xvi
Virginia Coyle

Ed Haley once described Virginia Coyle as “the most self-centered individual I ever met. The universe revolves around her, and she is that universe. There’s nobody else in it. No students, no colleagues, certainly no men. As far as we could figure, no family. She doesn’t see you, she doesn’t hear you. She hears only golden trumpets celebrating her eminence, which is a lot less eminent than she imagines. But Virginia—you have to understand this—genuinely believes she’s the next Barbara Tuchman or Helen Vendler.”

Lloyd Cowley was less charitable. “Virginia is the supreme product of affirmative action,” he grumbled. “Mediocrity empowered to empower more mediocrity. She’s more proof, if you want more proof, that affirmative action in action means no action.”

Marilyn Schneider’s view was tempered and politic. “Virginia was just not right for us, for our students. When she wants to, she can look very professional. At the right school . . . a research institution, perhaps, where she could sit quietly in her office and read books. Perhaps. Somewhere out East. Here? I’m afraid that she just did not connect with rural Wisconsin.”

“Yeah,” Jack added. “Sit quietly in her office and collect $30,000 a year. She’d have loved it. Virginia never put in a day of useful work in her life. Not teaching, and not researching either. Not even politics.”

Dr. Virginia Coyle was precisely the kind of woman who—given Jack’s blue-collar proclivities, his high level of energy, and his preference for sassy, young, go-getter coeds over middle-aged academic feminists—would be expected to grate on him, and he on her. Even Jack agreed the pair created a mutually hostile working environment. “However,” he always added, “I was here first. The burden of adjustment is on her. Plus, there’s nothing sexual about it. Take one look at her, and you’ll see exactly what I mean. That woman is a walking blizzard.”

Virginia Coyle came to Novum State in the fall of 1991 as a result of a national search for a fixed-term adjunct appointment to fill Eric Syverson’s one-year sabbatical leave. The department anticipated another sabbatical the following year, and another the year after that. In fact, the department anticipated a long string of vacancies. With NSU enrollments generally up, the English department expected all sabbatical leaves to be replaced. As a department which enrolled every NSU student in a minimum of four required courses, it even entertained hopes of adding a tenure-track position in the not-too-distant future. Had Virginia played her cards right, she could have parlayed her one year into a lifetime job.

The position for which Virginia Coyle applied, however, was not a tenure-track position, or even a multi-year appointment. It was not advertised as tenure-track position, and her contract was not written as a tenure-track position. All records at Novum State, and all individuals involved in the hiring—except for Coyle—agree that there was no promise, indication, or even talk of tenure or permanence. Most people did assume that if and when a tenure-track position opened, “near and dear beats strange on the range,” as Lloyd Cowley put it. But everyone at Novum saw Coyle’s 1991-92 appointment as nothing more than the first of a possible string of sabbatical replacement contracts, or the rail position in a race for a tenure-track job.

Novum might even have covered Syverson’s sabbatical internally, saving its faculty and students a good deal of suffering, had not SUUFAMP been crusading against administrative abuse of overload and adjunct contracts. Ironically, SUUFAMP President Charles Creed was a leader in that crusade. “America is full of intelligent people who have in good faith plowed their way through the death of a Ph. D., and then they got finished and found—nothing. No job, no prospects, not even unemployment. Because fat cat M. A.’s who haven’t done a thing in the twenty years since they left graduate school are gobbling up four and five overloads a year.” Using the same logic employed by Lou Feracca in spring, 1985, SUUFAMP argued that full-time faculty could not effectively teach one and two overload sections each term, and that the sustained, planned use of adjunct personnel was exploitative.

“The school knows it will need at least one more full-time position in English for each of the next four years,” Marilyn Schneider argued. “Andy Olsen’s own projected student populations for the next four years would justify two and two-thirds positions. The need for another person in the English department will probably last forever, so there is no reason on earth this position should not be tenure-track. At the very least it should be a full-time, fixed-term position, not just a bunch of part-time and overload classes.”

Administration was amenable to a compromise, as long as the position could be used to improve the school’s affirmative action profile and increase cultural diversity. Affirmative action and cultural diversity were two very strong thrusts in Wisconsin education from the middle 1980s to the middle 1990s. “Brownie points with Madison,” Jack called the agreement. “A blueprint for mediocrity if ever I saw one, but one of those compromises you have to make. With a little diligence and a lot of luck we could have done ourselves some good while doing Madison some good too. We just weren’t diligent. Or lucky.”

With authorization to advertise a fixed-term appointment nationwide, the English department received very explicit instructions: hire black, Hispanic, Native American or female, or don’t hire anyone.

“In those days women counted,” Lloyd explained. “Asians didn’t count, because they were too successful, too good. Real African Africans didn’t count. Why, I don’t know. Certainly Eastern Europeans didn’t count, and Jews didn’t count, although there isn’t a Jew within thirty miles of Lake-of-the-Woods. We were not told to look specifically for a young Ph. D., or for a gay Ph. D., or for somebody with a handicap, or for a person from a working-class background. Any one of them would have diversified our department and provided useful role models for some of our students, and all that other shit the cultural diversity people use as excuses for imposing quotas. If we really wanted diversity, we would have gone for a Buddhist. If we really wanted a role model, we would have gone for a single-parent mother of two who grew up on a farm, got married and divorced, and worked her way through an M. A. program. We had a lot more of those women in our program than we had blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, or childless second-generation academic females from California.

“But we were told to go for a black, a Native American, or a Hispanic—none of whom we had. Or a woman, several of whom we already had. Go figure. Affirmative action is all bullshit. The longer you look at it, the more it unravels. The point is, administration told us to select a candidate from a very narrow list of minorities, or hire nobody.”

The directive met some resistance within the department. “It’s patently discriminatory,” Lloyd Cowley pointed out in November, “an administrative intrusion on departmental turf. Who we recommend, and why we recommend are our own business. That’s the way it has always been, and that’s the way it should be.”

“Minorities are very underrepresented on this campus, Lloyd,” Marilyn Schneider argued. “We’ve talked about that for years. It’s time we quit talking and started acting. And women are still very underrepresented on this campus.”

“Not so much in this department.”

“Even in this department,” Marilyn said.

“You would not accept this directive in any other context,” Lloyd argued. “I’ve known you for two decades, Marilyn. This thing goes against everything you believe in.”

“I’m for hiring a protected minority not because Andy is telling me to, but because I think we should hire a minority. That’s been my position for a number of years now.”

“We never discussed this issue when we wrote the job description. Not once. You didn’t bring it up then. Neither did Linda, and she was up here. On that history department chair business, Linda was very clear: hire the best person, male or female, black or white. This minority hiring is administration’s idea. They rewrote our job description. Those are the new terms of the position, right there in print: ‘acceptable candidates will be Black, Native American, Hispanic, or female.’ It’s as much a condition of the job as having a Ph. D. and experience, and it’s a condition imposed by administration. I can’t see it any other way. And I don’t understand your evasion of the obvious.”

“I think your real problem is affirmative action.”

Lloyd’s argument fell on deaf ears.

“You don’t hear the Packers saying, ‘We need a quarterback in the worst way to turn this thing around, and we don’t have any Middle East types on this team, let’s make sure our next quarterback is Syrian, Lebanese or Turkish.’ What kind of a team would they have if they did that? ‘Think what a wonderful role model he’ll be for all the Turks in Wisconsin.’ That’s crazy. Another thing you don’t hear them saying, incidentally, is ‘The Packers are a municipally owned franchise, so the ethnic make-up of the team should be proportional to the ethnic populations of the city of Green Bay.’ They’d be worse than they are now. Lindy Infante doesn’t refuse to look at a quarterback just because he’s black, or Iranian, or Catholic. And he doesn’t hire a guy just because he’s black or Iranian or Catholic. He’s going after the best quarterback he can get. That’s the only way you build a better team.

“Yes, I got a problem with affirmative action. Being black or Hispanic or female has become an unspoken condition of employment. We all know it. It’s discriminatory. We would not tolerate any other unspoken condition of employment that amounted to de facto prejudice against certain individuals. Why not just put it in the job description: ‘White Anglo Males Need Not Apply’? You tell me how that’s different than ‘Colored Need Not Apply’? The only fair way—the only constitutional way—is to be completely color and gender blind. I say we hire the best person for the job.”

Lloyd waxed passionate, but he received little support.

“And while I’m on the subject,” he added finally, “I’d like to point out that I personally can remember the day when there was not one black man playing professional football, basketball, or baseball. Or college either. I can remember the day I rooted for the team with the black player just because they’d included a Negro on the squad. Nowadays, I root for the team with a white player. If I can find one. Black athletes have taken over football, basketball, and baseball, and they did it just by being good. I’m not complaining. I’m just pointing out that minorities do not need affirmative action programs to break into fields traditionally dominated by white males. They just have to be good enough.”

“Our last hire was white, Anglo-Saxon and male,” Schneider observed.

“You got a problem with our last hire?”

“Of course not. We’re all happy with him. I was just saying. . . .”

“If we’re all happy with the white, Anglo-Saxon male, maybe there’s another out there just like him. Maybe we’ll get lucky with another white Anglo-Saxon male. Now wouldn’t that make the most sense?”

“I was saying let’s try something different for a change.”

“That’s not what I do when I’m fishing. I go with the odds, fish the holes that worked for me before. That’s what you do when you buy a car. If you get a Chevy that runs good for 200,000 miles, starts all the time in the winter, and gives you no hassles, you buy another Chevy. You don’t say, ‘Well sir, that old Chevy was one hell of a car, but I’m gonna try something different.’ ”

Jack avoided the argument entirely. “I was in no position to support you, good buddy,” he told Lloyd after the meeting. “In the first place, I was the last hire. How could I object to a minority this time, when you guys took me, a majority last time?

“In the second place, I have a reputation for being a male chauvinist since that women’s liberation essay. Sometimes I wish I had never written that thing. Also, Linda is still in a snit over my remark that academic feminists are middle-aged, middle-classed nearly menopausal Puritans who were too repressed to get pregnant and have kids of their own but feel the need to scowl and lecture, so they run around picking on everyone else. Having no kids of her own, she took that a little personally, although Linda’s no academic feminist.”

“You could have backed me on the added condition of employment,” Lloyd told Jack. “We can’t let them be rewriting our job descriptions like that.”

“I resigned myself to a compromise,” Jack admitted. “Besides, part of me believes in affirmative action—for the younger people and the working class. Age and class are much stronger determinants of attitude than gender or even race. And in academia? Hell, anybody who makes it through a Ph. D. program is going to come out true WASP. Once the job description stipulates a Ph. D., it doesn’t matter whether you hire a black or a white, a woman or a man, a youngster or an old fart. A Ph. D. is a Ph. D. You got about as much diversity as Republicans and Democrats. I resigned myself, Lloyd.”

Lloyd did not.

“I personally will not participate in any search where the candidate’s qualifications are dictated by administration,” he declared. Then he dropped out of the search committee.

Nobody followed him.

Only one applicant “self-identified” as being black, Hispanic, or Native American: a male named Schmidt who had been born in Argentina. “Technically, he counts as Latino,” the English department was advised. Dr. Schmidt was a linguist with a specialty in socio-semantics.

“I’m afraid we wouldn’t have much use for him,” Marilyn Schneider told the Affirmative Action officer, who was forced to agree.

A candidate named Leroy Brown, with an M. A. from Oklahoma State, sounded promising, but discrete (and illegal) inquiries determined he was no more Afro-American than Leroy Andy Olsen, Novum’s dean.

Most of the 120 applicants were white Anglo males. Several were highly qualified, including a Ph. D. from the University of Minnesota with a published article in a respectable journal, teaching experience as a grad assistant, good recommendations, and youthful energy and imagination. “He also had a wife and a child to support, if that’s a consideration, and I think it should be,” Jack added. “Kind of a 1990 version of me twenty years earlier. The guy should have saved his 29 cents. His credentials were not even considered. The position had become ‘a female position’.”

Even among the women, Virginia Coyle was not the department’s top candidate. Her B. A. in philosophy from St. Mary’s of Maryland, an M. A. in Women’s Studies from Indiana University, and a doctorate from University College, Dublin, with a specialization in Anglo-Irish literature, were not especially suited to the Novum State curriculum. “Her background is all over the place,” Ed Haley pointed out, “and we have nothing here for her to teach. Except for an authors’ class in Yeats or Joyce or something.”

Jack, who had had experience at a U. K. institution, mentioned that European Ph. D. programs differ dramatically from American programs. “I’m not saying it’s less intellectually rigorous, but there is a lot less course work—virtually none—and a lot of sitting around reading books, engaging in research, and chewing the fat with colleagues. Teaching is mostly tutorials, not the U. S. style teaching at all.” Jack figured the fat being chewed at UCD was not very British-American.

“Her M. A. work is not necessarily literature, nor was her B. A.,” someone noted. Novum offered survey courses in American and British literature, with occasional classes in special topics or authors.

“NEH Summer Seminar in ‘Women of the Revolution(s)’,” Ed Haley read. “Now what do you suppose that means?”

“You don’t want to know,” Jack answered, and rolled his eyes slightly. “Highly specialized in areas we don’t need,” he noted under “comments” on his chart of the candidates, later introduced as trial evidence.

Another department member noted, “Her degree is two or three years old. If her research on Maud Gonne is significant, why isn’t it published?”

A third wrote sarcastically, “Having accomplished nothing, applicant seeks to travel somewhere else.”

A lower ranked candidate even among the women, Virginia Coyle would have remained in California but for other accidents of fortune, also related to affirmative action guidelines.

As part of its instruction in equitable hiring procedures, the English department search committee had been directed to formulate a standard set of questions to be asked of all candidates. A list of “Do’s and Don’t’s” instructed the department not to inquire as to age, arrest or conviction records, citizenship, credit, public assistance status, family situation, marital status, disabilities, and political or religious affiliations. The department was warned that “questions regarding any of the aforementioned areas may or may not be discriminatory or illegal in and of themselves” and “answers to questions in some of the above areas may produce an adverse effect on the opportunities of women, racial or ethnic minorities, or older persons to receive full consideration for employment. In any of the listed areas, answers to questions may trigger biases.”

One of the more bizarre features of affirmative action is that employers who are making a special effort to recruit “protected minorities” are supposed to pretend they don’t know the minority is a minority. It’s like an engagement ring your fiancé helps you pick out, and when she receives it, all wrapped up, she’s just flabbergasted. “Oh, what a surprise! I never imagined!”

The one thing no one admits is that the minority is being hired because she or he is a minority. Under affirmative action, hypocrisy rules.

The number one female candidate for the position was a Ph. D. in American Studies from Penn State University. Her degree was not quite in hand, but was expected by summer’s end . . . was promised in writing by her director by summer’s end. The dissertation was finished, even to the final typed version. Only a pro forma defense remained. The department, less Lloyd Cowley, interviewed the woman by telephone and found her acceptable, even exciting. Jack liked her, but he was suspicious on the degree business. “You don’t have it until you have it,” he warned. “I know these East Coast types. There are several other candidates, including other women, who already have their degrees. Some have publications.”

The majority of the department, however, favored this candidate. After a few more telephone calls she was flown in for an interview, round-trip air fare Philadelphia to Minneapolis-St. Paul, four-day automobile rental out of Minneapolis-St. Paul, three nights at the Lake-of-the-Woods Quality Court, meals, meetings, tours—the complete package. The department and the University were on their best behavior, the candidate was on her best, and even Jack was impressed. “She had poise and maturity. She got along well with the students, and the sample class, as I recall, went very well. She’d have been a good addition—within the parameters of a middle-aged, middle-class female Ph. D.”

Among the questions affirmative action had not permitted to be asked were those regarding the candidate’s marital status and number of children, if any. “The woman shows up for the interview alone, and she says nothin’,” Jack recalled. “She’s personable, competent, apparently hard working. Immediately after she leaves town we meet, talk for all of ten minutes, and vote to hire her. She hasn’t even taken off from the St. Paul Airport, and the offer is in the mail. Marilyn calls her that evening with the good news. She wants a day or two to think things over. Marilyn says, ‘Fine, I’ll await your call.’ A day or two goes by and there’s no call. Marilyn phones again, but this woman is not home. She’s at another interview, we figure, and start to worry. A week later she calls and turns us down cold.

“Not that she didn’t love the school, love the faculty, love the state, mind you. All of them are just beautiful, exactly what she’s dreamt of. What a wonderful place to teach and live. Couldn’t be more effusive.

“Problem is, the woman is married. To a lawyer, now that you ask, who has naturally not passed the Wisconsin bar, who practices in Pennsylvania and doesn’t really care to relocate in Wisconsin. Not that he has a great practice going in Pennsylvania, but there are some differences in state law, and I don’t know what all. Anyway, the husband about whom we were not permitted to ask is the number one reason she won’t come.

“The number two reason she’s turning the job down is an adolescent son, about whom we also were not permitted to ask. She feels that while she and her husband could, in the interest of her career, handle separation, one parent in Pennsylvania and another parent in western Wisconsin would not be in the son’s best interests. She is so sorry, blah, blah, blah.

“Why did this woman apply for the position in the first place? You tell me. Like she and he couldn’t have figured out, before we blew a grand bringing her here, that he couldn’t practice in Wisconsin? That the kid wasn’t ready for a commuting mom? This is ridiculous. I personally suspect it was evil, because I know these East Coast types. I believe this woman knew when she left Philly she wouldn’t accept a job at Novum. She was taking a holiday, practicing her interviewing skills, bolstering her ego at our expense. She cost us two weeks, maybe three. That’s evil.”

The department went to its second female candidate . . . who by then had accepted a position elsewhere. So had female number three.

“We’re getting pretty low,” Ed Haley observed. “Maybe that white boy from Minnesota is still looking.”

“Black, Latino, Native American, female, or nothing,” the vice president insisted.

That brought the department to its fourth choice, Dr. Virginia Coyle of Los Angeles, California. Virginia Coyle was a lower-ranked candidate for a fixed-term position, who would probably reject an offer anyway. The department was by this time fatigued. It gave her file the most casual of examinations and, after a slightly acrimonious discussion, forwarded her name to VPAA Olsen as an acceptable candidate.

Charles Creed, of course, had not been carefully scrutinized either. “If we had done a lot of checking, and if anyone had raised the issue about her background, I’d have been willing to draw a line,” he said in retrospect. “In her case as in mine. I would never have survived the kind of investigation we’ve given candidates after Coyle. Not with some of those letters in my file, and all those police investigations. I’m not bitching about phone calls. I’m willing to make a hiring decision based on credentials, and a rehiring decision based on a record that begins the day a person walks into Novum State.”

“None of us got the full F. B. I. treatment,” Ed Haley pointed out. “We were hired in a tight job market. ‘Got two hands, two feet, one eye and a degree? Okay, teach for us. No questions asked.’ Us older ones couldn’t get our own jobs these days. I sure couldn’t.”

“Her references were okay, but references are always good,” Ed Haley reflected. “Who’s going to request a reference from somebody who’ll give a crummy recommendation? Nobody these days pays any attention to letters of reference anyway, unless you know the person writing it. A lot of them were all Irish fellows and East Coast types. We didn’t bother to phone Dublin—we were too cheap, when it comes down to it.”

Olsen found Coyle perfectly acceptable for a one-year fixed-term appointment. Vexed at having spent a thousand dollars on one bad choice, and facing similar expenses on Coyle (who was not even black, Hispanic, or Native American), he told the department he would not pay for another on-campus interview. A conference telephone interview would be fine, he insisted. This was only a sabbatical replacement anyway.

“Not only did Virginia Coyle not teach a sample class, not talk with students, and not interact with faculty—all of which are standard procedure and always had been,” Lloyd Cowley pointed out; “we hired Virginia Coyle sight unseen. Nobody, literally, had ever met the woman.”

“I don’t think it would have made any difference,” Haley insisted. “Virginia made a good first impression. She could have fooled us for a day or two.”

“Not a chance,” Cowley insisted. “I took one look at that bitch at Marilyn’s party, and I thought, ‘Sister, you don’t fool me for a minute.’ And she didn’t fool that damned jury very much, did she then?”

“Most of us soon felt we might have made a mistake almost from the start,” Schneider later testified. “Virginia has a presence . . . a stiffness, I’d say, a reserve which I thought when I met her would not work well in our situation. I had sensed some hesitation on the telephone, a certain tenseness, a formal distance. At the time I attributed it to the strangeness of a phone interview situation. In person, the moment I saw her, I could see that Virginia is a very reserved person. Admittedly we’re a little relaxed here in rural Wisconsin, but I think—I thought upon first meeting her—that Virginia is a bit . . . the opposite of gracious.”

Marilyn was in a position to get to know Virginia better than anyone at Novum. As department chair, and as a woman, she took a special interest in the new hire. Schneider received Coyle’s early shipments of books and belongings, met her at the St. Paul airport when she flew to the Midwest in late August, and provided bed, breakfast and dinner for over a month while Virginia searched for a “suitable” apartment. In a hundred ways, large and small, the department’s senior female faculty member welcomed the department’s most junior female faculty member.

The honeymoon lasted, by Marilyn’s account, not more than a week, although the department chair kept on trying. “I’d invent excuses for what I considered bad behavior, telling myself Virginia had real cause for offense, and I was being overly sensitive. I’d accuse myself of being . . . well, you know how we can be in the Midwest, too intrusive. Then I would back off a little, on the theory that Virginia needed more space. Still she seemed offended, as if I’d been neglectful. I felt personally responsible for Virginia coming to the department. For the sake of her career and the department’s cohesiveness, I tried everything I could think of. None of it seemed good enough. Eventually I decided Virginia was just playing a game with me. But that was much later.”

Coyle’s introduction to the department came, like mine at Busiris so many years before, at a preschool year party hosted by the chair. Schneider spent the day shuttling between Lake-of-the-Woods and her home outside of town, buying alcohol and ice, cleaning, laying in groceries, composing plates of rolled slices of ham and beef and cheese, and stashing bowls of Cheetos and Nachos all over the first floor of her house.

She invited her house guest to join in the preparations, but Virginia opted for the Novum State library. “She offered neither physical nor financial assistance,” Marilyn remembered in a pretrial deposition. “Not that I would have taken her money, but I wouldn’t have minded the help. It was hard not to notice. Hard not to feel offended. Hard not to remember that day and maybe hold a little grudge.”

Novum State librarian Arnie Marin remembered that day very well. “The term hadn’t even begun, and there was this complete stranger sitting at a table in the reference section with a couple of bagels and a pot of tea, reading the New York Times Book Review. I went up to her, polite as pie, and told her that food and drinks were not allowed in the library, which was not yet open to the public. She laid into me like a butcher at the Hormel plant. ‘Just whom do you think you are speaking to? I am a member of this faculty, and this library exists to support my work. If the library is not open to the general public, it can certainly accommodate faculty research.

“ ‘What’s more, I consider it perfectly reasonable to assume that if the door is ajar, the library is open. Would not that be a logical inference?

“ ‘Finally, I am not some helpless incompetent woman. I am perfectly capable of handling my tea. I take full responsibility for whatever damage it may do to your precious furnishings. If you have a quarrel with that, perhaps you would wish to take it up with the dean.’

“Holy smokes! I never did get her name. A month later she finally came in to get photographed for a card. By then everyone knew who Virginia Coyle was.”

Late in the afternoon Coyle phoned Schneider requesting a ride back from the university. Marilyn indicated that she had no further business in town and suggested that Virginia ride out with any one of a number of persons who’d be coming to the party.

Virginia thought she would feel uncomfortable riding with a complete stranger.

“This would be a colleague in the department,” Marilyn explained. “One of the people who hired you.”

Virginia would want to freshen up a bit before meeting her future colleagues. “To make a suitable first impression.”

Marilyn drove once again into Lake-of-the-Woods. The library was clearly closed, and Virginia was nowhere to be seen. Schneider drove to the English complex, parked her car, and spent fifteen minutes wandering empty corridors. Outside the building again, she finally met Coyle walking toward her from the general direction of the dormitories. She had left the library when Arnie Marin, after several less subtle suggestions that he was ready to leave, started turning out the lights on her. Marilyn was too angry to ask why she’d wandered off, and Virginia apparently saw no need for explanation beyond the “beastly rudeness” of the NSU librarian.

“I don’t think I said ten words to Virginia the whole drive home,” Schneider remembered.

In Schneider’s guest bedroom, Virginia changed from her white dress into a tartan mid-length skirt, a white blouse, a sweater of a plaid to match her skirt, and a tam-o’-shanter. “She had gray knee-length woolen socks,” Jack recalled. “The ensemble looked a lot like the uniforms worn by girls attending Catholic high schools when I was growing up. She looked like one of those Archbishop Prendergast High girls, but that’s not what I told her.”

What Jack did say to Virginia at the Schneider party would become a significant issue five years later.

“This is Professor Creed,” Marilyn Schneider said when Jack and Kelly arrived. “And this is Miss Kelly Ayers.”

“Captain of the volleyball squad,” Kelly volunteered.

Virginia held out her hand and gave Jack a straight look.

“Professor Creed,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you. From Professor Schneider, of course.” She looked again at Kelly. “Wouldn’t a more mature woman be more suitable for a man of your stature?”

Jack could not believe he had heard what he’d heard. “I appreciate beauty regardless of age,” he told Virginia diplomatically. “I also appreciate talent, brains, and hard work.”

Virginia persisted. “I would have thought you’d be aware by now of the risks inherent in these . . . younger relationships.”

“What a very striking outfit you have on,” Jack told Virginia. That according to Creed, corroborated by Schneider and Haley.

In her complaint and deposition Coyle claimed Jack eyed her “suggestively” up and down and said, “Very cute.”

“I am certain I did not eye her suggestively,” Jack later testified. “She was coming on to me. I’ve never in my life eyed Virginia Coyle suggestively. Besides, Kelly was standing right next to me at the time. Between Kelly and Virginia—no contest. I doubt very much that I used the word ‘cute.’ I’d seen the movie [Bull Durham]. Baby chicks are cute. Kelly is cute. Virginia is not cute. Sorry if I sound discourteous, but the time for courtesy in this matter has long passed. I know cute, and believe me, Senator, you’re not.”

Kelly Ayers’ recollection accords with Jack’s. “She was definitely hitting on my man,” Kelly agreed. “Not a chance. What a bitch. Overdressed and pretentious from the word go. It was like she was used to a level of elegance far beyond anything we Wisconsin types could even imagine, and she wanted to impress upon us our inadequacies. I was totally turned off, right from the beginning. I didn’t say much to her after the look she gave Jack.”

The “very striking” (or “very cute”) was followed by a greeting in Gaelic, something Jack remembered from his Welsh adventures. Virginia Coyle offered no response, so Jack tried again. “For a moment I thought I’d lost the phrases,” he recalled. “Then I thought the differences between Welsh and Irish might be greater than I’d supposed.”

Finally Virginia understood what Jack was about.

“Mr. Creed,” she told him, “you may not assume that the fact that my degree is in Anglo-Irish studies means I am fluent in Gaelic.”

Jack was nonplused. “I wouldn’t want to assume anything but the best of you, would I?” he asked.

“I am sure you are as admiring of mature, competent women as you are of students,” Creed, Schneider, and Haley recall Coyle saying. Coyle did not later recall the remark.

Kelly did. “Let’s get a beer,” she suggested.

Jack and Kelly left, but Ed Haley tried to engage Virginia on the subject of Anglo-Irish studies. “I understood you’ve been working on Maud Gonne,” he said.

“That is one of the foci of my research.”

“I read the Levinson biography once. Maud Gonne was a fascinating woman.”

“That’s a very unscholarly work. Quite superficial and unprofessional. So too is Diana Norman, I’m afraid. And she published only last year.”

“What interests you about Maud Gonne?”

“I’m working on a book of her letters and speeches. The manuscripts are scattered everywhere: Dublin, London, New York. She even visited your Midwest, on her first voyage to America in 1897, trying to arouse Americans against the Boers and cement unity between the Irish in America and those in Ireland. She spoke in Chicago and St. Louis. Even, I believe, in Peoria, Illinois, invited by Bishop Spalding. I’ve been tracking her through America, but the process is frightfully painstaking and expensive. I understand our institution supports faculty engaged in research?”

“We get $500 each in professional development funds. You can spend it any way you like.”

“That won’t go very far, I’m afraid.”

“You can always ask for more. Asking doesn’t guarantee you get, but not asking guarantees you won’t get.

“I thought the Boer War was in the early 1900s,” he added. Haley was not trying to start “any big argument,” he testified later. “I was genuinely befuddled. It was just a point of information remark.”

“1897,” Virginia said with great certainty.

“Too bad you’re not a Hemingway scholar,” said Lloyd Cowley in what he later explained as an attempt to prevent embarrassment. “Then you could spend your $500 trout fishing in Idaho. On the other hand, a round-trip ticket to Ireland wouldn’t be such a bad deal either.”

“I’m afraid I’m strictly a library person. Not much of a fisher. But a very dedicated scholar.”

“Virginia was such a dedicated scholar of Maud Gonne,” Ed Haley added later, “that she confused Gonne’s first and second voyages to the States and didn’t know, or pretended not to know, that Anna McBride White and A. Norman Jeffares were already heavy into the Gonne-Yeats letters. After the party I did some checking in the library and asked her a few more questions. Those questions were test questions, and she flunked. Didn’t know anything about Maud Gonne. Hadn’t seen things that had just been published on Gonne. Talk about the tailor weaving away on an empty loom and telling everyone how swell the emperor’s new clothes are going to be. What an act!”

Haley later remembered one other episode from the Schneider party. “I was wandering around the living room, a drink in my hand, talking to no one in particular. You know that kind of party lull when nothing’s going on and you lose yourself in the books on the shelf and the art on the wall. A small stack of books on Marilyn’s coffee table caught my attention—I can’t even tell you why, or what they were, except that they seemed not to be the kind of books Marilyn would have been reading—and I started to thumb through one of them. Suddenly Virginia pounced like a leopard out of nowhere, as if I was personally perusing her private diary. ‘In the United Kingdom, pawing through someone’s personal belongings is considered very boorish behavior,’ she informed me. I looked at her, closed the book, and walked away. Virginia walked away too. Just left the books there. Maybe they were hers. Maybe they weren’t. I never found out.”

What colleagues perceived as the new women’s supercilious demeanor sent them scurrying into food and small talk among themselves. “We tried to be friendly,” Lloyd Cowley summarized, “and found we didn’t have much to say to Virginia. So, logically enough, we talked amongst ourselves. Some of us had had pretty interesting summers.”

Coyle interpreted their distance as deliberately rude and insulting. After two hours—none of the others could say when—she retreated to her bedroom to drink tea and read The New Yorker. Virginia Coyle’s coming out party was less than a success, although it was not nearly the disaster she later attempted to make it.

As university attorneys later pointed out, Virginia was comfortable enough with Creed and Schneider to request letters of evaluation from both of them later that month.

Toward the end of September, Virginia invited her chair to visit one of her classes and, based on what she saw and heard, write recommendation for her personnel file. Jack also was invited to visit and write a letter, as was Linda Tholen, whom Virginia had met the night of Marilyn’s party. Virginia apparently never understood that as state-wide SUUFAMP President Linda taught no classes and lived in Madison most of the year. Invitations were not extended to Lloyd Cowley or Ed Haley. One would conclude that in late September Virginia perceived Cowley and Haley as enemies, Creed, Tholen, and Schneider as friends. Or as powerful enough within the University community to significantly affect her employment. Or as powerful enough outside the community—by position or reputation—to help in subsequent searches for employment. It is not unusual, of course, for senior faculty to visit classes and drop their written endorsement in a candidate’s file, although Virginia’s invitation was slightly premature. Usually new teachers wait until they have settled into the course, the students, the school, and their colleagues: winter or spring of the first year, when they’re building a case for reappointment.

The senior faculty detest such visitations, which are painful for everyone involved. The situation is entirely artificial. The teacher prepares a trophy lecture. The students, who at Novum are a good lot and try their best to deliver for their professors, listen attentively, scribble reams of notes, and ask questions by the handful. The visitor takes fifteen minutes of glowing comments, then starts penciling numbers in the margin: 35, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0.

Jack never did visit Virginia’s class. Marilyn recalls the visit as confirming her earlier judgment of Virginia Coyle as a cold and formal personality. “Dr. Coyle delivered a formal lecture, almost memorized, and then asked for questions. When there was little discussion, she drew a disparaging contrast between Wisconsin students and students she had taught in California. Dr. Coyle had memorized names, but she couldn’t put a name together with a face. She’d invite a comment from Mr. Brown or Miss White, and be looking in the wrong direction, at the wrong person. Also, it was always ‘Mr. Brown,’ ‘Miss White.’ Never a first name. I noticed that.

“I also noticed that the kids did not seem to be doing their best for Dr. Coyle. They were not embarrassing her at first, but they were not performing. I have seen many, many students put on spectacular performances when they knew a favorite instructor was being evaluated.

“A reason for their behavior became apparent later in the class. I can’t remember what point Professor Coyle was making, but she paused at one point to draw an analogy between sports and literature, trying to impress her class. American sports was a realm far outside her area of expertise, and a teacher is well advised to avoid what she doesn’t know. Dr. Coyle missed the analogy entirely, making a reference to “Kirby Plunkett of the Minnesota Vikings.” The students caught her mistake immediately, and they did not let it pass. Sympathetic students will let such errors slide, not wishing to embarrass their teacher. Not these kids.

“ ‘Excuse me, Professor Coyle, but it’s Kirby Puckett and he plays baseball for the Twins,’ one of them pointed out.

“There was an instant of silence as everyone cringed, including me.

“Virginia was not at all embarrassed. She was angered. ‘Kirby Plunkett plays for the Vikings,’ she insisted.

“I looked up. Virginia’s face showed no sign of doubt or embarrassment.

“There was a chorus of voices: ‘No, no. Twins. Baseball. Puckett.’

“Virginia insisted a third time: ‘Kirby Plunkett plays for the Viking, children! I saw him in last Sunday’s game.’

“The kids looked at each other, not smirking or anything, just looked at each other, and shrugged shoulders, as if to say, ‘Whatever you say, Miss Coyle. This is your program.’

“I never wrote a recommendation or an evaluation, either good or bad. Not after this experience. I wrote nothing on Virginia Coyle until spring when, as chair, I was required under the contract to provide a recommendation to the dean. In that recommendation I was very guarded, and I didn’t mention this incident or others subsequent to it. I never mentioned my visit to Professor Coyle’s class to anyone. I was still trying to keep her record clean, keep specifics out. I believe I was successful. Charles Creed authored the recommendation that Dr. Coyle’s contract not be renewed, when he was acting assistant dean. That’s administration’s responsibility, as the contract specifically states.

“Still, I think any one of us, in his position, would have written just about what Jack wrote. He too was being kind and protective.”

Additional evidence of student dissatisfaction came hard on the heels of Marilyn’s visit, including an avalanche of students wanting out of Coyle’s classes.

The deadline for withdrawing from a class without financial penalty, one month to the date after preregistration, brought eighteen students to the English department office with slips to be signed.

“Your professor signs these forms,” Marilyn explained. “Not I.”

“We haven’t seen Professor Coyle for three days,” one student told her.

Another corrected him. “Sometimes she’s in her office, but she won’t open the door. You knock, and you know she’s in there, but she won’t open the door.”

“Is this during office hours?”

“She hasn’t been at school this week during office hours or for class,” the first student insisted. “Today’s the deadline for withdrawal. We think she’s trying to not let us drop.”

“I’ll sign this thing myself if I have to,” another student threatened. “I’m not staying in that class. It’s like Auschwitz.”

“Please, Professor Schneider, you’ve got to do something.”

Marilyn signed the drop slips, then circulated a memo to all members of the department urging them to keep posted office hours and notify the department secretary, either before or after the fact, of missed classes. “I’m not here to police you,” she noted, “and the contract requires no formal notification. Still, there have been some confused students lately, and neither I nor Marilyn knew what to tell them. Think of this as a courtesy you would want others to extend to you.”

Virginia Coyle returned to teaching the day after the deadline for withdrawal had passed. Presumably she noticed that her classes had shrunk some, but not until the end of the term did she discover that eighteen students had formally withdrawn.

There was a tremendous uproar. She demanded that Andy Olsen formally reprimand Marilyn Schneider. When he refused, she tried to file a grievance through the union. She accused Marilyn of withdrawing students from her classes without their knowledge or hers, in an attempt to make her enrollments look bad. Brad Newlund thought her charges merited investigation, but pointed out that one union member could not grieve another. So Coyle filed a grievance against Vice President Andy Olsen. Olsen was not even part of the complaint, and the grievance was later withdrawn.

Olsen, however, could not escape the next Virginia Coyle fracas. Three weeks after the penalty-free drop date came preregistration for winter term. Preregistration figures are a good barometer at any school of any teacher’s performance. “I don’t need written complaints,” Andy Olsen had once told Jack Creed. “I don’t even need students in my office. One look at registration figures tells me all I need to know about a teacher.”

Coyle’s numbers started bad and stayed bad. While other sections filled and students added their names to waiting lists, hers remained in the single digits. Marilyn Schneider circulated another general memo to the effect that faculty should not sign “Special Permission to Register” forms for their own sections of a multi-section class like composition and introduction to literature until all sections of the course were filled. Everyone in the department knew what she meant, and everyone pretended not to.

Students turned away from Creed’s and Schneider’s sections, and Cowley’s did not spill over into Coyle’s. As Jack had pointed out years before, when making the case for Sam Reese at Busiris, students confronting an unattractive professor simply go elsewhere. By the time preregistration ended, Coyle’s figures in classes designed for twenty-five and thirty students were barely in the double digits. For the time being, the kids had gone elsewhere, hoping for better luck come spring.

Olsen was furious. “We’re paying full salary for half classes,” he fumed to Schneider the day after registration ended. “Where did this woman come from anyway?”

“You hired her,” Marilyn reminded the VPAA.

“You people recommended her.”

“She was the best candidate within the parameters within which we were operating.”

“Let’s see if we can’t straighten this thing out before winter begins. And I damned sure don’t want this happening again come February.”

“That’s a management problem, Andy.”

“Don’t get technical on me, Marilyn. If it’s a management problem, I know how I’m going to solve it. So if you don’t want it resolved that way, you better straighten it out before it becomes a management problem.”

“We’re not on the best of terms,” Schneider mused. “She tried to file a grievance against me.”

“She did file a grievance against me. And I haven’t forgotten it. You’re the chair. I’d suggest you have a little woman-to-woman talk with Dr. Coyle. Soon.”

In mid-November of 1990, after the close of preregistration but before the end of fall term, Marilyn Schneider invited Virginia Coyle to lunch at the White Gull Inn, ostensibly to discuss ways Novum State could further ease her adjustment to Wisconsin, but really to broach the subject of enrollments. The conversation was more formal than the meal.

“Your preregistration figures might be cause for concern,” Schneider told Coyle.

“I’m new here,” Coyle reminded her, “and my methods are unknown. We all know that students are reluctant to experiment with an unknown quantity.”

“There have been a couple of complaints,” Schneider hinted.

“Why wasn’t I informed?” Coyle wanted to know. “What were their names?”

“I didn’t even write names down,” Schneider told Coyle. “It didn’t seem like anything serious. Confusions over assignments and grades. I sent them all back to you. That’s our policy at Novum. Chairs do not adjudicate. We merely facilitate. My own policy is to send all students back to their professors.”

“None have come to see me,” Coyle insisted.

“If there’s anything I can do to help alleviate the problems,” Schneider offered.

“I don’t know of any problems. Only a few trouble-causers. I always find a few trouble-causers, among my students and colleagues. I’m a very demanding professor, and I’ve always had a few trouble-causers who resist being forced to do work. I am a very competent woman, and I am quite adept at handling them myself, I can assure you. They will not be giving me problems come winter term.”

Schneider lapsed into silence.

Coyle continued. “There is one situation in which you might be able to help me. I believe I have secured publication of some of my research in a very prominent Irish-American journal. But publication is contingent on page costs of $30 per page. I’m afraid this is not something I could manage on my salary. . . .”

“Perhaps your $500 professional development funds could be applied to those costs,” suggested Schneider.

“I’ve already earmarked that money for a conference in Dublin next spring, although it’s quite insufficient. I’ve requested supplemental funds from Faculty Improvement funds. Dean Hayes is quite optimistic.”

“The department doesn’t have a slush fund,” Marilyn answered. “I might be able to assign you a summer school course or two. Each class pays 8% of your annual salary. In your case that would be. . . .”

“I’m afraid I’ve committed myself to a research project in Washington, D.C. over the summer. I found some very significant Maud Gonne material there last time I visited. I think publication is a real possibility, if I can discover the means to complete my research.”

“Would this publication involve page costs?” Marilyn asked rhetorically.

“The practice is quite common these days, I’m afraid. Of course they would be unnecessary if our library, and libraries all over the country, fulfilled their obligation to keep abreast of scholarship.”

Marilyn Schneider put down her fork and studied the woman in front of her. “I was flabbergasted, but Virginia saw no inconsistency at all in declining summer school in the same instant she requested additional travel funds, research expenses and even money to underwrite publication,” Marilyn told Jack and Lloyd at the Silver Dollar Bar. “She genuinely believes that her only teaching problem was a few trouble-causers who will not be in her class winter term. I think she missed the whole point of our conversation.”

“I don’t want to be an I-told-you-so,” Cowley began.

“You didn’t tell us so, Lloyd,” Marilyn answered. “You abdicated all responsibility.”

“Now don’t go blaming me because you didn’t do your homework.”

“What homework was that? You know how Olsen handled that search.”

“How many calls did you make on this woman? Anyone outside her references?”

Marilyn admitted to having made no calls.

“I’ll tell you one other thing,” Lloyd announced. “I been doing a little checking lately, and I noticed a couple of things. If you take a close look at the letters that accompanied her application, you’ll notice that every one of them were written very early in the school year. I don’t mean early in the term, I mean early in the school year. Not one letter later than October of her first year on any job. Now that should tell you something.

“And something else you probably didn’t notice, but I did. She told you she was teaching last year at Mount Saint Mary's, California, but not one letter in her file comes from Mount Saint Mary's. Now if that first bit doesn’t tell you something, this should. You should have been more careful. Learn to read the surface of the water, and you’ll know what’s going on underneath.”

“You should have stayed on the search committee. We needed you then,” Jack told Lloyd.

“Yeah, well, you got me now, good buddy. You also got her, incidentally. And you don’t need me to tell you what’s going to happen next. You’re gonna teach thirty kids a section, a hundred kids a term, and she’s gonna teach fifteen kids maximum per section, taking off for a conference every third week, and looking for ways to get rid of the trouble-causers and trim her enrollments to twelve. And it’s you publishing all them journal articles. It’s you that’s writing the book that’s going to get published. And you won the Pulitzer for the book you already published.”

“I’m afraid you’re right on this one, Lloyd,” Marilyn agreed.

“One last point. There’s not a damned thing either of you can do about it. As soon as anybody so much as scowls at her, Dr. V. C., Ph. D. is going to hit him with a grievance, if not a human rights action. You heard it first here.”