To honor its dead, Charleston Southern University puts together a slide show. But the colleagues and friends who gathered in Lightsey Chapel last October to remember Harold J. Overton, a linguist who died suddenly of cancer after teaching there for 27 years, had to squint to see the handful of images thrown up on a screen in a corner of the stage. There weren’t enough photos in the university’s P.R. files to fill the time, so they ran in a repeating loop.
Somehow this was appropriate, for even after so many years, Mr. Overton remained a blurry presence on this Baptist campus. Shy, courtly, and eager to please, he was appreciated for his steady loyalty. Many in the audience didn’t know that he was an ordained minister and a one-time missionary, that he was an antiques dealer and had a passion for Norse sagas.
The various speakers praised Mr. Overton for his courtesy and kindness, the endearing way he would make a friend’s excitements into his own. “Each time during the years when the university was able to provide an increase in salary,” said President Jairy C. Hunter Jr., “Harold would always send me a little note expressing thanks.”
And who else, asked Lisette Luton, an assistant professor of French, could -- or would -- speak so passionately about obscure distinctions in Old French? Only Harold, who wryly described himself as the “tall, skinny, bald guy” when arranging their first meeting at the Charleston airport.
Then, as the event wound down, Robert Rhodes Crout, an associate professor of history, strode to the podium. A fellow Southerner, he had been Mr. Overton’s closest friend on campus. If the assembled expected another run-of-the-mill tribute, they were to be sorely disappointed. “Harold Overton was a shy and private man who lived a shy and private life, and wanted his dying days to have that same quiet and private dignity,” Mr. Crout began. “I honored that wish.
“Now that he is dead,” he continued, “I can speak.” And so he did, stunning the audience with a 20-minute recitation of Mr. Overton’s money worries and fears about the future. “Harold’s sense of propriety never wavered,” Mr. Crout said. Yet privately, the late professor was wounded by a university that paid him miserably and wouldn’t offer the other rewards, like promotion to full professor, that come with long service.
The mood inside the room stiffened. After so many similar appraisals of a courteous Southern gentleman, this speaker had breathed life into Harold Overton, conjuring up a man betrayed: a 62-year-old tenured professor who did all that was asked of him, who taught more than his course load, who played by the book, both the official policies and the unwritten rules of how to stay in favor, only to find himself, after 27 years, humiliated and trapped.
It was a shocking and perhaps ill-timed message. All of Professor Overton’s long-time colleagues, and even some of his other close friends, think he would have shuddered at Mr. Crout’s outburst. Yet both Mr. Crout and President Hunter touched on the same onerous fact of life for Harold Overton, and for many professors like him: money. In nearly three decades at Charleston Southern, despite a promotion and a department chairmanship, “Harold was still making substantially under $40,000 a year at the time of his death,” Mr. Crout announced.
Mr. Overton took on plenty of overtime work. He sold antiques for extra money. Still, he feared he wouldn’t be able to meet the payments on his house, and worried about his retirement.
“What would be a fitting memorial for Harold Overton?” Mr. Crout asked at the service. “This is what I think Harold would say if he could speak from the grave to this assembly today: ‘Just show the simple loyalty to these folks that they have been showing to this institution for years. ... Just do these folks right, and I’ll be content. In fact, if my death led to those changes, it would give me a world of satisfaction.’”
Two weeks later, the university dismissed Mr. Crout. “You have irrevocably broken the collegial bond that joins us and have separated yourself from our fellowship,” the president’s letter read. The American Association of University Professors is investigating the case as a potential violation of academic freedom.
In death, as he never had in life, Harold Overton had made news.
Every campus has its familiar types. The inveterate complainers, like Mr. Crout, get noticed, for better or worse. The loyal citizens, like Mr. Overton, toil largely in silence. Whether they like or loathe their jobs, the Overtons, unsung and underpaid, are legion in academe. They often arrive with strong credentials -- Mr. Overton studied 10 languages, from classical Latin to Swahili -- yet may end up on a campus where no one really speaks their language. They teach so much that research becomes difficult to imagine, and a better job impossible to obtain.
They don’t blow up, or snap. But one day, they come to realize that a job that once held such promise now feels like doing time.
Institutions like Charleston Southern prove especially harsh. “Because of their religious vocation, they can tend to think their faculty are the equivalent of clergy, and can be paid accordingly,” says Mary Burgan, the general secretary of the A.A.U.P. At the same time, “faculty are expected to be more humble, more modest, and thereby have less freedom to express themselves.”
Mr. Crout had no such humility. Yet in shaming Charleston Southern, he inevitably overlooked the nuances of Harold Overton’s life, his career, and his strategies for coping. While Mr. Overton did grow increasingly frustrated, looking for a job elsewhere as recently as 1995, the university was still home. Colleagues became a surrogate family; other professors -- Mr. Crout; Ms. Luton; George Niketas, his former department chairman -- were there for him at the end. On them, his life -- and death -- left a profound mark.
Someone else will teach the history of the English language, and phonetics, and world literature in translation, just a few of the courses Mr. Overton handled as an associate professor of English. Someone else will oversee the language and visual arts department, which he ran -- and protected -- for the last 10 years. Someone else already has his faculty office. Were it not for the eulogy, Harold Overton might have been forgotten by now at Charleston Southern.
His is the story of a bargain broken: the disintegration of an informal pact between colleges and generations of academics. The professors knew they would not get rich. But they expected to feel that the life of the mind was indeed valued, that their compensations -- financial and otherwise -- would sustain them.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A18
