Shortchangers excerpt / Other recent releases / Home / Winter Table of Contents
n
writing his novel Shortchangers, UMass English professor Arnold Silver didn't
mind chopping off his protagonist's toes. Dean Jonas Trelawny was "a
paper creature," after all. So it came as a surprise to Silver, some
readers' objections to the grisly, albeit fictional, amputations.
In fact, there is much in this book that readers may find objectionable.
No doubt Silver, as should any satirist worth his salt, steps on a lot
of sensitive toes in this "story of the near future," as the
book is subtitled. It may be some small comfort that sooner or later he
takes a swipe at just about everyone in his portrayal of the cultural and
political atmosphere of a large, unnamed, university.
Silver states unequivocally that this every-university is not UMass. Yet
he is amused by the ways in which sometimes life imitates art: the takeover
of Goodell last March coincided with the release of his book, which begins
with a takeover. In Shortchangers, the student protestors are members of
the Liput Liberation League, a group of short people sick of being "shortchanged"
by the system. Their demands include recruitment of Pygmies, an increase
in the percentage of faculty five-foot-two or under, and mandatory courses
on the short story. Their protest provides the narrative thread. The rest
of the tale is woven out of Silver's knowledge of key facets of university
life. Playfully, and with confidence borne of long experience, Silver describes
lunch at the Faculty Club, multicultural events, and all types of meetings,
one of which is described in our excerpt.
Rejecting the label "conservative," Silver considers himself
an "old-fashioned liberal," of the school of FDR and Truman.
He wrote Shortchangers out of anger at the fate of a former student and
fellow scholar who fell victim, he says, to political correctness, and
in hopes of "opening up hidden subjects for discussion" e.g.,
the tendency of administrators "to buy peace on campus at any price."
Despite having undergone two angioplasties during the course of producing
it, Silver says he had a "great time" writing the novel. Silver
teaches the novel and drama, and has had a play produced off-Broadway,
but he found fiction-writing took some getting used to. "I kept feeling
that I should footnote," he confesses.
His faithfulness to factual reality seems to have paid off. He finds it
gratifying that in commenting on something in the news, people say to him,
"Oh, it's just like your book!" FSW
IN THE LARGE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT LOUNGE
, where the Curriculum Committee met, conviviality reigned. Disputes and
even lengthy discussions were rare, and no one could even remember when
there had been a rejection vote. Proposed new courses were here approved,
and here the newer Departments requested permission to offer graduate degrees.
Later approval by the faculty Senate was routine. Jonas, after nodding
greetings to the eleven others, went into his Tibetan Trance. He looked
attentive, but he was lost in reflections on a problem in physics no one
had yet solved and which he had been working on nine years ago when he
went into deaning...
The dean snapped awake when he heard people shouting over the proposal
by the Scilly Island Studies Department to offer a Ph.D. Only three years
old, the Department had been voted into existence after claims of discrimination
by the two Scilly Island-American students on campus. They pointed to the
existence of Departments of Pacific Islands Studies and Cape Verde Islands
Studies.
Last year the feminists had beat back a proposal to add the Isle of Man
to the Department, insisting that the name would first have to be changed.
Jonas had suggested including the Orkney Islands. They seemed unusual,
and he had known a physicist from there who had become an administrator
at some school back east, an interesting fellow whom he always wanted to
get back in touch with to find out how he was handling the challenges and
opportunities of a multi-cultural campus. But the Committee thought the
Orkneys should become a separate Department. Now the Scilly Island Chairman,
Robert Whetstone, wanted to offer a graduate degree. The courses would
be the same as for the undergraduates Topography, Local Customs, Relations
to Cornwall, Shipwreck Salvaging, The Art of Carless Transportation, and
the Scilly Island Sculpture Renaissance, 1950-1990 but graduate students
would do more advanced research.
Whetstone's proposal would have had clear sailing except for the animosities
aroused the preceding year by his book Island Brains and Continental
Drones. It argued that island people are the smartest on earth like
Manhattanites and Japanese and Brits and continental people are innately
drones, like the South Americans and the Manchurians and people from Utah.
It claimed a benign influence on genes of circumambient waters and a brain-deadening
effect of being land-locked. Those who protested this thesis were immediately
labeled islephobic and told to practice civility and shut up. But led by
the energetic Swiss American Club, the efforts to keep the book out of
the bookstore were successful. The Curriculum Committee's debate was dominated
by Ricardo Mendoza, an eloquent Paraguayan-American teacher, joined by
an Austrian-American professor, an assistant dean from Kansas, and a distinguished
agronomist whose ancestors had come from a central African country. After
much acrimonious discussion, the proposal was finally defeated six to five
on the grounds that enough Eurocentric graduate courses already existed.
Harmony was recovered and speedy approval given to the last seven proposals
on the agenda. Department of Native American Studies: "Advanced Iroguois
War Dances;" Bisexual Studies: "AC-DC and Fuse Control;"
Jewish Studies: "Protocols of the Elders of Zion Making Fiction Come
True;" Differently-Advan-taged Studies: "Tap-dancing Equivalents
for Paraplegics;" Women's Studies (two proposals): Intermediate Witchcraft,"
"Castration by Candlelight;" and finally a joint offering by
the Hispanic and Theology Departments: "Was God Puerto Rican?"
Jonas was delighted that the meeting had been so productive and had finished
within its allotted hour.
Other recent releases by faculty and alumni
The Words We Live By, The Creeds, Mottoes, and Pledges that Have Shaped America. Brian Burrell; The Free Press. A member of the mathematics and statistics faculty, Burrell takes a break from figures to examine the origins, popularization, and implications of phrases as various as " e pluribus unum" and the motivational motto "Think."
Profiles in Character, Hubris and Heroism in the US Senate 1789-1990. Joseph Martin Hernon; ME Sharpe, publishers. Hernon, a UMass professor of history emeritus, has written a solid, informative book on some of Americ's lesser-known, but influential statesmen, including "the Ohio icicle" and "Old Bullion." His accounts remind us that scandals, controversy, and complexity of character are nothing new in American politics.
Long Life to your Children! A Portrait of High Albania. Photographs by Stan Sherer, text by Marjorie Senechal; UMass PRess. This book presents startling juxtapositions of the feudal and the modern: a picture of a man with two sheep tied to his bicycle handlebars, a VW Jetta in the background; an interview with the director of a textile company who was denied a universiyt education because her father worked for the party of King Zog. Sherer is a Campus Chronicle photographer.
Crookjaw. Caron Lee Cohen '90, illustrated by Linda Bronson; Henry Holt and Co. This children's book tells a Bunyanesque tale of a whale, possessed by a witch; the whaler who succumbs to the witch's charms; and his wife, who rows to his rescue.
