It wasn’t long before your grandmother’s trial by harassment started. It began with inane attempts to remind her that freedom of speech was tenuous at best and there was a price for its responsible exercise. For starters, the harassment vehicles were intimidation and symbolic acts. Names have been changed for obvious reasons.
[S]hortly after her meeting with the Sporadic leadership, SL was summoned to report to the social studies department, where she was to meet with its department head, Mr. Atlas. The note was coincidently delivered by messenger at, of all places, Mr. Swibach’s class. Swibach, who was never good at effective disguises, smirked as he handed her the message.
It was becoming clear that the hallowed halls of learning were rumbling about her bold article. She wondered about the stranger, Mr. Atlas. As she walked to the forum where apostates were evidently punished, SL moved from the mindset of student to irate tax-payer.
There was an unanswered question that had not been settled in her mind: if the newspapers had been confiscated and burned, why was Mr. Weldon silent and sitting on a good story? It was as if the whole thing hadn’t happened. In her mind’s eye, she was seeing the effects of a cover-up.
Mr. Atlas was unfriendly as he ushered in the offending student, who had the audacity to lift the scab from Swibach’s “sore-wounded” political science class. Once he established a preliminary exchange, Atlas launched into an informal, interrogatory inquisition.
Atlas rhetorically asked SL what business she had in presenting herself as a “foreign affairs expert.” Without waiting for an answer, he made a terminal thrust: “What are your credentials!”
If this was meant to “shock and awe” her, he could have spared himself the time and effort. SL had walked in the company of certified intimidators for the last eight years, as a political activist and a human relations representative. She had left quaking and shaking reactions at the door of Sacred Heart Church, where ten years earlier she had begun her growing-into-womanhood process.
SL calmly looked at the man whose salary she and her neighbors were paying, and replied that she was a homeowner and taxpayer and those were her credentials. Besides, she calmly asserted, she wasn’t aware that one had to be “credentialed” to make reasoned judgments about world events.
Atlas backed down and muttered something about the need to allow all views to be heard on a college campus. SL would have agreed, except she knew first hand that all views were not being presented in her political science class and elsewhere on campus, but she prudently acquiesced to respectful silence.
Having briefly chided SL for her audacious article, Atlas dismissed her with the addendum to stick to news articles which were orientated to “student interests.” As she walked back to class, SL mulled over the use of the phrase, “student interests.” Mr. Weldon had said earlier that they would have to focus on “student interests.”
Obviously, the social studies department held sway on the matter of her pesky article. She wondered, without wishing to probe, if Mr. Melton had suffered a diminishment of his ability to reach personal teaching goals.
SL decided at that moment one should not step foot on a campus until they had lived in the world for at least five years. In her thirties, SL looked on campus life as a kind of extended play pen where human growth was arrested for four years, so as to conditionally mold young-adult minds, rather than form them into truly free, balanced thinkers.
SL hadn’t time to think about the new/old journalism. Time changes all things. She eventually would find ways to redirect the spotlight on the SDS, through “student interest” articles. In an ironic twist of fate, she would later be recalled to the Social Studies department. This time Atlas would ask for her help.
The whole mess irritated SL. The world was going up in flames and the stranger in the social studies department wanted her to write solely about campus life. The irony gripped her heart as she returned to Swibach’s class.
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