Question (from "Jeremiah"): Last year our department at "Ordinary U" fired a faculty member ("Purvis"). Given legal considerations, we were not told why, nor will we be told. But I heard the same story from many sources, including faculty friends and students in various offices. It's said that Purvis had some inappropriate interactions with a female student, though nothing physical ever happened. He found a temporary position at "Nearby U," where he is working now. I saw his vita online, and he fabricated parts of it, including courses he supposedly taught for us that we do not even offer or that he did not teach when he was here.
Given that his behavior seems to be a pattern of deception and puts students at risk, I want to communicate something to Nearby U, to make sure they do not give him a full-time position. Since I cannot speak with any authority about the offense that caused his firing, I have thought of sending them a copy of his vita with classes marked that he never taught and that we don't offer, hoping this will prod them to look into his background. Our administrators do not feel they can say anything, due to legal constraints, which also causes my partner some concern about my idea. However, doesn't someone have an obligation to try to protect the students where he is currently teaching? If so, who and how?
Answer: And if so, should the whistle-blower be you?
Ms. Mentor thinks the story you're telling is this: Purvis was dismissed from Ordinary U for unexplained reasons, and now has a temporary job at Nearby U. That's all you know for sure.
Out of this you've constructed a much larger epic, in which the villainous Purvis behaved badly with a female student and was rightly fired for his egregious sins. Since he's a hopelessly heinous character, he puffed up his vita with courses he hadn't taught—thereby conning Nearby U into hiring him, the varlet. You, the avenging angel, want to tattle to Nearby U because you're convinced that his evil nature will put students "at risk" in some undefined but horrible way.
Ms. Mentor thinks you have a marvelous, but perhaps overactive, imagination. The academic grapevine is one of the strongest, hungriest beasts on earth. It is always craving new and more tasty morsels—which may not be the best, or truest, things for anyone's digestion.
If, for instance, Purvis paid for a student's lunch a couple of times, Ms. Mentor knows you would hear speculation about "afternoon delights"—even if their conversation, overheard, was about incunabula and palimpsests.
Often the gossip is so lurid because the facts are so tepid.
Ms. Mentor admits that Purvis may have done something wrong to somebody. If he was dismissed in the middle of a semester, maybe there were drugs, felonies, or intimate photos. But you don't say that the firing was abrupt.
Is it possible that there were budget cuts, and so Purvis had to go? Did Purvis have an illness or disability, with a legal right to privacy? Is Purvis so handsome, or obnoxious, that the rumor mill had to provide a more interesting and memorable explanation? Do we even know for sure that "legal reasons" were involved?
Ms. Mentor feels her mental wires untangling and retangling.
She also wonders how Purvis's vita, even if he did lie, puts students "at risk." You haven't indicated that Purvis was a bad teacher—or a good one. And even someone whose powerful enemies consider him a corrupter and promoter of evil and subversive ideas can be a great, earth-moving teacher. Consider Socrates, or Jesus.
Ms. Mentor is more worried about you. When she mentioned your letter in very veiled form at an academic meeting, audience members thought "stalker" and "vendetta." Ms. Mentor is all in favor of gossipy curiosity—what are Google and Facebook for?—but the search for tidbits about others can consume your life, and not in a good way. It is too easy to become a fanatic about the crudities of Wikipedia, the infelicities of bloggers, and the horrors of RateMyProfessors.com. It's also easy to conclude that they're all out to get you.
It is called a Web, after all.
It's also possible that Purvis's vita was mishandled by an online gremlin. Or maybe he is an arrant liar who made it all up. Or maybe Nearby U hired him in a last-minute frenzy ("gotta cover those extra freshman-comp sections"). Some unscrupulous departments have been known to seize bookstore clerks and baristas and throw them in front of English 101. If Purvis, or some hapless transmitter of his information, claimed he had an expertise in Balkan politics or Etruscan pottery—it would not matter in English 101. While it galls Ms. Mentor and you that he may have lied, it may do no harm. He may be a knave, or he may be a flake.
Ms. Mentor thinks you need to move on from the Case of Jeremiah versus Purvis. She admires your energy in the pursuit of justice and thinks you could turn your talents to making a better world, outside the web of academic thread-pulling.
Whatever you teach, for instance, could include some service learning—harnessing students' energies, learning how the world really works and what really matters. See, for instance, Service-Learning: Engineering in Your Community by Marybeth Lima and William C. Oakes (Oxford University Press).
You can also apply your interest in the pursuit of justice in other ways. Go to school-board meetings and ask righteous questions. You are a taxpaying citizen who doesn't want your money frittered away on, for instance, ignorant brouhahas about "creationism." You can join a church, synagogue, or mosque and volunteer for its social-justice component. You can run for office, or work for or against a political candidate. Ms. Mentor thinks every sentient academic should write a letter to the editor, at least once a year.
The anti-Purvis campaign has given you some experience (though not the kind you should put on your vita). Consider it your private internship in fact-gathering and choosing not to spin the truth. Think of Sir Walter Scott's mighty lines: "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive!"
Use your power wisely, and weave only the webs you can use, the symmetrical and lacy ones. The others make a slimy splat.
Question A colleague has execrable table manners. I feel I have to speak up and say something.
Answer: What?
Sage readers: Once Ms. Mentor's last column, on academic novels, was picked up by Arts & Letters Daily, a herd of new responders nominated other books and appealed the judges' grades. One reader protested that Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals deserves more than a B-plus, since it is "satirical gold." Another ambivalently protested the B-minus for A.S. Byatt's Possession: "It's unforgettable if a bit long-winded."
Ms. Mentor's judges remain impeccable and incorruptible, and next year's "Ackies" (awards for academic novels) will include the new nominees. Readers pining for summer suggestions may check Ms. Mentor's long list. She will be pleased—and astonished—to hear from any worthy souls who've read them all.
Meanwhile, no one has commented on the ethics of portraying a real, identifiable person in an academic novel. In these barbarous times, Ms. Mentor wonders if there are no secrets, anyway—and that the only real insult is to make someone invisible. It used to be possible to administer a primal face-to-face insult by pretending not to know someone. But now you can silently unfriend them from your Facebook page, or change your status from "in a relationship" to "whatever I can get."
As always, Ms. Mentor welcomes queries, gossip, and rants. She regrets that she can rarely answer letters personally, and never swiftly. All communications are confidential, with details made murky in published columns. No one will know what gaucheries are hidden from your official vita, nor what frivolities have been introduced (not by you, of course) into your Wikipedia entry.
(c) Emily Toth
