Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Figuring he had lubricated little Jerry with enough praise and acknowledged his position as leader of the forces of Light at this great university, the President now cupped both hands and brought his palms within inches of one another and twisted them this way and that as if he were making an imaginary snowball and said, “At the same time, Jerry—”

“Don’t you start at-the-same-timing and but-on-the-

other-handing and still-neverthelessing me, Fred!”

The President couldn’t believe it. The little shitbird insisted on putting him right against the wall.

“You know, I know, and Mr. Roth here knows that Jojo”—uttered contemptuously—“Johanssen, whose SAT scores, if we had access to them, which we don’t”—he gave the President a sharp look—“and why not, Fred?—would no doubt prove to be lower than his hat size, assuming he knows what a hat is, other than an adjustable baseball cap, which he wears sideways—”

“That’s not true, Professor! You’re dead wrong about his SATs.”

Buster Roth couldn’t hold back any longer, and the President knew he had to jump in fast lest the whole meeting turn into a pissing match. Merely being called “Professor”—just that, Professor rather than Professor Quat or Mr. Quat—was enough to set Jerry Quat off, since Jerry would know that in the mouths of coaches and recruited athletes the title Professor, all by itself, carried the connotation of Pretentious Fool.

“Oh yeah?” Quat snapped. “Then why won’t anybody—”

“Mr. Quat! Mr. Roth!” said the President, “Please! Let’s remember one thing! Whatever any of us may think, Mr. Johanssen retains some basic rights here!”

He knew the word “rights” would get to Jerry Quat. To Jerry, rights would be the civic equivalent of angels. Sure enough, Quat shut up, and Buster Roth was shrewd enough to shut up, too, and let the President argue the case for Jojo’s “rights.” The President continued: “Now, I gather we all agree that Mr. Johanssen’s paper was suspiciously far above the rhetorical level of any other work he had submitted.”

“Rhetorical level?” said Jerry Quat. “He doesn’t even have a clue what the words mean!”

“All right, it looks suspicious in terms of vocabulary, too. But that is prima facie evidence, which presents us with a problem. No one has less tolerance for plagiarism than I do. No one is more of an absolutist when it comes to the penalties for plagiarism than I am. But the language of the judicial code is very clear on this point. Plagiarism must be proved by discovering the source of the material in question. Stan Weisman has done the best job he could, it seems to me.” He was careful to use the man’s name, which was Jewish, rather than his title, judicial officer. “He did a coordinate search of all the usual suspects, all the rogue Web sites that offer to provide students with papers. He did a coordinate search of every other paper submitted for that assignment, including those from three of Mr. Johanssen’s teammates. And he came up with nothing. He interrogated Mr. Johanssen, who denies receiving any help other than the books cited in his bibliography. He interrogated Mr. Johanssen’s tutor, a senior named Adam Gellin, who denied writing the paper or even assisting on it.”

“Adam Gellin?” said Jerry Quat. “Why do I know that name?”

“I believe he works for The Daily Wave,” said the President, who by now knew very well that he did.

“Well, I’ve seen the name somewhere.”

“Professor—”

Oh shit. Buster Roth was piping up again with his Professor.

“We’re very firm about that with the tutors. That’s the first thing we tell them. They’re there to help the student-athlete”—Quat’s lips and nostrils twisted sarcastically at the very term—“but they’re not there to do their work for them. Writing a paper for somebody—no way.” He shook his head and slashed the air with the edge of his hand, to emphasize the “no way.” “This is Adam Gellin’s third year working with student-athletes, as fine a young man as I ever met, and I never heard a him doing nothing that wasn’t strictly by the book. I talked to him myself after this thing came up, and he got mad at me for even suggesting—you know what I’m saying? I never saw him lose his temper before, but this?…No way!” He slashed the air again. “I know Adam—and Adam? They don’t come any more decent and honest than Adam Gellin…No way!” Another slash for good measure.

The President let out his breath. Bravo, Buster. He could have used a little help in the grammar and syntax department, but he had managed to be pretty convincing. This was all very tricky stuff for the President. Circumstances had forced him to become a temporary ally of Buster Roth. Roth had approached him and warned him—although not in so many words—that if Johanssen was forced out for even one semester, the scandal would hurt not merely “the program” but the entire university. It wasn’t that Buster was so concerned about losing Johanssen himself—he was gradually being replaced by a hot freshman named Congers, anyway—but such a turn of events would make “the program” look so sleazy and hypocritical. For years the university had built up and promoted its reputation of being a national power in football, basketball, ice hockey, and even minor sports—track and field, baseball, lacrosse, tennis, soccer, golf, squash—without compromising academic standards by so much as a millimeter. A case indicating that Dupont had tutors who wrote the athletes’ papers for them would explode all that in the public eye. It might, he had hinted in guarded terms, open up a whole can of worms. Where did the players’ new SUVs come from? What about this list of “friendly” courses? What about these rumors that four of the team’s players had SAT scores of under nine hundred? The President thought about that. For a start, it would knock Dupont from second, behind Princeton, in the U.S. News & World Report rankings down to…God knew where. U.S. News & World Report—what a stupid joke! Here is this third-rate news weekly, aimed at businessmen who don’t like to read, trying desperately to move up in the race but forever swallowing the dust of Time and Newsweek, and some character dreams up a circulation gimmick: Let’s rank the colleges. Let’s stir up a fuss. Pretty soon all of American higher education is jumping through hoops to meet the standards of the marketing department of a miserable, lowbrow magazine out of Washington, D.C.! Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Dupont—all jumped through the hoop at the crack of the U.S. News whip! Does U.S. News rate you according to how many of the applicants you offer places to actually enroll in your college and not another? Then let’s lock in as many as we can through early admissions contracts. Does U.S. News want to know your college’s SAT average? We’ll give it to them, but we will be “realistic” and not count “special cases”…such as athletes. Does U.S. News rate you according to your standing in the eyes of other college presidents? Then a scandal indicating that all our lofty pronouncements about the “student-athlete” at Dupont are not only a joke but a lie—well, anybody could write the rest of that story.

But there was no instructing the faculty to keep mum about such things and cooperate. You had to become a college president to realize how powerful the faculty could be when aroused. We are the university, was the attitude of the Dupont faculty. Consequently, they resented not only the vast amount of money that went to sports, they also resented the glory. Why should a collection of anabolic morons such as the Dupont basketball team, led by a man who goes by the ridiculous name of Buster, be idealized at one of the world’s greatest institutions of learning? The President had wondered about the same thing himself, for years; and when he was a young faculty member, he had been resentful and contemptuous the same way Jerry Quat was, although not with such bitterness. It wasn’t until he was promoted from chairman of the history department to provost of the university that he began to understand. Contrary to what most people believed—himself included in days gone by—big-time sports did not make money for the university, did not help to underwrite the academic departments, etc. National championship teams receiving big postseason television fees lost still more money, more than all the minor sports, baseball, tennis, squash, lacrosse, swimming, the lot put together. Big-time sports were a stupendous drag on the financial health of the university. In a practical sense, they were like sticking a .45-caliber revolver barrel in your mouth and pulling the trigger. Nor did alumni donations increase or decrease with the fortunes of the teams. It was something subtler and grander at the same time. Big-time sports created a glorious aura about everything the university did and in the long run increased everything sharply—prestige, alumni donations, receipts of every sort, as well as influence. But why? God only knew! These great athletes—Treyshawn Diggs, from a lower-middle-class black neighborhood in Huntsville, Alabama; Obie Cropsey, all-American quarterback, a redneck from rural Illinois—none of the athletes in the major sports resembled the vast majority of the real students, not intellectually, not socially, not temperamentally. Nor did the two groups mix at Dupont. The athletes were received with awe wherever they went, but few real students had anything to do with them personally, and vice versa. Part of it was that the other students thought the athletes existed up on a plane so far above them, they shouldn’t presume to intrude. And in truth, the Athletic Department saw to it that they spent so much of their day in mandatory physical training, mandatory practice, mandatory dining at training tables, mandatory study halls in the evening, and certain “suggested” “athlete-friendly” courses that their contact with real students would be minimal in any event. They were alien mercenaries paid in kind and in glory. So why would the real students, the alumni, the parents of prospective applicants, the world at large, care how our aliens performed against their aliens? Fred Cutler had no idea. He had puzzled over it for more than ten years now, and he had…no idea…But one thing he did know for sure: a winning coach like Buster Roth, Low Rent grammar and all, was…a demigod. He was a far bigger figure than President Frederick Cutler III or any Nobel Prize laureate on the faculty. He was known across the nation. He now had his own castle, the “Rotheneum.” Officially he, Frederick Cutler III, had authority over Roth. On paper, in the catalog, Buster Roth was on the faculty. But he also made more than two million dollars a year. Because of his private deals with sports equipment companies, his television product endorsements, lectures, and other public appearances, it was hard to determine how much with accuracy. The President’s salary was four hundred thousand a year, one fifth as much or perhaps less. And there you had it. He had the official power to oppose Roth at any juncture. But he could only do so gingerly, with his own job in his hands—because there was one thing he couldn’t do. He couldn’t fire him. Only the board of trustees could do that—and they could also fire the President.