“Why should he force one into bed if three others will hurl themselves under him? It makes no sense!”
“You only say that because you refuse to understand, Tim! Rape isn’t about sex. It’s about power and humiliation!”
“Who knows what kinds of power games Nick and Natalie had been playing,” Eugenia agrees. “If he really raped her, it was to degrade her, and to satisfy some perverse impulse that has little to do with…ordinary sexual desire. Whatever that is.”
“Well, I’ll be sorry if she turns out to be the victim in this—” Tim shrugs “—but Natalie Greco is a spoilt, manipulative little bee-yatch who brought the chair and the Dean of Studies down on me in her very first semester here because I wouldn’t accept her essays after the deadline.”
“But that doesn’t mean she would fabricate a rape allegation!” Erin is exasperated. “Did you never see The Accused?”
Was it predictable that the men would doubt the truth of Natalie’s charge against Nick Hornberger, while the women tend to believe it? Like television detectives we argue all sides of the case, and—for all its fruitlessness—cannot bring ourselves to stop speculating.
I make an ingenuous bid to steer the debate into another direction.
“So, will Dancey get the chair, do you think?”
“What is it with Giles?” Erin promptly fires up. “Someone needs to shake some sense of responsibility into that man! Elizabeth is right, he’s been picking the cherries out of this job, and now he won’t pull his weight!”
I catch Yvonne watching me, and I’m almost sure that she is covering up for me when she asks, “How do you mean, picking cherries?”
Now everyone is looking at Tim, but Tim—and I must say, I love him for this—shrugs and purses his mouth.
“It isn’t a secret,” Erin takes over, clearly annoyed at Tim’s misplaced loyalty. “A year ago they gave him leave to teach at Stanford for a semester to see whether he liked it well enough to stay there—this is extremely unusual and set a few tongues wagging! And last semester they allowed him to bring his sabbatical forward, and he spent that in England.”
“Well, he can spend his sabbatical anywhere he wants, can’t he?”
“Yes, of course he can! It’s just a little galling to see how some people get break after break, while others—I mean, I used my sabbatical to prolong my maternity leave by a semester!”
“Each to his—or her—own, Erin,” Eugenia says gently. “That was your decision, and Giles did a lot of admin before he left, you know he did. Sure, the Stanford fellowship was a favor, but I know for a fact that he only got half his salary during the semester in England, although theoretically he might have had a full one.”
“Big deal—for those with private funds!”
“Maybe it’s just as well,” Joe says. “You say you’d prefer him to Dancey, but Giles has a pretty idiosyncratic way of doing things, and if he took the chair and decided to go all English on us—that wouldn’t exactly be helpful either.”
“How do you mean, go all English?” I ask.
He was away for a whole year? What about his wife? But this I cannot ask.
“Well, as long as it’s just his own research and teaching, it doesn’t matter—after all, Diversity with a big D, right? But I’m not so sure his style is really suited to leading this department. Just my two cents, guys.”
“You might not notice it so much, Anna,” Eugenia adds, “coming from British universities yourself—Tim, are you not eating those nachos?”
“Help yourself.”
“I’m shameless, I know,” she sighs, pulling Tim’s plate toward herself. “He comes across as not caring very much. Giles, I mean.”
“It’s the traditional British policy of non-interference.” Tim can’t, after all, stay out of the fray. “What you call caring, he calls mollycoddling.”
“Non-interference by a nastier name is appeasement!” Erin snaps.
“Laissez-faire,” I correct her, trying to keep my voice neutral. “Disastrous in world politics, maybe, but in education there’s a lot to be said for it. I don’t know whether Cleveland is like this, but I know a number of lecturers in England who don’t believe in…well, in teaching.”
“I don’t particularly like teaching, either.” Joe shrugs. “Necessary evil.”
“No, I don’t mean it like that.” I fumble for an explanation. “I mean that they don’t believe in teaching as organized, explicit instruction. In fact, they believe that good students shouldn’t need teaching. They expect their students to get on with it, and they only interfere if you go off the