Leaving Beaver for Camp Meeker

As much as I loved Hawaii, finding out that my number two, Seymour Lutsky, had been in the CIA for the last ten years (ever since finishing his Ph.D at Iowa) and being miffed that the promised $13,500 salary had been peremptorily cut back to $11,000 without so much as an aye oh, and because my wife hated the dinky house in Manoa that Charles Bouslog, the interim American Studies director, had rented for us sight unseen, I decided to quit the best job I have ever had.

It was tricky, being several thousand miles away from potential jobs. Only two materialized: at SUNY, Purchase and at Beaver College, a former Presbyterian female college outside Philadelphia. Carnegie Mellon professor Erwin Steinberg, who would later get me a U.S.Office of Education grant to pioneer media use in English classrooms, touted me to his friend the Dean, Margaret LeClair. She and Edward Gates the president had just consolidated the dual campus (the old site in Jenkintown and the new one in Glenside).

I loved the Castle, where the interviewing was done. It had been designed by the famous Philadelphia architect to the rich, Horace Trumbauer, following the pattern of Alnwick Castle in Berwick on Tweed, England. It was made for the Sugar Baron of Philly, William Harrison. They could only offer $10,000 salary (even that was so far above the median pay there as to cause frictions in and outside the English Department that I was puzzled how to resolve and finally decided not to bother.) But they offered me a full professorship and chair of the English Department. That didn't set well with the old hands either, who had been patiently waiting their turn at the top. What the hell were they doing bringing in a media freak to run an English department.

Heh, I understood where they weren't coming from. I like to tell people that I turned Horatio Alger upside down. Assistant professor at Ivy League Penn in 1960, associate professor at a solid state University of Hawaii in 196l, and a full professor in 1962 at rinky dinky Beaver. Actually, I'm ashamed of that rinky, dinky sneer. Gates and LeClair actually turned a rinky dinky no go college into a much better one, by bringing in productive scholars like sociologist Norman Johnston and psychologist Bernard Mausner (the first Jewish professor) to join a major artist like Benton Spruance. (I even chided former colleague Richard Wertime for fudging on his affiliation with Beaver College in his acclaimed memoir,Citadel on the Mountain:A Memoir of Father and Son. Under the leadership of Bette Landman, an anthropologist from Ohio State, Beaver has morphed into Arcadia University, a decent multipurpose institution with much higher standards than it had went I began there in 1962.

An episode about the name change may illustrate the strained relations I always had with the faculty. In 1975, I had been out in San Francisco fielding a Third World Film Festival at the Hilton. (I was convinced that American Lit plus Commonwealth Lit added up to International English Literature, a rubric I introduced to the curriculum there.) If you'll pardon the verb, the hotel abutts on Skin Flick Row. And the English teachers would file in, semi-tumescent from scrutinizing the glossies! Theyd flip when they saw my ID, Patrick D. Hazard, BEAVER COLLEGE.

Woo, woo, they'd tease. You've really got it made! Monday back at Beaver, President Gates called an emergency meeting of the faculty for our ideas! In a fiscally beleaguered institution thats code language for There will be no raise next year. After fighting off a snooze triggered by a tsunami of boring initiatives, I timidly raised my hand. President Gates, I shyly averred, there is a tide of filth flowing inexorably Eastward called Beaver Flicks, and if we don't change the name of the college to Atwood (after one of our most generous donors: I fantasized that Gates followed her around with heart monitoring equipment, on the grounds that if she dropped we'd be in the black for a decade) or after Glenside, we'll be a laughing stock in ten years.

The sweet lady who ran the book store never did figure out why the Beaver 69 sweatshirts sold so much better than other years. Gates was unusually antsy when I took the floor since he (and often I) didn't know what was coming next! He quickly appointed me chair of a committee to supervise name change suggestions.

The next morning in my mail box, there was a kidnap type note cut out of diverse letters: WHY DONT YOU CALL IT PUSSY PREP; YOU PERVERT AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! Wooo. Collegiality? There ensued an idiotic game of pseudo-naming. The born again Christian who headed the chemistry department playfully cornered me in the hall one day and suggested the Mons Institute of Technology, because that would come out M:I:T. and would attract more science students. And so it went.

I decided on the spot to vacate Beaver as a lost cause once I no longer had to backstop my retired mother. She died in January 1982, while I was in Baton Rouge interviewing David Duke and relishing the Art Deco Capitol Huey Long had bequeathed to his state. I hurried home to bury her, and split for California as as soon as my grades were in that May. (I sent a formal note of early resignation to then Dean Landman on Walt Whitman's Birthday.) After thirty years of English teaching, I declared myself a cultural journalist.

When the worlds media were slyly full of the name change in 2001, I wrote to now President Landman. She had been a lowly assistant professor of anthropology when I got my Pussy Prep rant and had no idea who could have sent it. She admitted that Beaver had become a lethal eponym. In the Internet Age, you'd either get a porno site when you tried to punch up Beaver College, and you wouldn't get anything. Blocked porno sites! I've told this story so many times (when I've been asked where I taught) that it's like a tawdry vaudeville turn. And, mortal than I am, I used to often answer that question by saying, in fast succession, Trenton State, PENN, Hawaii, and Beaver. Arcadia's a fine name and thousands of my books grace the shelves of its soon to be named LANDMAN LIBRARY: How's that for a real Horatia Alger. From Piqua, Ohio to Arcadia U in thirty rapidly upwardly mobile years. It couldn't have happened to a nicer lady.

I had taught in Santa Rosa Junior College in 1975-76, when I wanted to get out of Philly during the Bicentennial Brouhaha. John Bigby, a former student of mine at the Annenberg School, was the head of the media department and they had a fellowship in honor of a retired professor Andreini. They brought in a media freak for a year to shake up the troops. John was one of my best buds, and I had cavorted with an Okie krautlette named Mary Mueller while teaching there. So when she asked me to join her in her hut in a former Methodist summer vacation school, Camp Meeker, I complied. But not for long.