Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

Coffee was brought in. It was about a quarter past eleven, and we had started at ten. Motion : that the Court confirms the decision of the Disciplinary Committee.

In the unconfined, hygienic room the air was tight. Not, so far, with anger: remarks were quiet: there was curiosity, unease, something else. I heard, or thought I heard, someone whispering about the university premises . Arnold Shaw stared down the table. He wasn’t pleased to have lost his leadership during the hearings: he was asserting it now.

“There is a motion before the Court,” he said. “Before I put it, I should like to hear whether anyone wishes to discuss it.”

Pause. One of the academics spoke up: “Some of us are wondering, I think, Vice-Chancellor, whether it isn’t possible to make distinctions between these students—”

Shaw sat, high-coloured, without answering. Others were doing that. It was a line some were eager for. Surely one of the girls had been dominated. Didn’t she deserve different treatment (I noticed that the handsome blue-eyed woman, though she sat silent, had her own view of Joyce Darby)? No one had any use for Pateman. There was a great deal of talk, scrappy, some of it merciful. Someone said: “Whosoever shall cause one of my little ones—” and trailed off. I caught the word “degenerates”. It was left for Leonard Getliffe to make a special case.

“I should like the Court to give consideration to young Llewellyn. I can speak for the physics department. He’s worth saving. I said before, he has talent. He’s certainly the best student I’ve taught here. I don’t know about the general position. I mean, I can’t reach absolute conclusions about student behaviour. I should say, in terms of character as I understand it, he is a decent young man.”

Leonard was speaking politely but without concessions. On his clever conceptualiser’s face there was a half-smile, a mannerism which some found irritating. It meant nothing. He spoke like a man sure of himself. Underneath the fine nerves, he was more virile than most. If Vicky had been an older woman, she would have been bound to perceive it. Yet it had quite escaped her. I wondered if, free that morning from his obsessive love, he had time to be bitter because it was weakening his manhood, just as, younger than he was, but in this same town, and for the identical cause, I had been bitter myself.

I wondered also if he felt envy for the culprits. Envy because, instead of being prisoners of love, they took sex as though it didn’t matter. Or because they just took sex as it came. At various places round the table, through the curious unease, through both the mercifulness and the disapproval, there had been those stabs of envy.

He went on: “There is another point. I admit that it’s a slightly more abstract one. The more people the university sends down, the less penalty it really is. That is, the importance of the gesture is inversely proportional to the number involved. If you send the whole university down, no one will care. If you send one person down, then that is a genuine penalty.”

He had spoiled his case, I thought irritably. That was what the theoreticians called cat-humour. Why didn’t they keep it for their seminars?

One of his colleagues, more worldly than he was, thought the same. “Never mind that,” he said. “Vice-Chancellor, going back to Professor Getliffe’s first point, there does seem to be some feeling for discretionary treatment on behalf of two of these students. We should like to ask, rather strongly, whether that isn’t possible?”

Shaw had been quiet, like a discreet chairman letting the discussion run. Now he looked round, took his time, and said: “No. I have to tell the Court it is not possible.”

There were noises of disappointment, but he was in control.

“No. The Court must face the position. This is all or nothing. If you ask me for the reason, I give it you in one word. Justice.”

Denis Geary said that justice could be unjust, but for once he was over-weighted.

“No,” said Arnold Shaw. “It would be wrong to distinguish between these four. Morally wrong. There are no respectable grounds for doing so. Age. Some people might think that a respectable ground, though I should beg to differ. In any case, the students whom some members want to favour are the two oldest. Academic ability. We are not judging a matter of academic ability. We are judging a matter of university discipline and moral behaviour. No one wants to deprive the university of able students. We haven’t got enough. But you can’t make a special dispensation for the able when they’ve committed exactly the same offence. Personally I am sorry that Pateman ever became a student here — but to dismiss him and let others stay, who are precisely as guilty on the facts, simply because they might get better classes in their degrees — well, I could have no part in it. I’m surprised that anyone could find it morally defensible. Finally, influence. It’s easy to think we know who is responsible. We don’t. We can have our suspicions — but suspicions aren’t a basis for just action. Anyone who is certain he knows what happens between two people is taking too much on himself. In this case, it would be utterly unjustified to go behind the facts . I repeat, I for one could have no part in it.”

Quiet. It was time to turn the argument. I said, perhaps I might put another point of view. “Do,” said Arnold Shaw, firm and beady-eyed.

I was deliberately cool. I didn’t want to get entangled in the legalities of the case, I remarked. So far as they went, the Vice-Chancellor’s statement was unanswerable. And everyone round the table understood the position in which the Disciplinary Committee had found themselves. All that any of us wished to say was, weren’t we making too heavy weather of it? The Committee had been obliged to take action: that was accepted. But wasn’t the penalty, now we had had time to realise the repercussions, too severe? Send the students down for the rest of the academic year, and no one would have asked a question. But were we really intending to cut them off from finishing their university education anywhere? It wouldn’t have happened at other institutions or American colleges that I knew. Wouldn’t it be fairly easy for the Committee to have another look, just as an act of grace?

Arnold Shaw turned half-left towards me: “Sir Lewis, you’ve just said that this wouldn’t have happened at other institutions?”

“Yes,” I replied, “I did say that.”

“You were a don yourself once, weren’t you?”

That was a rhetorical question.

“Might I ask,” said Arnold Shaw, “what would have happened at your own college if undergraduates had behaved like this?”

I answered that I couldn’t recall a case.

“The question,” he persisted, “seems to me a fair one.”

Sometimes, I said, I had known blind eyes turned.

“The question,” Arnold Shaw went on, “still seems to me a fair one. In your college. Two of your own undergraduates and two women. Or in a room in Newnham. What about it?”

He had won that point, I was thinking to myself. I had to remember a time when Roy Calvert nearly missed a fellowship, because he was suspected, as a matter of gossip, not of proof, of keeping a mistress.

“I grant you that,” I said with reluctance. “Yes, they’d have been got rid of.”

Then I recovered myself. “But I want to remind you that that was getting on for thirty years ago. The climate of opinion has changed since then.” I was trying to work on the meeting. “So far as I can gather the sense of this Court today, the general feeling is very different from what it would have been thirty years ago. Or even ten.”

Some murmurs of support. One or two noes. I was right, though. The tone that morning had been calmer and more relaxed than in our youth most of us could have imagined.