Homeland Elegies(106)
Four years later, though, her frustration had given way to compassion. Most of her students, she now recognized, were dealing with some very real form of anxiety or depression—or both. They trusted no one and expected that everyone and everything was taking advantage of them. As Mary saw it, they weren’t wrong. The university was a case in point: Tuition had risen another 4 percent the year prior. Inflation was below 2 percent. Why the gap? Because the college had taken on more debt to build a new gym and renovate the faculty club. Better facilities attracted better teachers and students, justifying higher tuitions; more cash flow meant the college had an excuse to take on more debt. This vicious cycle was being passed on to the students: the cost of coming to campus had just broken $70,000. Her students were carrying more debt than she thought many would ever be able to repay. It made sense that they didn’t want to work for their educations anymore. They were paying more than most Americans made in a year; wasn’t that work enough? College was now a customer experience, not a pedagogical one; and what the college customer wanted was only what had been advertised to lure them: physical comforts, moral reassurance, unceasing approbation. Mary believed deep down they knew it was a con, knew they were marks, knew not to trust a world that was now nothing more than a marketplace—but no trust in the world meant they had no basis for trusting themselves. Her students spent so much of their time in class—when they weren’t on their phones—wondering what was real that it was hard to arrive at a discussion of anything substantial. Platitudes and pornography commanded their days. As she saw it, much of her work now was about teaching them cognitive basics: how to recognize what was worth paying attention to; how to suffer through boredom; how to discern rhetoric from reality, discomfort from defense.
All this came up in the conversation we had at her six-acre homestead twenty minutes outside of campus, where I showed up on an unseasonably warm morning in March of 2019 and found her in the vegetable garden, tending to the soil. Her work in the garden was like meditation, she said as we headed for the house, which was something else she was making more time for every day. “And I finally got rid of my smartphone. Strictly a flip phone for me now.”
“Hard to text on those, isn’t it?”
“Small price to pay for my brain,” she said, holding open the door to a mudroom filled with gardening tools. In the kitchen, as she filled the kettle for tea, she shared the latest news from the Muslim student union: I was already aware she’d visited with some of the students there, aware she’d discovered none of them knew much about me or my work other than what they’d been told by the young pornographer in training’s cousin. I was also already aware that Mary encouraged them to read some of my writing and, if they still had issues, to pen a letter she would deliver to me, which I’d agreed to respond to in public. What was new was that the letter hadn’t yet arrived because something else just happened: overnight, posters depicting me against a photograph of the burning towers appeared around campus. Mary believed they were inspired by a similar poster depicting Representative Ilhan Omar that had gone up in West Virginia a few weeks earlier; she pulled open a kitchen drawer and laid a crinkled eight-by-ten color image on the table between us. She was right: it was more or less the same image used in the Omar poster—a photo of me, seated, superimposed awkwardly beneath the image of the towers on fire. The caption along the bottom read: PROUD OF 9/11.
I couldn’t hide my shock. “How many of them are up on campus?” I asked.
“We don’t know exactly, but the kids from the Muslim student union went around, found a dozen or so, took them all down. Now that this is happening, they’re getting behind you.”
“Jesus.”
“I spoke to the dean this morning. We’ll have security with us today and tomorrow morning for our talk.”
“I doubt that’s necessary.”
“Maybe not, but I don’t want to take any chances.”
*
That afternoon, I sat in on Mary’s senior seminar while two security officers stood guard outside the classroom door. Inside, a dozen of her students led a discussion about that week’s reading assignment: Whitman’s Democratic Vistas. They were all startled that the poet’s portrait of the nation 150 years ago was one they still recognized, a country of endless energy, enterprise, and breadth—both natural and human—but ensnared in a materialism from which it couldn’t seem to escape. Back then, Whitman worried America’s preoccupation with the business of making money would lead to the failure of its historic political mission. On his remedy, the students were less agreed. Most thought Whitman naive to believe that future American poets and writers could inspire the nation to a nobler idea than money, something higher that could inspire us all to put our material abundance to more generous use. Some of the students did not believe there was a remedy; for them, the die was cast; remunerative individualism was our national character; we would never overcome it. For others, the looming climate crisis would provide the necessary larger idea. Change was coming to the system because it would have to. Only Mary still believed that art would play an essential part. I found the session engaging and invigorating, and when it was over, I told Mary I didn’t recognize the students she was so worried about in that classroom. An embarrassed smile crept across her lips: “I don’t want to take too much credit. But I have had all of them for at least two semesters before they take that seminar. We’ve had time to get into the practice of thinking.”