Death of the Ayn Rand Scholar by Gray Cavender (classic literature list txt) 📕

she remembered his face from the paperback of 1984 they’d read in freshman English. She snapped photos of both of them. Mainly, she tried to stay out of everyone’s way. There were six other people in the office, seven counting her, and it was crowded.

Jillian thought about beginning an interview with Grace Wilson, the English Department’s Assistant Chair person, but decided against it. She would wait for Wes to see what he suggested they should do next. At this stage, they needed to coordinate everything. While she waited, she reviewed the notes that she’d taken during the interview with Professor Billy Gilroy. She mentally arranged them so she could give Wes a good summary. As she thought, she walked out of Professor Siemens’ office, away from all the forensic activity and wandered back to the main corridor.

Then, standing there, she did a slow 360 and thought of how different this building looked from when she was last here. Today, it looked like any other academic office building: long, fairly sterile hallways, offices on both sides, mostly with closed doors. She wondered if the doors were usually closed or if it was only today because of Professor Siemens. Along the corridor, there were chairs and small tables…”probably for students,” she thought. Today, they were empty.

The last time she was here—this would have been maybe three years ago—she’d come to check-out a book, a law treatise on corporate legal responsibility (as she recalled) for a research paper, ironically, for Professor Naremore’s class. Jillian closed her eyes and remembered. Back then, this entire floor was filled with metal book shelves loaded with university law reviews, legal codes from the states and the federal government, and law treatises like the one she checked-out. The room had seemed a bit dark, certainly not as well-lit as now, and those shelves had looked flimsy. But, back then, the room was open and she could see across to the far side.

She opened her eyes. It didn’t even look like the same building…except for the area over behind the stairs that strangely narrowed so that it resembled the bow of a ship. Jillian had noticed that as they hurried up the stairs on the way to the second floor and Professor Siemens’ office. There at the rear of the staircase, you could walk to this narrowest part and look down onto the floor below and see students at carrels reading, at least they were back when she was a student. Jillian smiled and thought, “A lot has happened since then.”

Which made her think about Becca’s “are you glad you left” question. Yes, she was glad, although “it’s complicated, that’s for sure,” she said to herself. Sometimes it seemed as if the past several years were a blur, and a confounding one at that. First, an ASU honors thesis and then a master’s degree had led to opportunities that she would have never imagined or imagined that she’d want, for that matter…a job, a series of jobs at Tempe PD, initially as a civilian employee, and eventually as a sworn police officer, a detective, no less, and now at ASU Campus Police. And a promotion to detective sergeant. She shook her head in disbelief.

Her undergraduate honors thesis had focused on women in policing. Professor Carolyn Patek, from Justice Studies, her honors thesis director, specialized in women who worked in traditionally men’s occupations, like engineers, fire fighters, or lawyers, although these days women lawyers are not so unusual, but still… She’d learned about lawyers and the rest of those occupations in Carolyn’s undergrad Women, Work & Justice course. That’s when she’d started what would become her honors thesis.

It had begun as a research paper on the topic: the culture of women in policing. She was taking the class for honors credit, which meant that her research project was a fifteen-page paper, not the seven pages required for the other students. Carolyn was a demanding professor, which challenged Jillian, who had her own obsessive side, and went all-out on the project. Carolyn not only gave her an A+ on the paper (and for the course), she also had encouraged Jillian to keep working on the project, to pursue it for her honors thesis. Which she did.

Jillian had taken the course during fall semester of her junior year. During the spring semester, she took a one-on-one Independent Study with Carolyn and completed an extensive reading list…what would become the literature review for the honors thesis.

Carolyn then had introduced Jillian to Linda Timms, a Lieutenant with Tempe PD. Linda headed the PD’s Research Division. Linda had helped Jillian in so many ways, from sitting for an interview herself, to setting-up interviews with policewomen in Tempe and in other jurisdictions in the Phoenix area, and arranging for her to ’shadow’ some of these women as they did their police work.

Jillian had worked her butt off on her honors thesis, and because she had, three amazing things followed: she and Carolyn had published her thesis in an academic research journal; Carolyn had encouraged her to enter Justice Studies’ master’s program; Lt. Timms had hired her to work in Tempe PD’s Research Division. Which, in turn…

“OK, Jilly, so Keefer’s done…at least for now. How about you and Gilroy?”

She’d been lost in thought, reliving her “how she got here” story and facing back toward Professor Siemens’ office at the end of the narrow corridor, so she had not heard Wes come up from behind.

She rebounded quickly from her reverie. “I’m finished, too”

“And…”

“Well, the quick summary is that Professor Gilroy said there were a lot of bad feelings generated by the Center for Ayn Rand Studies AND hiring Professor Siemens…basically what he was saying earlier to Professor Keefer and to us. Something he told me that was interesting is that one of the faculty who was the most vocal about the situation—and in a critical way—was Ian Naremore. I know him, Wes. He’s a Justice Studies prof.”

“Ever have a class with him?”

“A couple…one as an undergraduate and one