The Sad Story Of An Elephant’s Birth

My résumé has said since 2003 that I’m just a thesis shy of a master’s degree in mass communication.  It doesn’t mention my vow to never finish the degree.

That vow is the friendly elephant who has followed me everywhere for nearly a decade.  The cute guy costs me $167 a month to feed. (I order his food from the Department of Education’s Student Loan division.) But I’m proud to have him around. He has been one of my good friends since the day he was born. So it’s about time I finally introduced him.

Elephant No Masters was conceived in about 1988 during my journalism classes at Del Mar College. That’s when I learned that Janet Cooke, the reporter caught fabricating her Pulitzer Prize winning story, had been reduced to a $6/hr store clerk in Kalamazoo. And journalism’s sacred hate for liars became part of my soul.

I’ve never studied the gestation of elephants, but I assume  No Masters is an unusual case.  He spent the next 15 years growing quietly in his womb.

He would give  half-hearted kicks every now and then during my early days in newspapers and radio (particularly when I would be assigned to write “Business Office Musts,” news articles intended mostly help the advertising  guys land new clients) but, overall,  he didn’t draw much attention. I am not sure now whether I even realized he was there.

But I sure knew about his birth. It came in 2002. Labor lasted about two months. And boy was it painful.

The stirrings began  in late spring, when a fellow graduate student and I were eating lunch in the student center, chatting innocently about the gossip making the rounds at school.

“What do you think about that paper that was fabricated?” my friend asked.

The question startled me. I hadn’t realized people were talking about that paper.

A few weeks before, one of our friends had presented a very impressive final project for a “research design” class. The study seemed to have gone great lengths to test and prove a provocative hypothesis: Country Music Television’s music videos had become more racy and degrading toward women since Viacom, the owner of networks like MTV and Comedy Central, had bought the channel.

I remember high fiving my friend after the presentation, saying things like,  “Unbelievable job, Sarah!”  and “You really came through.”

I’m  pretty sure I knew better, though. Afterall, Sarah had called me in a panic just three or four days earlier. “I haven’t even started my final project yet! I have no idea what to do!”

I now remember Elephant No Masters giving a kick while I was  doating on Sarah after her presention.  But I must have thought it was just indigestion.  I didn’t give her paper, or the sin, any more thought before this lunch room chat, nearly a month later.

“Yeah, Sarah went out to a party with several of us that night after the presentations,” my friend went on. “She was laughing with several people about how she’d just made up all of the numbers for her paper.”

With that, Elephant No Masters started his contractions, and, finally, I couldn’t ignore them.

“I had a feeling she’d made up the numbers, but I hadn’t heard that she was bragging about it,” I said. “How many grad students were at the party?”

“About 10 or 15.”

“Does anyone on the faculty know about this?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. Nobody’s going to want to get Sarah in trouble.”

I thought the pain might kill me.

Sarah helped teach the freshman “media writing” class at the school! I remembered. ‘Thou shalt not lie in print’ is the mantra from day one in that class!

I naively assumed that I’d get plenty of support as I made the rounds to a dozen or so other graduate students in the next few days, hoping to arrange a meeting of concerned students with some faculty members.

Everyone was reluctant.

“Why don’t you at least try to convince Sarah to fess up, first?” was the common reply.

So I did.

I meekly confronted Sarah and told her she should confess. I tearfully gave her a week to do so.

She called me “delirious,” and “jealous” and said, had she not already thrown away all of her research notes, she would be glad to show them to me as proof that she’d done all that she’d claimed. She was “very hurt” that I would accuse her of fabricating the paper. She “always thought we were friends.”

A week later, Sarah hadn’t confessed anything, and the contractions came harder than ever.

I made the rounds again, this time to  faculty members. First stop was the teacher whose class had required the paper. She seemed annoyed with me for waiting more than a month, but she said she would ask Sarah to bring in her notes and other evidence to support her research. (One of the things we learned in the class was that the scientific method requires a researcher to keep such things for long after a study is complete.)

I expected the other faculty to be livid at Sarah, but they were all calm and measured, willing to wait for much more proof of a fabrication before passing judgement.

The judgement came about a week later. We  grad students all received a mildly worded email:  an anonymous one of our peers had been caught fabricating a course paper, and his or her grade had been lowered to a C. We were all expected to remember that such behavior is unacceptable at our school and in our profession.

That wasn’t exactly keeping with the “no second chances” rule, but elephant births are interesting. The contractions suddenly paused.  I was content with the email — especially since all my fellow students seemed okay with it, too.

But that was only temporary. The  final rush of pain finally came.

I saw a list of graduate students who had been selected to return as teachers of the freshman writing class the next semester, and there was Sarah’s name. Right next to mine, in fact.

She was still going to be allowed to teach?!

Everyone at the school was already on edge because a committee from a the Accreditation Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication would be arriving in a couple of weeks: the fate of the school’s a long standing quest for prestigious national recognition was soon to be decided.  I guess it didn’t occur to anyone else  that letting a known fabricator teach a freshman writing class might hinder the application.

I made desperate attempts to convince the school’s leaders to reconsider their offer to Sarah before the committee arrived.

Several faculty members worried aloud about my mental health.

As I talked to more and more people about all this, it became clear that  the offer to Sarah had boiled down to a weird miss-communication: The professor in charge of the course had made the decision to hire Sarah before the fabrication was uncovered and, since he’d never received an order to remove her from the list, he assumed he was required to stick with her. Meanwhile, the dean and the chairman of the department were maintaining their policy of not interfering in the hiring choices faculty members make.

So, thanks to its very strange dysfunction, my school was powerless to keep a fabricator out of its classrooms.

With Elephant No Master’s finally about to burst forth, I decided an intervention was necessary. When the ACEJMC committee arrived, I slipped the leader a letter, and I gave copies to the dean, the department chairman and the university president.

The letter explained all that I have told above (well, I didn’t mention the elephant, of course. He wasn’t even born yet.), and I requested a meeting with the committee.

I never heard back about the letter — not directly anyway.

A few days later — after the committee had left — I ended up at a conference in Albuquerque where my thesis director was a fellow attendee. Being from the same school, we ended up sitting near each other during the opening ceremony, and she greeted me coldly, to say the least.

Apparently she had heard about my letter.

The accreditation bid had been her pet project for nearly 10 years, and she was pissed at me, to say the least. I reached out to shake her hand and she glared back at me.  “I’ve never wanted to ring someone’s neck so badly in my life.”

Later, back at the school, my director seemed to take great pleasure in telling me that my letter to the committee had been ignored.

“They told us that there’s always one or two nut cases who oppose any application. You hear that, Don? They think you are a nutcase.”

Then she uttered the words by which Elephant No Masters was finally born.

“Don, a lot of us around here were talking about you being the best graduate student this school had ever had. I emphasize were.”

That’s when it dawned on me that all the talk of me formally joining the faculty the next year had stopped in recent weeks — dating back to my elephant’s first contractions, in fact.

I’d been had. My promising career in journalism academia was aborted by my elephant.

Feeling nauseous, I made my vow — while the rest of the school celebrated it’s hard-won accreditation (and all of the money it would bring).

As I say, Elephant No Masters has since become my constant companion ever since. He and I have been through a lot together. I thank him for giving me the strength to stand up for sanity when my first job with him at my side went sour. I wrote about that episode here.

And then, well, he accidentally got me in trouble a few months later at yet another job.  But I’m glad he was there. His presence caused me to innocently point out that my bosses at a community college were fudging numbers and misleading state officials just to make their program appear more effective than it was. Of course, I ended up fired (and then black listed across town) despite uniformly stellar reviews from students and bosses alike. And, of course, the program in question is bigger, and richer, than ever these days.

But that is my life with my great companion, Elephant No Masters.

His loyal friendship is worth the trouble! May God bless that great elephant’s soul (and mine, too, please).