A Teacher's Dilemma

Academic Life in a Totalitarian State

Feliks Dzerzhinsky, father of the Soviet security forces. 1918.

"The problem was that, yes, his favorite student who used to sit on the left side in the third row from the top had been right, and the professor had been able to head the department all these years only because he had engaged in treachery, had kept silent, and had gagged those just beginning to speak, gagged them with the phrase 'politics has no place in the classroom,' although what was at issue was not politics but ancient history and the parallels that arose on their own when readings concerned Caligula or Nero, and you knew how Muraviov ... No, no, one cannot talk about that. Ancient history should be banned from the curriculum and replaced with any other kind of history. Then everything would be clear-cut and logical. Then such monstrous questions would not arise in his classes, and he would not be forced to betray anyone. He touched the window at which he had spoken with the student: it bore blurred traces of the lines on his forehead and the jumbled grid of his hair. The professor had stood, leaning against this window, after being summoned to the dean's office and served a short, ridiculous ultimatum: by evening the next day one of them, either the student or the professor, would have to abandon these walls forever and with no possibility of reinstatement. The dean, with his puffy face and excessively large violet lips that seemed to hang from their own skin, informed him that the most appropriate reason to give for the expulsion would be academic truancy. His favorite student had already spent fifteen days behind bars for having uttered the word 'Muraviov' during an even less appropriate argument. It had happened in winter. In hindsight, the student obviously had no intention of 'committing himself to his studies.' Just the opposite: he would continue speaking the word 'Muraviov,' and nothing would stop him. He would not be able to compensate for the classes in ancient history that he had missed. Therefore, the university could not allow him to continue his studies. No politics. Just academic progress." 

- Victor Martinovoich, Paranoia (2013) p. 26. After expulsion, the student is quickly drafted into the armed forces, and shortly thereafter he dies in a training accident.

"A little fire is quickly trodden out / Which, being suffered, rivers cannot quench."

- William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3 4.8.7-8.

Dzerzhinsky photo: RIA Novosti archive, image #6464, http://visualrian.ru/ru/site/gallery/#6464

See also A Lesson From the Berlin Wall, Narcissism and Dictatorship.