REPRESENTATIVE SNIPPETS

The resulting dissonance only aggravated my mounting alienation from the ambient culture, my solipsistic retreat into a self-enclosed conceptual universe, a black hole from which no light escaped. What Joe had feared most was now coming to pass. I would manage to overlook my descent into insularity and obsession, however, as this vortex would take shape in small increments, each of which I could readily minimize. Even so, the cumulative truth of my steadily percolating estrangement and anomie would be communicated to me from myriad directions during the winter and spring of 2009. Like my advisers’ disquietude in December, these incidents were subtle portents of things to come, incipient materializations of institutional headwinds that would in time place me in intractable conflict with the might of Stanford itself.

So what was going on here? Barbara was positioning herself as on my side, offering ostensibly well-intentioned constructive criticism in order to advance our mutual interest in the timely progression of my academic career. But “the truth of euphemism,” Bourdieu notes, “is revealed in the use made of it by professorial rhetoric any time that an unfavorable judgment has to be delivered within the limits of academic etiquette and/or prudence.” And here was that professorial rhetoric in all its subtlety and circumspection—as was to be expected of Barbara, whose prognosis was just as disingenuous as it was accurate. It was accurate inasmuch as it correctly gauged how the market would respond to my résumé. It was disingenuous, however, inasmuch as Barbara held herself out as merely tendering a prognosis, when what she was passing off as just educated guesses about others’ hostile reactions also constituted her own reaction, which was identical to those from which she was distancing herself rhetorically.

I didn’t know and didn’t really care, as I was far more interested in my research agenda than traveling down this dark, disagreeable road. And yet the question could not but come to mind in a law school setting, which my advisers understood just as well as I. The legalization of our relations had commenced with the knockout email, was then ramped up by me in the works-in-progress email, and had now been cemented by the situation at hand. The existence of a controversy concerning the veracity of my dossier had been entered into the email record only the previous night. With the day’s events coming right on the heels of that deed, the question naturally presented itself. Nothing was certain beyond Barbara’s disingenuity, which was a by-product of my own disingenuity and not unlawful. But an inference of defamation was scarcely capricious on a stylized Law School 101 kind of level. Indeed, it was quintessential LSAT reasoning in action. Everyone involved had more than enough schooling to put two and two together.

An explicit reference to Stanford wouldn’t have been an admission of wrongdoing, but it would have confirmed that any suspicions thereof were grounded in some underlying reality—the unofficial reality that now enveloped me. I wasn’t demanding such a confession, and Dick had no interest in volunteering it, so he acknowledged the situation by way of logical implication within the confines of the tacit dimension. Just like me when I fired off the works-in-progress email, Dick was resorting to allusion, intimation, and ambiguation (the willful creation of ambiguity) to communicate a clandestine meaning inaccessible to the casual bystander not privy to the situation’s subterranean background. For reasons of both law and academic etiquette, his real meaning had to be histrionically encrypted in conversational irregularities that could then be decrypted into the actual message by those in the know.

I had reason on my side, but faith—the social faith that such things just can’t happen—would override the reason of others. These San Francisco liberals could no more envisage Stanford professors machinating as alleged than could a medieval peasant envisage the village friar molesting the choirboys. They couldn’t question Stanford because that would be to question themselves and their value system. Entranced by the facial outlandishness of it all and my attendant disorientation, they reflexively discounted my arguments as the rantings of a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist. I may as well have been contending that the moon landings were faked or that the World Bank had been infiltrated by an alien race of reptilian shape-shifters. Gone were the high hopes of making vital contributions to Establishment Clause jurisprudence. Instead all my intellectual energies might now be occupied with the daunting task of defending my own sanity, a low bar for most.

There was, then, but one way to wiggle my way out of my subaltern status as one “most lacking in symbolic capital,” and that was to mint symbolic capital out of my very oppression, a tried-and-true strategy in modern America. … Only by blowing the whistle on my own gaslighting could I rescue myself from the professional and intellectual oblivion to which my alma mater might seek to consign me. I would have to criticize and climb over the university itself by latching on to its symbolic capital in a gambit to appropriate some of it as my own.

Moreover, it was readily apparent that everything I had stood for over the years pointed ineluctably toward this Promethean feat. As I related in chapter 1, my first, abandoned dissertation topic took up Nietzsche’s counsel “to examine and dissect the men of learning themselves for once, since they for their part are quite accustomed to laying bold hands on everything in the world, even the most venerable things, and taking them to pieces.” Here was an opportunity to do just that, to fulfill a now-manifest destiny that had been lying in abeyance for a decade until crystallizing before me like a long-forgotten revenant. … Stanford was awash in both plausible deniability and cultural authority, but I had a liberal arts education, which I could at long last put to good use.

My own hands were hardly unsullied, so I couldn’t sanctimoniously deplore my gaslighting as an unpardonable injustice. There was in fact an argument that I had it coming, some of which I have outlined for the reader. But there was another side of the story, too, and that it might never get aired would be an unpardonable injustice. This airbrushing from history of the unofficial reality was precisely the outcome willed by the star chamber of Stanford, and it would have to be averted by any means necessary. My advisers had excised their pound of flesh. With their claims now satisfied, I would advance my counterclaims and rescue my Stanford legacy from the memory hole in which they would inter it.

“Professionalism silently installs the New Class as the paradigm of virtuous and legitimate authority,” notes Gouldner. But the unprofessional path of the fellowship had uncovered contingent power relations where the elites would see virtuous authority and deterministic social structures where they would see individual agency and desert.

Notwithstanding the authenticity of the works in progress, there was an underlying fraud. My advisers were within their rights to feel misled and betrayed because I had never truly been a “rising young scholar.” That was just a socially respectable disguise, provisional camouflage under whose surface something darker was gestating perfidiously, something too primitive and barbarous to ever be welcomed by the highly civilized mandarins of the Wednesday faculty luncheon. Bob Weisberg’s incandescent rage that Wednesday afternoon in September 2009 was the direct physiological expression of this bitter pill, which that day’s fallout would teach me to swallow.