Dr. Voss looked at the binders. “The committee will enter these documents into the formal record.” She paused. “Professor Marsh, in your professional judgment, having reviewed these documents, what do they indicate?” Marsh looked at the committee without hesitation. “They indicate a pattern,” she said. “Not an isolated incident. A pattern of complaint management that has consistently produced the same outcome regardless of the specifics of the complaint, which suggests that the outcome was determined before the process was completed.” She paused. “In my field, when an experiment consistently produces the same result regardless of the variables, you do not conclude that the experiment is working correctly. You look at the methodology.” She returned to her seat.
Dr. Voss made a note. She looked at the agenda. Then she looked at Ren. “You indicated there is an additional witness.” Ren said, “Yes. Deanna Marsh. No relation to Professor Marsh. Former Harwick student. Graduated two years ago.” Dr. Voss looked at the door. Fuller opened it. Deanna walked in. She sat at the witness table and folded her hands in front of her. She had the composed quality of someone who has decided to do something they are afraid of and has moved through the fear to the other side of it where everything is simply clear.
Dr. Voss said, “Ms. Marsh, please describe your experience as a Harwick student as it relates to the matter before this committee.” Deanna spoke. She spoke for seven minutes without stopping. She described the incident in her second year. She described filing the complaint. She described the scheduled hearing and the forty-eight hours before it during which her academic scholarship had been placed under unexplained review. She described the conversation she had been asked to have with an academic administrator during those forty-eight hours during which the phrase institutional disruption had been used in proximity to the phrase scholarship review. Not as a direct connection but as a proximity that anyone in her position would understand.
She described making the decision to withdraw. She described what that decision had cost her, not in dramatic language, in plain language, which is more expensive. “I withdrew because I was a first-generation college student, and I needed the money to stay in school,” she said. “And I was twenty years old and I was alone in it, and I did not understand yet that alone does not have to be permanent.” She paused. “I have thought about that decision every day since, not because I blame myself for it. I understand why I made it. I think about it because I wonder how many other people made the same decision in the same circumstances and never found out that someone eventually came back to try again.” She looked at Ren. Ren looked back at her.
The room was very quiet. One of the committee members, a woman at the far end of the table who had not spoken yet, took off her glasses and set them on the table in front of her, the gesture of someone who has heard enough to not need to take notes anymore. Dr. Voss said, “Thank you, Ms. Marsh.” Deanna returned to her seat beside Ren.
Dr. Voss looked at Derek. He had the particular quality of someone who has been watching the structure they depended on reveal itself piece by piece as something different from what they believed it to be. The confidence was still there because it was habitual enough to not fully switch off, but beneath it something had shifted. The man in the suit was no longer leaning forward. He was sitting back. That was a visible change.
“Mr. Stole,” Dr. Voss said, “the committee has several questions.” The questions took twenty minutes. They were precise questions about specific dates and specific interactions and specific conversations. They were the questions you ask when you already have a significant number of the answers and you are establishing what someone is willing to acknowledge and what they will choose to deny on the record. Derek answered some of them. He declined to answer others on the advice of the man in the suit, which was his right. Each declined answer was noted.
Dr. Voss finally set down her pen. She looked at Derek with the expression of someone who has been doing this work for a long time and has learned to say difficult things without either softening or hardening them beyond what the truth requires. “Mr. Stole,” she said, “I want to ask you one direct question, and I want to ask it for the record. Did you strike the complainant in the university dining hall on Tuesday?”