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PART ONE
MARY, a professor, sixties/seventies.
When one of my graduate students – shall I tell you her name? – let’s call her Sam – came to see me outside of office hours – I was unsurprised. My office hours are available online, along with the reading list, class notes, PowerPoint slides and so forth – but there is a lot of hand-holding these days. (One student phoned me at 10 p.m. the other night just to ask the definition of chiaroscuro. ‘Google it,’ I told him. ‘The internet is your friend.’) So I was irritated, but, well – they make so many sacrifices to be here and have so few prospects – if it means I’m late getting home to Gale, if there is a slight delay for that delicious moment… It would be churlish of me to complain.
I assumed it would be about her thesis. Again. Sam was so fearful of failure she found it difficult to venture any original thoughts of her own. Instead it read like a crazy quilt of others’ undigested ideas. I sometimes wondered if it wouldn’t be kinder to direct her to another activity – accountancy, say. She wasn’t stupid, but she lacked flair and bravery – and no consultations with me were suddenly going to imbue her with that.
But there was something in her manner that day – she was highly agitated. Oh, god, I thought, is she going to begin telling me about her personal problems? Childcare, love life, bulimia? I don’t do sympathy terribly well.
You know those children who have to learn how to communicate by studying drawings of facial expressions? Little smiley or frowning or tearful faces. That’s what I’m like with sympathy. (Other emotions I can do just fine, thank you.) But sympathy – when I really want to just grab the students by their shoulders and shake them, shouting ‘Get a grip’ – that’s a reach for me. Still, I nodded and invited her to sit. I pulled my face into the appropriate mask of concern: gentle smile, tilted head.
‘I wasn’t sure if you knew,’ she started.
‘Knew’ – I braced myself for some admission: she was leaving the course; she was pregnant; she was gender-confused.
‘Knew?’ I think I said this encouragingly. I can’t be sure. ‘You’ll have to fill me in a bit more.’ I know those professors who pride themselves on being tartars, but really what’s the point? I would let her say her piece.
‘It’s on the internet.’ She said this in such a way as to suggest I would have no idea what the internet was. As if I’d reply, ‘What? That thing that replaced scrolls of papyrus?’
So cyber-bullying it was. We had some in-service training on this. I wondered where I’d put that booklet – filed somewhere around spotting FGM and well b...
