than 5 percent of the student body, yet it had become a highly vocal and impassioned minority at odds with the predominant liberal atmosphere, and it didn’t help the situation that certain of the Christian students, like Alexander Stirk, seemed to be courting martyrdom—at least, the public attention accruing to martyrdom.

Especially, M.R. had been disturbed by the bluntness of the column “Stirk Strikes” with its provocative title “Free (For Who?) Choice” and, in boldface type, the mocking rhyme in the first paragraph:

FREE CHOICE IS A LIE!

NOBODY’S BABY WANTS TO DIE!

Unbidden the thought came to M.R.—My mother wanted me to die.

But how ugly this was, and in the student newspaper! No wonder Stirk had drawn what he claimed to be hate e-mail. No wonder there were undergraduates who resented him, mocked him. If Stirk were gay—as it appeared to be Stirk was—this “gayness” had nothing to do with his conservative beliefs, in fact would seem to be in opposition to conventional conservatism—which would have made of Alexander Stirk an unusual individual, perhaps, and a brave one. But in these issues which roused emotion like a dust storm, there was no time for nuance or subtleties; no time to consider paradoxes of personality.

Distressing to M.R. and her (liberal-minded) colleagues, that campus conservatives, in mimicry of conservatives through America since the triumphant Reagan years, were inclined to forgo subtleties. Their strategies of opposition were adversarial, confrontational—ugly. Their strategies were, as they put it, to go for the jugular.

When M.R. had first known Oliver Kroll, when she’d first come to teach moral philosophy at the University, Kroll had been less passionately involved in the conservative movement; M.R. had read Kroll’s essays on the history of American libertarianism, published in such prestigious journals as American Political Philosophy, and been impressed. For here was a perspective very different from her own, intelligently if not persuasively argued. M.R. had never felt comfortable with Kroll—for both political and personal reasons—but she’d admired his work and, to a degree, painful now to recall, they’d been friends—or more than friends, for a brief while; since that time, Kroll had become a (well-paid) consultant for the Republican administration in Washington and had become closely aligned with the University’s most famous—or notorious—conservative spokesman, G. Leddy Heidemann, an authority on “fundamentalist Islam” who was rumored to be intimately involved with (secret) preparations for the Iraqi invasion, a confidant of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Both Kroll and Heidemann were much disliked at the University by a majority of their colleagues but they had a following among a number of students, primarily undergraduates.

M.R. found all this disturbing, and distasteful—like any administrator she feared for her authority even as she believed herself the very sort of administrator who cared little for “authority”—it was M. R. Neukirchen’s specialness that made her an effective president, an air of open-minded friendliness to all.

Yet it was upsetting to her that in growing quarters in the public media as on her very campus, the word liberal had become a sort of comic obscenity, not to be murmured without a smirk.