Nancy and Bartleby

So how, you might ask, could Nancy possibly pass her defense? For too long this question had sorely perplexed me. I had to find out more.

Since I knew the name of her committee chair, Bart Bartleby, I decided to google him. What I found out would chill a snow wasp. Bartleby had once belonged to a self-help group called “Asperger’s Anonymous.” With this information, I went to their web site and posted a call for information on academics that had attended their meetings. Not long after I received a call from a certain Harvey Kennedy, who was down on his luck and had been reduced to trolling dumpsters for returnable emptys, and rolling middle class drunks with his trashy protégé, Lulu. Lulu, a once promising Yoga guru and figure skating prodigy, had python-like quads and carpish calves. Harvey would rouse them with satanic verses, at which point Lulu would pounce, crushing them into unconsciousness with her limbic constrictors. Once subdued, the hapless dipsomaniacs were quickly relieved of their money, keys, and credit cards.

Now Lulu was gone, and Harvey needed money. He showed up at my Devill Hall office wearing beach thongs, a bathrobe, and a rosary.

What he remembered was Bartleby’s confessions to his afflicted brethren. Bartleby spoke of the weird unhealthy bond that took shape between Nancy and himself. How they had stolen and shared food from the faculty-grad orientation, putting mayonnaise and ketchup in napkins, which they would bring out in his office hour. They would then smear the condiments on their faces and talk about Rogerian dialectics and the Detroit Red Wings. This didn’t surprise me, as Nancy had spoken more than once of her hockey days. Before she tore her transverse colon, she had showed much promise in the nets with the Adirondack Copralites, or so she claimed. It was Bartleby’s complicity in Nancy’s advancement that made this insane story possible.

The high functioning autism that defines Aspergers is well suited to the academic temperament. Aspergers Syndromites often have above-average intelligence (Bartleby was a M.E.N.S.A. member), a photographic memory and natural affinity with numbers (Bartleby could figure out 4 Rubic’s Cubes simultaneously with each of his arms and legs in under a minute), and are extraordinarily skilled at foot massage (it was said that Bartleby once worked exclusively for Miss Divine).

Engaging in ordinary conversation, making appropriate eye contact, and understanding body language present social problems for those afflicted with Aspergers. Bartleby confessed to all that sometimes he lived in his office for weeks and months, carefully sneaking out only when the janitors made their appointed rounds. He railed about his office not having a bathroom (he used an old Folgers coffee can for a bedpan), and complained that the quality of the furniture was beneath someone of his intellectual stature. He lamented that, when offered help, he reacted with rage and indignation. He once bragged of putting psychedelic mushrooms on the pizzas of underling secretaries who dared defy him, laughing as they rolled away a hysterical administrative grad coordinator.

For Bartleby, Nancy served as proof of his normalcy. Failing her would have been an admission of his inadequacies. While rudely dismissing anyone unable to measure up to his lofty standards, he fawned on Nancy and, like some kind of academic Frankenstein, created a freak of higher education. A collegial monster who instead of ravishing the countryside, inculcates shock and awe in the minds of those naïve freshmen foolish enough not to drop her class.

Bartleby once quipped that he sat in on a class where she conducted a simulated domestic crisis where a distraught live-in adult child gave his Alzheimered mother a torturously painful pedicure while plying her with Everclear. Bartleby saw this as amusing, and as perfectly acceptable at a university where someone like him had achieved lifetime tenure.

Who cares about the quality of instruction, having illiterate wackos like Nancy constantly reappointed ensures that crackpots like Bartleby can flourish. It’s pedagogical competency and commitment that threatens our universities Bartlebys.