In September 2018, Professor Herman said something that made the department secretary cry. It wasn’t anything terrible. The words weren’t insulting, obscene, scary, or spoken in anger or malice. They thoughtlessly evoked a circumstance in Herman’s life that made the department secretary reflect on a different circumstance in her own life, and the difference made her cry.
What Herman said was the first problem. The department secretary wanted to tell her: “I’m not comfortable talking about that.” “Let’s avoid that subject in the future.” Only there was a second problem: she couldn’t talk to Herman in that way. They didn’t have that kind of relationship. There was a cold feeling between them.
So the department secretary wanted me to say something to Herman. Which should have been an easy solution. One of the miscellaneous duties of the chair was to let people know if they crossed a line.
Here was another problem. The first minor problem, compounded by a second minor problem, was folded into a third, older problem of indeterminate size. I now had to inform the department secretary that Herman and I were not on speaking terms. We had not spoken to each other in two years.
I was well aware of the third problem. I was working on it. For a couple of months, Herman and I had been communicating by email.
Aaron: Are you available for a coffee sometime in August?
Herman: What did you want to talk about?
Aaron: I want to meet with everyone [before] the semester starts to talk about impressions of the department, concerns, possible items for the agenda. And I think it would be good for you and me to have a conversation about how we’re going to work together.
[7 days later]
Herman: Hi Aaron, I’ve thought about this and I am open to having a conversation. It would have to be in the next week as I am going home to Toronto for family reasons until the end of the month.
Aaron: Thanks [Herman]. Will you be in Claremont at all this week? My schedule is mostly open -- any day other than Thursday would work.
Herman: My plan is not to be on campus until the first day of classes, frankly. Perhaps we can do this by phone?
Aaron: I think we should meet in person. You’re in Altadena? Where can you go from there? Are there any locations near a metrolink station that would be possible for you?
[7 days later]
Herman: hi aaron, so i will now likely be out of town and in toronto from the 20th to the 3rd. although a phone call is fine with me, if you really think an in-person meeting is best, it will have to wait until the first week of school at this point. my travel dates for september are the 9-12th and the 21st-25th. regards, [h]
Aaron: Okay, let’s meet on September 4. What’s your availability?
Herman: I teach at 1:15 but I will let them out early. So am free from 2pm on, but need to leave by 4 for childcare. I imagine I’ll be on campus all day however.
Aaron: 2:30 at Some Crust?
Herman: No thank you. How about Le Pain Quotidien. Which has more space, less carbohydrates and less lurking Pomona people. 2:30 then.
Aaron: That sounds fine, see you then.
Our communications had a definite edge, but I didn’t worry about that. That we were corresponding at all was enough to satisfy me. It also didn’t worry me that Herman put off the meeting until the first week of classes. Two other members of the department had done the same thing. That was all right. I just needed to have some talk with everyone, including my former friend, before the first department meeting.
[Two weeks later]
Hi Aaron,
I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve decided that I don’t want to meet with you next week. I think it feels best for me to wait until I get my feet wet with the semester, and get back into the swing of things, and also I’m frankly swamped with the GWS search and other administrative work and also several article and tenure deadlines. So let’s touch base in a few months.
Also, I wrote the people at Ole Miss and it turns out I’ll be literally on the road driving with a grad student *during* the first department meeting so that doesn’t work out either.
See you soon,
[Herman]
Now I was worried. I thought that I could handle working with someone who wasn’t my friend. I didn’t know how to work with someone who wasn’t talking to me. I tried to explain:
Hello [Herman]
I think you’re making a mistake. We had a conflict, and we never talked about it. Not talking was fine as long as I was on leave and you were on leave. After two years, we still haven’t talked. Now we are working together in the same department, which means that I need things from you and you need things from me. Right now, as far as your interests are concerned, I’m completely in the dark. This is a situation in which we might easily misunderstand each other.
If we’re going to have a good working relationship the only way to start is by having a conversation in person. I urge you to reconsider keeping this meeting.
Best wishes
Aaron
The next morning, I fretted over the last sentence of my reply. “I urge you to reconsider keeping this meeting.” What did that mean? Probably I had intended to say, “I urge you to reconsider. Please keep this meeting!”, or something like that. What I wrote sounded more like I was urging her to think about whether the meeting was something she really wanted.
Well, it wasn’t.
Hi Aaron, just to conclude this correspondence, I am looking forward to speaking when I get my feet under me, but not until then. I know we can both count on a collegial and frank communication.
As regards my involvement in English you should know that this semester I will be largely devoted to GWS given our review and given our hiring so I don’t expect to be very present in English. That is the nature of my appointment, after all.
I’d like to not give this issue any more energy because I’m really focused on re-entry for the next month or so, so I probably won’t respond after today, but will reach out when I’m more settled.
See you around Crookshank, good luck with your first semester as chair!
[Herman]
Okay, it’s your call. Let me know when you’re ready to talk.
Aaron
That was as far as we had gotten when the department secretary asked me to talk to Herman.
I liked the department secretary. I enjoyed her ironic sense of humor and did my best to respect her carefully drawn personal boundaries. I believe she viewed me as something like a boy dressed up in his father’s clothes. Her main point of reference was that someone had once played a prank on me -- stole my office keys and tossed them into the fountain on the quad. Whenever I happened to be looking for something, she would tilt her head and ask if I had checked the fountain.
I had not yet learned to appreciate that she had a close-up view of all my mistakes and absences of mind. That it was impossible to hide anything from her. If there was a conflict in the department, she knew it atmospherically.
Now I had to tell her (feeling like a fool) that Herman and I, two grownups working in the same small department, did not speak to each other, and the cause of our mutual silence was neither money nor blood.
I could talk to the dean about it, I said. The dean could talk to Herman. Did the department secretary want me to do that?
No, she said quickly. She didn’t want to make too much of it.
The dean knew about my lack of communication with Herman. I brought it up in spring 2018 when the dean asked me to chair the English department.
There were, I observed, ten tenure-line faculty in the English department, and one of them wasn’t speaking to me. I wanted to know, what kind of problem was that? Did the dean think I could chair the department in these circumstances?
The dean thought the problem was manageable. She assured me, she understood that Herman was a difficult person. Working with Herman had been a challenge for her as well.
I agreed that Herman was a difficult person. I asserted that there was a place for difficult people in the profession. (I still believe that.) I said that I was willing to try talking to Herman, and working with her.
For the first two months of the semester, Herman did not attend department meetings. We fell into two pointless conflicts; I will write about them separately. Meanwhile I tried diligently to schedule a meeting with her, although heaven knows I did not relish the idea. In the emails we exchanged, we continued to discuss possible times. To some extent, she was also willing to try.
Herman: Hi Aaron. I am almost but not quite out of the weeds with GWS and other things. I can meet you once I get back from Nashville on the 7th? I’m waiting to see if I have Monday research committee meetings before making appointments, if you don’t mind waiting.
Aaron: That’s great, thanks [Herman]. I will try to keep my schedule open in the afternoon on October 8. I could also do noon on October 9.
Herman: Aaron, I can meet after my class tomorrow at 2:30, but need to leave by 4? Let me know if that works for you.
Aaron: Ah, sorry, I have office hours tomorrow 3-5pm. Are you available at noon? Thursday (10/11) is better for me – I could be at Pain Quotidien at 3:15. Would that work for you?
Herman: As ever, have to wait for the GWS meeting schedule to happen, always at the last minute. I’ll get back to you.
Herman: Hi so -- I am now booked into office hours through 5, sorry about that. Can we try again next week. I won’t be in properly until Tuesday.
Aaron: Yes, that would be good -- let’s try again next week.
Finally, on October 15:
Herman: Hi aaron, I am in all afternoon if you want to meet.
Aaron: Great, thanks, I’ll knock on your door at 4:15.
Want to go for a walk?, I said.
We cut through campus and into the village. Herman wanted to stop in Starbucks and then another shop.
I remember making a half-hearted attempt to stand in front of her when we entered the shop so that I could offer to pay for her food. I think it was cut up fruit in a bowl.
When she paid, she asked if I wanted something. I said no. A small mistake -- I should have accepted.
We returned to the quad and sat on a bench by the fountain.
Professor Philip came out of the English department, saw us sitting there, recognized both of us as people with whom he conversed, experienced an impulse to join us, corrected himself, and re-entered the building so that he could exit in a different location.
She told me that she felt alienated from the department and the college, but she had found a place for her work in the profession. She was giving a lot of invited talks that season. She was proud of her work with the English Institute.
I congratulated her on her success, said that she was bringing glory to the Pomona English department, and vowed to support her projects.
I asked if she wanted to discuss her objection to my proposed course on Ralph Ellison from 2016. She said no. I didn’t insist. I thought it would be fine to postpone discussion of the conflict until I had another opportunity to teach a senior seminar, which wouldn’t be until 2022.
I told her about department business that she had missed, why we were using Robert’s Rules in meetings, and why we needed to tighten oversight of restricted funds.
We talked about vacancies in the department, lost opportunities, people who had retired, left for jobs at other schools, or died.
She said she always knew that Professor Theresa, who taught Asian American literature for several years, “was gonna bounce.” Now she wanted to stop Professor Joy, the new creative writing hire, from teaching a course on Asian American poetry, which might make it appear to the dean’s office that the department was covering the field and did not need to hire a literature professor with a doctorate.
She was still angry that the department had voted to search for a medievalist rather than an Americanist in 2012.
She was angry that the department, without “buy-in” from her, had hired Professor Marianne, a visiting assistant professor, to teach modernist American literature.
She said that I had a friend, Professor Edmund, who worked in my own field, Renaissance poetry, and asked why couldn’t she have a friend working in her field?
I said that we didn’t run job searches in order to find friends for ourselves. A pointless thing to say. My tone may have sounded triumphant. I immediately regretted saying it.
At the end of the conversation, I asked her to please come and talk to me if she ever had any problems with the department or with me. I gave this request as much emphasis as I could manage.
She looked at me with disbelief. Like, why was I pestering her with this irrelevant request?
When we parted ways, I had only two hours to walk the dog, eat dinner, and prepare my evening class. I started to run, felt embarrassed, switched to a brisk walk (something between a walk and a run), felt more awkward than before, and openly started running.
That was my last private conversation with Professor Herman. All of our other communications since September 2016 were either written down by us in emails, or witnessed by the entire department and recorded in meeting minutes.
When I picture the scene, I see two people, former friends, trying to remember how to talk to each other.
When I see how she later represented the conversation to the workplace investigator, I remember that Herman is someone I should never talk to without a witness. I’m kind of glad that she never honored my request to come and talk to me when she had problems with me, although I believe this would have been the correct institutional answer to all of the department’s conflicts in the years 2018-2020. (“Go back to your department and talk to Aaron.”) I’m glad there are no other private conversations where no one knows what was said but the two of us.
In 2020, she forwarded part of our correspondence to the workplace investigator, cutting it off before the email where she canceled our September 4 appointment, in order to suggest that I was at fault for not speaking to her before October 15. She also accused me of crafting the schedule of department meetings with the intention of excluding her. “The strategy here then,” she wrote in her “impact statement,” “was to label me as a problem, while disguising his own micro-aggressive behavior, in which he manipulated meeting dates, rules and niceties of process to advance his own narrative and interests. This has constituted harm to me.”
It’s interesting, a friend of mine said recently, Herman’s lies are all like that. You can always discern a connection between what she remembers and the lies she tells. She doesn’t invent out of whole cloth. She exaggerates, she omits, she changes the order of events.
In her account of our conversation, she added one detail: that I “stormed out.” Maybe she was recalling my awkward exit, half-walk and half-run. She sent the investigator a note after their first interview, just to highlight this detail: “I outlined my issues with the department -- as I have done so to you -- and he stormed out of the meeting. Not sure if we touched on that in our conversation.” She highlighted it again in her impact statement: “Finally, when I was finally able to speak with him on October 15th of the same year, he stormed out of the conversation.”
The investigator was not impressed, did not add the allegation to the complaint, and never asked me about it.