Bias Incident
This month we have five Sunday’s in September, so I am starting my month with a fiction book, and this week it is Bias Incident by Ari H. Mendelson.
The hero of our story is Jeff Jackson, who was homeschooled growing up and is now entering adulthood on the college campus of Tinsley College. And he’s excited, he’s off to live his life and join adulthood at a small private college, and all the brochures promise him academic freedom to study what he wants and he’s pretty sure he’s going to be seeking a classically liberal education…meaning studying kind of like the founding fathers did, ancient history, foundational philosophies, languages.
Only, like many colleges today, Tinsley is more interested in the liberal portion of the classically liberal education, and leans more towards requiring classes that end in “studies”…like Womyn’s Studies, Peace Studies, Pornographic Cinema Studies….
He opted to take a class entitled Anthrogynology….which is what used to be anthropology, and was renamed to be more inclusive. Note from the author: no class has been renamed this YET, it was kind of a tongue in cheek dig at how ridiculous modern campuses are becoming at their search for inclusivity, especially when their actions show they are anything BUT inclusive.
Which Jeff quickly comes to realize, when during his dorm orientation he asks a simple question and is rudely shut down by the dorm leader. His next challenge happens when he goes to his anthrogynology class, and expecting a reasonable debate regarding the curriculum is again shut down, this time by the professor of the class. Who on grading Jeff’s first essay, immediately denigrates Jeff as advocating to “pray the gay away” which is nowhere in the essay…I know because Mendelson includes the essay that sparked all of Jeff’s problems as an addendum to the book.
Jeff is rightfully enraged about the F on his essay and how this might effect his overall grade and while going out with a friend, sees his classmate, and teacher’s pet, the self described pomosexual Carl Fitzgerald, writing on his car with soap. Now, Jeff knows damn well that Carl was writing Breeder on his car, which as the trans-issues have taken over the news, we all know Breeder is very much a pejorative against “heternormativity.” Unfortunately for Jeff, he interrupted Carl before Carl could get the whole word written out. So when Jeff files a Bias Incident against Carl, the school decides this was NOT a hate crime, because Carl could have been writing any word that began with B R E.
In the interim, Jeff, who had one successful date with a girl he was interested in, gets shut down by the girl because Carl had a friend of his pretend to be Jeff’s high school girlfriend who Jeff beat up. Jeff…who was, if you’ll recall, homeschooled…tells the girl that he didn’t have a high school girlfriend because…Homeschooled. And Carl beat him to that by saying he would claim exactly that. So Jeff’s depressed about the girl, confused about his F in class, and pissed that the school does not, apparently, take Bias Incidents seriously when you are a white, straight man. Unless the white straight man is the instigator. We’re going to come back to that.
Jeff is talking with is best friend Tom and the two of them come up with a classic college prank: the decide to buy a fainting goat from a local farmer, and put it in Carl’s dorm room during one of the dorm parties.
Carl immediately files a Bias incident against Jeff, and despite literally ZERO evidence that Jeff put the goat in the room, the school decides to open an investigation against Jeff. And he is given a date and time of his hearing, which is a completely closed hearing, no attorney’s allowed, all he is allowed is a faculty advisor.
Which he finds, and the advisor gets him in touch with a lawyer who helps him figure out his best course of defense and how to effectively cross examine the witnesses. Jeff does all the prep work he possibly can and then the day of, his faculty advisor is sick, and has sent a replacement, who seems sweet and the tribunal accepts her in the advisors place.
And Jeff does his absolute best, but the odds are seriously stacked against him, and the verdict is basically a foregone conclusion. Despite all this, it has a happy ending, and yes the good guys win, although I won’t tell you how. Astute readers will catch on, although I only caught part of it, so was still pleasantly surprised by the denouement.
So, what was startling about this book is it was written FOURTEEN YEARS AGO. I seriously had to double check the copyright because it seems like something more current events. And while Mendelson again included an extensive list of the articles he pulled from to create this satirical story, ALL sources were from 2011 and earlier. So there’s no reference to Jordan Peterson’s launch to fame in 2017 for protesting the forced use of ze/zir pronouns…which are used in this book! The campus protests, the denial of how Iran treats homosexuals…all are included. All remain current events. On an Amazon review I did for Mendelson’s Kingmaker series, I referred to him as The Premier Psychic of our day. I didn’t realize how long he’s held that role.
