"Ivory Power"
by Lynn C. Miller
September/October 2006 issue of Mystery Reader's Journal
© Lynn C. Miller

The great female moderns all created a parallel universe. There weren’t many accounts of untraditional women’s lives to chart their way: they wrote the books they wanted to read, and not only that, they wrote the lives they wanted to live. ––from Death of a Department Chair

Writing well is the best revenge. And having the last word is particularly delicious. That’s especially true in the academic world, where the stakes are high, the salaries low, and people wield their pens––or keyboards––as surrogate swords. Fiona, the protagonist of my first novel, The Fool’s Journey, dubbed the political machinations in the academy, a world filled with outsized egos and grandiose expectations, Ivory Power.

Like the castle in a Gothic novel with only one road in and out, or the country house in the English murder mystery with its captive characters, this self-enclosed world is a mystery novelist’s dream setting. I began to set novels in the academy after several years of bruising political battles with colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin. I found the glass ceiling visible, but that didn’t mean you didn’t bump your head against it just the same.

As a young assistant professor, I learned that academic departments, like all bureaucracies, resemble private clubs. Because in many departments tenured professors tend to stay for many years, often decades, a closed system develops. Old resentments and slights, simmering over such a long period in the confines of an enclosed community, magnify, erupting occasionally into full-scale war. In a small department, with frequent faculty meetings and clashes over graduate students and funding, it’s not easy to get away from a person who might be difficult or irritating. Such a community tends to develop its own culture and its own set of rules, inexplicable to the outsider who is not privy to the ingrained codes of behavior. In The Fool’s Journey, Fiona compares these rules to the arcane codes of the Old New York satirized by Edith Wharton: the protocol only makes sense to those on the inside who steadfastly endorse tradition but barely remember what inspired the rules in the first place. In this insider culture, “standards” are upheld in mysterious ways. The requirements for tenure were like that in one department I worked in. Everyone expected junior faculty to follow the very rules that no one bothered to explain.

My department had a governing body of all full professors and, since only one woman in the department had been promoted to that level, the group was overwhelming white, male, and heterosexual. Puzzled that so few women were promoted to Full Professor, this group was unable to see the attitudes and lack of mentoring that made women’s failure to achieve promotion part of the culture of the department. Everywhere they looked, they saw only their own reflection. An amusing picture if it’s true, as one of my male colleagues was fond of saying, that most professors were people no one would dance with in high school!

In my years struggling toward my own promotion in a department strewn, it seemed to me, with land-mines, I began to fantasize about an ideal colleague: a woman who knew the ropes, had survived the squabblings of colleagues and the priorities of the administration, but was dedicated to fairness and justice just the same. My latest novel, Death of a Department Chair, begins with a preface by such a person, Miriam Held. After her brilliant female colleague, a woman ambitious and ruthless in equal measure, is found murdered, Miriam “edits” this account, taking the reader on a journey to find the killer among a crowded field of academic suspects, any of whom (herself included) had the motive for murder. Miriam possesses a healthy sense of the absurd. And an awareness of consequence. Considering the sexual nature of the crime, Miriam writes: “This is a college campus. If one chooses to focus on the sexual, the odor of indiscretion and intrigue pervades one’s every breath. Have you ever witnessed a Texas gulley-washer? No? Well, trust me when I say that a dry creek bed can transform in seconds into a torrent barreling down on the unwary with the force of a derailed locomotive. A similar power is unleashed when someone whispers “sex” in the hallowed halls of academe.” Over fifty, Jewish, lesbian, and stout, Miriam speaks her mind and damn the political fallout.

In Death of a Department Chair, Miriam heads a committee devoted to increasing minority faculty at the predominantly white Austin University, a fictional research institution in Texas. The death of the chair occurs while the department is recruiting an outstanding African-American female scholar to the faculty, a hire that three powerful professors are opposed to. Homophobia and racism are two of the spokes driving this particular manifestation of Ivory Power, as the novel is set before two historic Supreme Court decisions in 2003––one finally overturning the Texas sodomy law and the other nullifying the Hopwood decision which outlawed recruitment in Texas on the basis of race.

Writing mysteries about a culture that alternately confounds and delights me allows me to explore the ways closed communities encourage sameness and choke innovation. And yet, by creating Miriam and her group of friends as a powerful countercurrent to hegemony, I’m able to express another side of the academic equation: most professors are well meaning, bright people who care deeply about public institutions and learning, or they wouldn’t have chosen careers as teachers and researchers. Bureaucracy itself is a villain in my novels. Insulated groups of people spawn groupthink and fall into ruts until jolted out of them. Murder is a great catalyst for change.

Mystery writers and readers crave order and justice of a kind, as much as we desire the chills and thrills of a good story. In writing a mystery novel about the academy, I tilt the scales in favor of the smart, ethical woman. She must always be vigilant, however, as Miriam Held tells the reader in her Epilogue, after the successful completion of the case: “And so, life goes on, but things do not stay the same.….The powers of reaction lurk beneath the surface, populating the waters of discourse in the manner of predators layering the ocean depths, prowling for someone smaller and weaker to devour. Do I sound too dire? Too cynical? Remember that anything I could imagine pales in comparison to what has happened in real life.”

Women writers, when disheartened by the status quo, have often created a world they wanted to live in. Miriam and Death of a Department Chair are fictional, but I like to think that the struggles and triumphs that occur in the novel can influence the way we live institutional life. Knowing Miriam exists out there somewhere heartens me when ensconced in a particularly ludicrous outbreak of Ivory Power. She so understands the academy’s peculiar witch’s brew of ordinary outlandishness, bizarre correspondences, and happenstance. And how she who speaks last triumphs. Or perhaps simply, she who laughs last, laughs best.

Lynn C. Miller is the author of the just-published novel Death of a Department Chair and The Fool’s Journey (2002). Her novel in progress is The Dean’s Revenge (click here for an excerpt). A professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, she’s taught at the University of Southern California, Penn State, and as a guest artist in universities across the country.  Miller divides her time between Albuquerque and Austin.

You can contact me at lynn(at)lynncmiller(dot)com