Woody Allen says
you can’t believe
them when they say
you’re good if you
didn’t believe them
when they said you
weren’t. In my case,
it was the
reverse. I couldn’t say they didn’t know
what
they were talking
about when they said I wasn’t good enough
if I believed them
when they said I graduated magna cum laude,
made Phi Beta Kappa,
was an Outstanding Senior, and won
a University
Fellowship to FSU. If Tulane were right
to accept me,
they were right to
hassle me into quitting by failing me on my comps,
damning me with
faint praise, giving me B’s instead of A’s
(in one case, giving
me an F). They must be right. They were
the experts. They were objective. I was too close to it.
I had too much skin
in the game. I now think
they deliberately
accepted more students
then they planned to
graduate to get
the tuition money. The matching funds.
Knowing they weren’t
going to graduate us.
They were dealing in
bad faith.
We were pawns in
their turf wars.
We were cannon
fodder. Aristocrats don’t care
about the hoi
polloi. They were from Harvard.
We were from state
schools, or the great books school
(
fluent Trobriand by
reading Malinowski’s field notes.
We heard him say
so. And fell out laughing.
That was it for
us. We disrespected him.
Me and Brenda and
Larry Schlueter.
We were expelled
like pork fat from a goose.
Projectile
defecation.