12. Suicide Grades - Lords of Serendipity

They met a week later, on a Friday evening, at an Italian restaurant near campus. Cold and dark outside. Warm and dark inside. Candles on the tables, dim yellow pendants hanging from bleached-out rafters. Joyful jazz music playing. Christmas twelve days away, and everyone flushed and chatty. All the tables were taken, so Jack and Helen sat at the hammered copper bar.

Five or seven ounce? the bartender asked Helen.

You don’t have a nine-ounce glass?

Why not a half bottle?

Then what’s he going to drink? I’m just kidding. A five-ounce glass of the Syrah, please. Actually, let’s go with the seven-ounce.

The bartender laughed and raised his eyebrows at Jack, to see if he was up for this.

Jack absolutely was.

Actually, after the day I just had, I’m the one who needs the half bottle . . .

Tell you what, said the bartender. I’ll bring you a half of the Syrah and two glasses and let’s just go from there. Deal?

Helen and Jack smiled at each other, enjoying the easy secret-sharing the bartender was making possible.

Deal.

Deal.

So.

So.

You first.

No, Helen, please. I insist. You could tell me one of the moons of Jupiter fell on campus today and my day was still worse.

Helen told him she would skip the latest about the ongoing student encampment around the Immunology Department’s dormouse glirarium. Instead, she told him about a situation in a fine arts studio course where a professor had given students the option of either submitting a handmade sculpture or giving him a five-minute shoulder massage as their final assignment.

Unbelievable, Jack said.

The wine arrived. They clinked glasses wordlessly, briskly even, ardent to keep to the current game. To keep things here and now. Not recall those few seconds of brushing past each other silently, smiling shyly, going in and out of a beachfront shower stall at Rehoboth, years before, everyone else still making their way up from the water, everyone else still marveling at the sight of the man who was drowning and not calling for help because in fact it was a seal thrashing a fish. No one noticing anything because there was nothing to notice in their bodies brushing together, holding things, just a moment. Wordlessly. Nothing at all.

Nearly nothing at all.

It happened again, in Helen’s kitchen, a little while later, when the two of them were clearing plates together while Nick and Elizabeth chatted in the dining room. And then, one time, but only that one time, in Jack’s pantry, when Helen followed him downstairs, both of them looking for more tonic water. They were down there for a while. What happened was more than just wordless brushing, more than just a moment.

And now, years later, both widowed and having never discussed any of that with each other, Helen and Jack made the decision to enjoy half a bottle of wine together, and for that long, not ask or tell about anything else.

Helen took a long sip, nodded to herself, and continued.

But guess what happened when he gave the students the massage option?

The students went online about it.

Well duh, yes. There’s an online petition. Hundreds of signatures already. Luckily no livestreaming like with the glirarium encampment. According to IT, most of the signatures aren’t even from Arcadia. But guess what else happened?

What?

Half the class chose the massage option.

Really?

Yes. All the male students.

And?

And now the professor’s on medical leave. Muscle spasms. He sent in a doctor’s note and never submitted the grades. Apparently he’s gone back to Turkey and we can’t reach him, which means all those students are in limbo and demanding SGs.

SG?

Consider yourself fortunate, Jack, that after this many years of teaching at Arcadia Tech, you don’t know what SG stands for.

Are you going to tell me?

She took another sip of her wine, a long sip. Jack did the same.

Did you want to order some food, Helen?

She was drinking fast. And how thin she was, her clavicles showing just above her black scoop-neck shirt. Beautiful clavicles. The bone jewelry of a warrior queen.

Suicide grades, she said.

What?

SG. That’s what the students call it on Reddit. The formal term, in policy, is the Compassionate Grading Protocol, reserved for situations in which an extreme, unexpected event significantly impacts every enrolled student in a course. This could be something like an active shooter, or a terrorist attack, or credible threats of class-specific violence. In the past, it was used when a professor became gravely ill or died during the semester and couldn’t be replaced. But these days, it usually comes up when a student commits suicide. And sometimes when it’s a professor.

I see why I’m fortunate now, yes.

And I hope it stays that way. Anyway, all of the students are demanding it.

Which means what, specifically?

An automatic A minus.

And the university allows this?

It’s been policy for years and students finally seem to have noticed. Most professors clearly have no idea.

How many? How many were in the massage class? Did you say hundreds?

No. Hundreds have signed the petition. Twelve are in the class.

Jack snorted.

You’re not impressed by my day.

Jack grinned, the overlaps of his big front teeth making him look especially boyish.

This afternoon, he said, there took place the final exam for STA 105.

Uh-oh.

He nodded, beaming.

Twelve hundred enrolled, two sittings: eight hundred in the old arena, and four hundred in the Test Accommodation Center. And guess what happened?

Not a fire alarm. I would have heard about that already. And probably it wasn’t a grab-and-go or I would have received an incident report. Let me guess. Someone had one of those ear implants to get the answers from an online tutor and they forgot to charge the battery and it began beeping? I love that one.

Really? You love it?

What do you mean?

When you hear about what students are doing these days, it doesn’t bother you? All this cheating?

It really used to upset me when I started this job, Jack. And how little we can do about it. The online services change names constantly. The tech is always getting better. But also, the university doesn’t want to try too hard here.

Meaning?

Meaning, Arcadia Tech isn’t Dartmouth, it isn’t Haven. We don’t have a massive endowment or lots of big donors. The university more or less runs on tuition from international students these days.

And?

And pretty much everyone caught cheating is an international student these days. You’re the statistician, Jack.

You’re saying there’s a near-perfect correlation coefficient between being an international student and cheating at Arcadia Tech?

No. But remember the immense pressure these kids are under.

You mean, because of what’s happening in Washington?

No. The Republicans hold their hearings and make their speeches and cut funding and arrest people and fire people, but do you notice, they only attack the best schools? Where all of them went and, I guarantee it, want their children to go? All this chaos to get rid of international students, yes it’s politics, but also, they’re freeing up spots for their own kids and their friends’ and donors’ kids. Whereas I’m talking about all the ordinary international students who go to places like Arcadia Tech. The ones who don’t have the luxury of protesting. For a lot of them, it’s not really about university.

Going to university isn’t really about university?

It’s probably true for most American kids too, at this point. At least at the better schools. But for the international students we teach, it’s not a lifestyle thing, or an experience, or a four-year networking event. They’re very, very expensive anchors for their families.

It’s an immigration scheme?

Or it’s American universities helping the nation create a highly skilled workforce with the best talent from around the world.

The way you say that, I almost believe you.

Well it is believable, isn’t it? But if the university makes a big show of catching all of these students who will do whatever it takes to pass their courses, then Arcadia will get a bad reputation among the people otherwise still willing to send us their life savings. So fewer will apply, which means less revenue, which also means more program closures, hiring freezes, staff redundancies. Remember History, English, Philosophy?

The departments that became Cultural Expression and Action.

Yes. And what happens next?

The same thing that happened to the foreign language departments. I heard that some of them started working for Duolingo.

Au revoir, tous les amis.

So you need to let the students cheat to keep the university going.

It’s more complicated than that, Jack. We still pursue hundreds of cheating cases a year. In fact STA 105 is really important to us for this. We catch a lot of students from that course alone. But cheating’s happening all over the place in higher education these days, and whenever one of the trustees reads something in The Atlantic about what’s gone wrong with the university, which is all the time, we get pressure to do something. We also get it from whistleblower students, who are also all international. Another of your . . .

Correlative coefficients.

Thank you. So there’s that, and I’m doing whatever else I can to help keep this place going. So cheating students forgetting to charge their ear devices? Yes, that’s funny at this point. Because if I’m not laughing, I’m probably just giving up. To answer your question, yes, it definitely used to upset me, Jack.

But not anymore.

She shrugged her slender shoulders and looked right at him.

Things callus over. Other things become more important. Don’t they?

He looked away.

After a moment, she tapped him on his arm, smiling.

Hey. It’s a nice night. We’re enjoying a glass of wine. And we’re blowing off steam after a long day and a long semester. Let’s keep going, shall we?

Okay. Shall we order more wine?

Yes!

Jack asked for another half bottle.

So, said Helen. You were saying? About what happened in your STA 105 exam?

Yes. A student who took STA 105 three years ago tried to take the exam today. I have no idea how he got past the check-in table, but he sat down like everyone else, and when the proctor asked for his student ID he grabbed the exam and ran to a different chair and began writing. He kept doing this, all around the arena. He kept saying he had to rewrite it, he just had to rewrite it. Eventually he went out a back door, which set off the emergency exit alarm. Then guess what he did?

Why would anyone be that desperate to write the STA 105 exam again?

He went to the Test Accommodation Center—

Oh no.

Yeah. And he did it there too, trying to force open doors, banging on windows.

Where is he now?

Nobody knows. He took off, with the exam.

Oh no!

Yeah.

You know what this means, right?

Jack grinned. It means I had a crazier day than you!

Helen shook her head. No, Jack, it means we have many crazy days ahead of us. You’re probably going to get twelve hundred EIPs, which means I’m probably going to get twelve hundred EIP approvals. What did you call that?

A perfect correlation coefficient.

Jack took a long sip of wine. He felt fizzy. He was grinning. They were making fun of the university together, like they used to.

Helen, tell me, what does EIP stand for? Can I guess? “Equity, Inclusivity . . . Principles”? “Practices”? “Program”?

No, Jack. And please, please don’t become another middle-aged white guy telling everybody he’s not racist or sexist or homophobic or Islamophobic, that he just has some questions about DEI. Don’t start forwarding me links to Wall Street Journal weekend interviews and invitations to online meetings about the real enemies of academic freedom, and please don’t tell me all about these amazing podcasts and Substacks you get from failed tenure cases and fired journalists, some of them even women, okay? Don’t tell me that you didn’t vote for him but you understand why people did. I’m not having a glass of wine with that guy, am I, Jack?

Jack had listened to Helen with the bright-eyed, then dead-eyed look of a child sucking on a licorice whip that turned out to be a snake, a gun, a gun in his mouth. His first date in decades was asking him why he had a gun in his mouth.

Jack swallowed.

I mean, Helen said, finishing her glass, Evan’s already enough these days.

Evan? Your son? Meaning?

He’s gone over.

As in?

Conservative. Right wing. The Drama of the Gifted Child didn’t prepare me for this.

But isn’t Evan—

You can be gay and conservative, Jack. You’ve never heard of Andrew Sullivan? You’ve never heard of the Catholic Church? Anyway, Evan’s vice president of the Dartmouth Republicans. He reviews television shows for The Dartmouth Review. He goes to a Latin Mass. He says it’s just for the vibe but I’m not sure. And, Jack, I think he’s becoming a natalist.

Gay and natalist?

But Jack quickly plotted it out.

Actually, there’s a logic to that.

There’s a logic to lots of terrible things in the world, Jack. I just didn’t expect my son to go to college and get behind them.

No. I’m sorry.

Thanks. So. To continue. EIP. It stands for “Examination Invalidation Petition.” When, for reasons beyond a student’s control, the conditions under which they wrote an exam are unusual and unexpected in the extreme, such that they were not able to complete the exam as a matter of course, the student is granted a prorated final grade minus the exam portion or a default grade of seventy-six, whichever is higher. All twelve hundred students are going to ask for this. And policy requires an individual meeting with each student, first at the instructor level and then at the decanal level. You and me both. You’re the statistician. What are the chances we’ll have a free night again before April?

Helen called the bartender over and asked for more wine and also for the menu.

Jack looked at her, confused.

She smiled. You forgot my research area, didn’t you.

No I didn’t. Fin de siècle French history.

Good memory, Jack. And as part of my work in that area, I know that people tend to intensify their enjoyment of life when they feel like the world around them is going to end soon. So, my research-informed position is that this may be our last free night. Who knows what’s coming next for us. So we might as well enjoy tonight.

Sitting straight up, not even thinking to ask about the end of the university, the end of the world, Jack asked, Can we enjoy two nights maybe?

Jack. We haven’t talked about anything real yet. And I don’t want to right now. I want to enjoy some wine. Slowly slowly, please.

Same, Helen, believe me. I just meant, tomorrow I’m driving up to Haven to see Katrina in the Christmas Gaudy. She’s playing Reynard, just like Elizabeth did. Do you want to come?