MacArthur's Ghost Read online

  The morning after I return from Maine, I position myself in my living room window, watching the college faculty assemble at the college gates. Dressed in caps and gowns of many colors, plush maroons and somber judicial blacks, decorated with silver and blue sashes, pinks and yellows. Returning like the swallows to Capistrano, one odd bird at a time, they turn the campus into a medieval aviary. The old timers, about to retire or already emeritus, can be counted upon for a day like this. Some of them have been retired for decades but they take their place in front, death and eternity right ahead of them. Soon they are joined by junior colleagues, visitors and recent tenure-track hires, dressed in plain black robes and ordinary mortar boards on loan from the wardrobe department in the basement of the college bookstore, the sole exception being their hats—whimsical beanies, boaters, derbies—that some of them wear to show that none of this is to be taken seriously.

  I walk downstairs and pause to check myself in the hall mirror by the front door. Blue robe, black piping, silver sash, black mortarboard, gold tassel. Pale skin, gray hair: dead white male walking. Student waiters scurry by, carrying trays of glasses out to the front porch. The smell of hors d’oeuvres reaches me from the kitchen, like the generic whiff of heated fodder that wafts down airplane corridors. I duck out of a waiter’s way, apologize, open the door for him. Where I have lived for twenty years is not my property. It comes with the job. Other presidents have lived in it before me and others will follow. I know that that’s true of other houses too; we’re all just passing through. But this house reminds you of it all the time, the formal parlor, the dark dining room, the uncluttered study. It’s the kind of place an undertaker buys.

  I step outside and feel the heat. August has two days remaining. I understand the intricacies of college calendars but part of me nonetheless resents the way we start in August. I remember when Labor Day was the end of summer. There was time for last walks on the beaches, barbecues outside vacation cottages, resort romances ending, the first thought of school supplies and new courses, flannel and corduroy to buy, Dr. Zhivago not yet read and now all of it’s gone the way of doubleheaders. I walk across the grass and greet the senior faculty.

  When did I come back, they ask. How was Maine this summer? Is my new home almost built? When will my wife be able to tear herself away from contractors? Isn’t it amazing how the weather cooperates when freshmen and their parents are here? How long has it been since rain forced us indoors? Once again, I am a president. No one more talked about, more closely observed, more deftly parodied. The average college president serves for seven years. I have been here nearly three times as long. If time itself were a monument, that would be mine. An almost unprecedented run. Can I be blamed for feeling proud?

  Ninety out of 120, not bad at all: faculty arrange themselves up and down the path. The smart alecks pick the side of the path which will lead them to the shady side of the stage. It won’t be long before we’re all sweating. Though summer pleasures end today, the heat continues. I detect mixed emotions in the conversations I hear, exchanged condolences on the end of summer. The long vacation begins with imperative books to read, manuscripts to write. But life gets in the way and lack of talent and loss of interest and today there’s a note of apology and relief, that the agony of freedom is over and more manageable pain is about to begin. Because: they’re back. They’re coming.

  They’re here. They march towards us, down the path. Call them matriculants, incoming students, underclassmen, first year students: only the word freshmen describes them. This, I confess, is a moment I love completely, this first glimpse of the young people who have chosen us. Oh yes, we’re a “highly selective” college. We accept—select—seventy percent of those who apply to us. Of those applications, slightly fewer than thirty percent (our “yield”) agree to come. We choose once, sort of. They choose twice, decisively.

  While we sweat in caps and gowns, freshmen pass by in shorts and wrinkled khaki trousers, short-sleeved shirts, t-shirts even, running shoes, sandals, flower print summer dresses, madras shirts, a few white shirts and ties, a few earrings and nose rings. What they are wearing, I grant, is roughly what their professors-to-be are wearing underneath their robes. It’s enough to make me doubly grateful: that clothing covers our bodies and that regalia covers our clothing. Amen and Amen again.

  Some students smirk as they pass by. What a goof, stepping through this gamut of faculty while bells toll—for them!—in the nearby chapel. Others are plainly moved; they sense beginnings and endings in their lives. Some—prep-school graduates, I suspect, though that may not be fair—plod along familiarly, institution-wise, like juveniles moved from a youthful offender facility to adult minimum security. Been there, seen it, done it. Many students just can’t decide, they’re giggly, they’re anxious, like newcomers at the edge of a party. Sometimes, I sense a trace of concern about being accepted, about fitting in and finding happiness and—very occasionally—I think I detect a concerned expression, the vestige of another time, when academic failure was something to worry about. These days, flunking out of college is rarer than breaking out of prison; also harder to accomplish.

  Now it’s our turn to parade. The junior faculty head towards the stage and then, in rough order of seniority, from mid-career to old timers, we follow. It must be like time-lapse photography, to see what professing does to the human body, turning spiky-haired theorists into fuddled curmudgeons. At first, there’s only grass and trees on either side of us. Then, things thicken. I see village people, up for the parade but keeping a safe distance from our oratory. Early arriving upperclassmen, football and soccer players reconnoiter the freshmen women while lounging on the grass. I see dogs and kids and faculty spouses, cheerfully paying their respects. I walk through parents pointing cameras my way, I walk through students. I take the stage. After the priest prepares the way for me, I arise and speak.

  “GOOD AFTERNOON!!! AND WELCOME to what has been and is and will continue to be the finest college of its kind!!!” An audacious claim. I repeat it. “The finest college of its kind. I know what you’re thinking. What does he mean by that? Some of you in front of me may wonder. Along with some of those behind....” This is when I turn and ponder the faculty, part sullen, part sycophant. People who talk for a living resent being forced to sit and listen. They know my performances in and out. Over the years I’ve repeated myself. As if they hadn’t!

  “Look around you,” I declare, in what is locally famous as my Brigham Young moment. “Consider this place, this hillside in the heartland, so central yet so remote, this hill and the river curving around below, these trees and lawns and college paths. Consider the sense of discovery you feel, when you come up the hill for the first time, when you discover this improbable, unexpected college-out-of-place. Consider that the trip you make today repeats the arrival of the college’s founder, more than a century and a half ago. And he—passionate, visionary—turned a dream into a fact, a desire into an imperative. Look around at his place. It is still his place. And now it is yours as well. You are part of the river of life that flows to, and through, here. You are newcomers, each of you, the latest but not the least, and not the last. You are part of something larger and older, a college rooted in a certain time and place. Ask me to define my terms. Well, that is part of it. This is not just any college!”

  I have built to a crescendo. Now I rest a bit. The founder president lasted less than two years here. He lost an argument with a faculty he couldn’t control, resigned in anger and rode off into exile, wintering in a relative’s cabin one county north of here. He never returned, died and was buried elsewhere.

  “My definition continues,” I resume. “It has to do with size. Though the college has grown, often against the odds, contending with a smallish endowment, limited resources, and a short list of graduates, however generous, our smallness—a choice enforced by circumstances—defines us.” Careful now, I remind myself. Watch your cadence, those balanced clauses, those cross cutting parenthetical asides.
Elegant and intelligent, that’s what they say about me. Slicker than snot on a doorknob.

  “We believe in small classes. We believe that what happens in class is only part—although the most important part—of what occurs between a professor and a student at a residential college. We believe in chance meetings, sidewalk seminars, casual conversation, the shared experience of life in a small place. Our faculty hold office hours, answer their own telephones and—now hear this!—grade papers the old-fashioned way, by hand, one paper at a time. If that kind of scrutiny makes you nervous, I can tell you, you are not alone. And I can add that the admissions people assure me your high school records, your test scores, your application essays and on-campus interviews suggest that you are among the most talented and diverse incoming classes in college history. So they tell me...” I pause, just a beat “...every year.”

  Relaxed laughter ripples across the crowd. I’m on the home stretch now, I smell the finish line and so does the audience: everyone’s relieved. The shirt beneath my robe is soaked from the collar down and my belt will be sweat-swollen and sodden when I pull it out of my trousers, loop by reluctant loop, half an hour from now. The breeze feels cool on wet skin and how often, in his chosen line of work, does a college president pour sweat? I love the illusion of honest labor! I love it so much that on this, my next to last convocation, I take an out of character gamble. I depart from the text that the faculty behind me know by heart. I do this for my own sake, not for theirs, and for the sake of this very journal I am keeping.

  “I travel a lot on college business,” I say, dropping my voice to the level of a confession. “And I come back late to various hotel rooms, I come back from meetings with trustees, with graduates, with foundations of all kinds, potential donors and prospective students and fellow presidents. I come back exhausted. There are no words left in me. I’ve lost not only the ability to talk—no loss there, some of you might say—but the ability to listen and, very likely, to think. So, what does your president do at, say, the O’Hare Ramada Inn?”

  A dozen faculty suggestions float into the air, obscene soap bubbles blowing across the stage, like words over the heads of cartoon characters: pornography, prostitutes, masturbation, phone sex. I sense unusual interest. I’m providing new material.

  “I turn on the television. Obscure sports events, late night talk shows, colorized movie classics, cable shopping. And, recently, a certain ad. It’s an ad—you’ve all seen them—for DeVry Technical Institute. I believe that’s the correct name and I apologize if I have it wrong. The ad features a map of the U.S. that lights up, to show the institute’s many locations. That’s impressive: a school that moves and shifts and replicates. But what impresses me most is the parade of graduates who appear on the screen, looking up from microscopes, seated behind computers, carrying rolled up blueprints that look like diplomas. These are happy, hardworking people whose lives have all been made better by education at DeVry’s. DeVry’s helped them find jobs and earn money and make a mark. Their education has been a transaction from which both sides, buyer and seller, have profited. In short: a good deal.

  “I wish, oh how I wish, this college could offer the same straightforward assurances. But, truthfully, we cannot. What we attempt here is different, riskier, trickier. Success is harder to measure here. A lifetime can pass and all the returns aren’t in yet. We don’t teach marketable skills here, specific trades and vocations. Though many of our graduates prosper, we cannot guarantee the kind of immediate return on investment that some places promise. Your presence here is more than an investment. It is an act of faith. And the faith is that a deeper and human engagement with the liberal arts will serve you and enrich you in a way that goes far beyond the job that you get and the work that you do, in today’s marketplace and tomorrow’s. We’re interested not just in what you do, but in who you are. And that, ladies and gentlemen, defines us.”

  I nod towards the crowd and linger at the podium while the applause builds. It always half-surprises me, though it’s never failed. Snake oil salesman! Flack! Flim-flam man! Shill! Charlatan! Those are shouts I hear in my head. And when I look at the applauding students and their parents, I half expect to see someone raising a hand to ask me the name of that institute I mentioned, could I please spell it for them?

  At the post-convocation reception, I position myself on the front lawn, mingling with parents, greeting them genially, introducing them to appropriate professors. Attendance is decent but the party doesn’t last long. It’s mid-afternoon and, unless they go soon, the parents will have to stay the night and that would feel wrong because the whole point of the day is about saying goodbye. I can read these parents’ eyes, see them wondering if there’s anything more they can do, some little thing, a conversation with me that might help down the road, the personal touch we advertise: “The president told us that early grades are low; he told us himself, his first paper in college came back with an F.” And, behind it all, deep in their eyes, the sense of departure, minutes away. Act of faith.

  When the guests are gone and only caterers remain, empty trays, empty glasses on empty tables, I step inside, into the living room we added a few years ago. Living room is a phrase I ordinarily resist. But in this house, the word applies. The other rooms are public spaces, designed for entertaining, where selected strangers stand and drink, sit and eat, hang their coats, relieve themselves, dry their hands on college towels, check their faces in college mirrors. Only the living room is mine. It has a television and a soft chair with a good reading lamp, a pile of magazines and books on the floor. Alumni like to send me books they think I should read. Most come from old timers who contribute volumes on the politicization and dumbing down of higher education. Just what I need at the end of the day. Titles like “Poison Ivy” and “The Tenure Trap,” published by institutes with furniture store names: Republican Heritage, American Traditions.

  I stretch out in my chair, settle into the afternoon itself. When late sunlight slants across the campus, every window frames a painting, a late summer/early autumn mix of green and gold. Stone walls, oaks and hemlock, grass and a few fallen leaves. The sun gets richer by the moment, even as it declines towards the hills on the other side of the river. Late afternoon. If my career were one day, it would be around this time now. Autumn of the President. A hundred yards away is the college cemetery, where three college presidents repose. It’s not so many, three out of eighteen, but some stormed away and others were forced out. What’s more, there’s an unwritten law about college presidents: once you resign, you leave. Hilton Head and Scottsdale beckon. Sometimes I picture a retirement community that’s just for former college presidents, poolside drinks at happy hour, merry old duffers swapping their favorite tenure-denial stories.

  As usual at college functions, I’ve eaten just enough to ruin my appetite. Everything is thrown off. At dusk, it is too late to nap, too early to sleep. My wife, if she were here, would urge me to walk the dog around campus. In her absence, and the dog’s, this stroll is something I cannot undertake. I head upstairs. I take off my shoes and stretch out on the bed. The day went well, I suppose. The only hiccup was mine: that angst about DeVry’s. I came out of it strongly, though. Act of faith. DeVry’s positions its graduates in the market place. At our school, we study history, we consider eternity. So: act of faith. I roll over. Lying on my back is like lying in state. I glance towards the bathroom. I must have left the door open, the light on, though that isn’t like me. And it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me at all. I see ACT OF FAITH written on the mirror in a pinkish-red lipstick my wife favors. Her lipstick but not her handwriting. Someone else’s. ACT OF FAITH and, just below it, YOU ASSHOLE!

  Trembling, stunned, I walk slowly towards the bathroom. I am an actor in a cheap scene, not of my devising, seeing what someone has wanted me to discover, walking forward as someone has meant for me to do, just like this, afraid, just as it was meant I should be afraid, wondering if someone might be waiting for me in the bathroom, behind the door or
the shower curtain. I pause, I hesitate. “Don’t go in there,” I can hear an audience shouting. I nonetheless proceed. The room is empty. ACT OF FAITH. YOU ASSHOLE! I wet a washrag and wipe the mirror. ACT OF FAITH goes first. Then I am looking at myself in the mirror. YOU ASSHOLE! remains, like a caption below a photograph. A few more wipes delete it. The room is as before yet everything feels different. Who would consider me an asshole? I wring out the washrag under the faucet, turn to towel off my hand and see something on the top of the toilet. A library card, a firm plastic card with the sort of bar code that gets passed over supermarket scanners. And a name: Martha Yeats. What an anticlimax! A history professor, outspoken and cause-oriented, the loosest cannon on campus, the kind of tenured radical conservative critics denounce.

  I take the card into the bedroom, placing it next to the bedside phone. Another Martha stunt. I’m expected to react, to come down hard. That would make me a male authoritarian. Not to react would make me soft and gutless, another “suit.” A lose-lose situation. I decide to wait. This is a company town, a residential college, I remind myself, and Martha is tenured. She isn’t the kind of problem you solve. With Martha, you live and manage. “Hi Martha,” I will say, tomorrow or the next day. “It’s Warren Niles. I found your library card.”

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