Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Ironically, only someone much lower down the ladder—some faculty member with tenure—dared speak out, dared cause trouble. And who was the hothead, the firebrand, who did the most to inflame the entire faculty’s resentment of how the natural and rightful order of things had been turned upside down? That hothead, that sorehead, was the blob sitting right across the desk from President Frederick Cutler III.

“Jerry,” said the President, “there’s one thing that makes this case a little different, and I thought I’d run it by you. Stan Weisman”—I’ll keep that name front and center, he said to himself—“discovered an interesting thing. After Johanssen turned in his paper, but before the question of plagiarism came up, he seems to have undergone something of a conversion, as it were. He decided—or so he told his friends—to become serious about his academic work. He shifted out of a one-hundred-level survey course of modern French literature to a two-hundred-level course on the nineteenth-century French novel with Lucien Senigallia, where all teaching and discussions are in French. He shifted out of a one-hundred-level Philosophy of Sports course into a three-hundred-level course Nat Margolies teaches—the Age of Socrates, I believe it’s called. And Nat, as you may know, is pretty demanding and cuts no slack for anybody—any body.”

Buster Roth spoke up, looking at Jerry Quat. “Oh, I’ve never been prouder of any of my boys than I was when Jojo came to me and told me he wanted to take that course, the Age of Socrates.” Buster Roth smiled at the recollection and shook his head, as if to say that was really some turn of events. “I wanted to make sure he understood what he—the commitment he was making. I said, ‘Jojo, have you ever taken a three-hundred-level course before?’ He said he hadn’t, and so I said, ‘These are advanced and very serious classes. They can’t wait for you if you fall behind,’ and I’ll never forget what Jojo said. He said, ‘Coach, I know I’m taking a risk, but I feel like I’ve just been grinding out credits up to now. I’m willing to take a risk to get myself to a higher level. The way we look at the world today’—he said, or something like that—‘it all starts with Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, so that’s where I want to start.’ And then he’s telling me about Pythagoras, I think it was, and how he was great in math but pretty backward in philosophical thought—I mean, I had no idea he was into all this stuff. I was really impressed, but it was more than that. I was proud of him. Here was the kind of young man you’re always looking for. Oh, I know people get excited over sports qua sports, the competition and all that—”

Qua? The President couldn’t believe it. Buster Roth was sitting here saying “sports qua sports”? He wondered if he’d planned it.

“—but I like to think of my role as an educator first and a basketball coach second. You know? I think it might a been Socrates himself who said, ‘Mens sana in corpore sano,’ a sound mind in a sound body, and a lot of people forget—”

Oh shit, Buster, thought the President, you just blew it. Socrates, he don’t speaka the Latin. You just buried that beautiful qua of yours. And you didn’t have to translate mens sana in corpore sano for a Jerry Quat.

“—that that’s the ideal. There’s a beautiful synergy there, if we can only make it happen. And there’s a guy like Jojo, the kind a big, plainspoken guy people are gonna call a ‘dumb jock’—you know what I mean?—and he’s coming to me on his own to tell me he don’t wanna miss the chance he’s got to make that synergy work at a great university like Dupont.”

The President studied Jerry Quat to gauge his reaction to Buster Roth the Greco-Roman scholar. He expected the worst, but Quat was actually studying Roth. He didn’t look convinced—but neither did he have the typical Jerry Quat sarcastic look, turning his face away from the speaker and tilting his gaze upward as if bird-watching until the mindless boor shuts up. He was trying to decide—the President devoutly hoped—if there was more to this great side of beef with a Dupont-mauve blazer on than he had thought.

“I’ve never been prouder of one of our athletes in my life,” Buster Roth was saying. “This was all Jojo’s idea. It’s one thing to take chances on the court. Jojo is used to that. He’s a kid who’s used to doing the unexpected under pressure. But it’s another thing for a kid to take a chance in a thing that’s just as important where he don’t qualify as a star.”

The President was beginning to get nervous. The he don’ts were piling up. All it would take would be the notion that Buster was just blowing smoke up his tail.

“So how is our newborn scholar doing in the Big Risk?” said Quat.

Buster Roth and the President looked at each other for a moment. “I’ve checked with Mr. Margolies,” said Roth, “and he says Jojo’s struggling a bit, but he’s working hard and getting his assignments done, and he’s been taking part in class discussions and so on.”

The President jumped in and said, “I’ve talked to Herb myself, and that’s pretty much the same thing he told me. This is an unusual situation.”

“It’s not unusual,” snapped Jerry Quat, “and it’s not even a situation, if by situation you mean some state of affairs that is not easy to interpret and deal with. Unfortunately, it’s not ‘unusual’ for ‘student-athletes’”—pronounced affectless felons—“to engage in the most egregious cheating. Your Mr. Jojo is lazy, ignorant, and a simpleminded cheater. Let’s keep our eyes on that ball. What he has or hasn’t done for Herb Margolies couldn’t interest me less. I’ve looked your Jojo’s callous, contemptuous disregard for the core mission of this university in the face, and I don’t like what I’ve seen, and I don’t intend to put up—”

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. The President could see the Cutler-Roth strategy tanking right before his eyes.

“—with any such thing ever again.” The hotheaded little ball of fat, resentment, and revenge wasn’t addressing his tirade to Buster Roth, however—he didn’t dare look that force of nature in the eye—but to the President. “If Mr. Roth wants to deal with a bunch of seven-foot bab—uh—brainless athletes, that’s his business, but I think—”

The President was positive that Quat had been on the verge of saying “baboons.”

“—he has an obligation to do what he can to keep them out of courses where teachers are serious about—”

Buster Roth’s face had turned red. He leaned toward Jerry Quat, trying to get him to look him in the eye. “Now, you hold on! You don’t even know what you’re talking about!”

“I don’t?” said Jerry Quat, although he still wasn’t looking straight at Buster Roth. “I’ve got four of your ‘student-athletes’ in my class, and they all sit together side by side like lengths of lumber. I call them the Four Monkeys: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, and Comprehend Nothing Whatsoever.”

A pissing match. The President had to step in and break this thing up. “You sure you want to say monkeys, Jerry?”

“What? Am I sure—” He halted.

The President looked on with some satisfaction as it dawned on the butterball that three of the four athletes he was referring to were black.

He began sputtering, “I didn’t mean it—I mean, it’s just an old expression—a cliché in a way—I mean it’s totally removed from—I mean, I retract that. It was just a manner of speaking…” He began backpedaling as fast as he could. “One of them, a Mr. Curtis Jones, does wear a baseball hat to class, on sideways, and when I—” He paused. His face turned redder than Buster Roth’s. He was boiling with anger again. He looked straight at Roth. “The bottom line is, I want your student-athletes out of my class, all four of them! I don’t intend to teach your fucking ‘Jojo boys’ ever again! They belong in fucking junior high school! Jesus Christ, you guys are such a fucking disgrace! I don’t want to have to fucking think about it again!”