Chapter 7: The Man Who Shook My Hand
Dr.
Marsh's office was on the third floor of the main faculty building.
I had walked past it dozens of times during my four years without ever going in.
She stood when I entered and shook my hand firmly.
"Thank you for coming in, Mr.
Calloway.
Please sit down."
The office was orderly.
Books on three walls.
A single window looking out over the campus quad.
On her desk, a yellow legal pad with handwritten notes I couldn't read from where I sat.
"I've spoken with Priya," she said.
"And I've spoken with the two other faculty members who were present in the lounge."
"Did they confirm it?" I asked.
"They did," she said.
"One of them was uncomfortable confirming it, but they did." She set her pen down.
"I've also pulled the syllabus for Professor Holt's graduate seminar.
Your thesis is listed as assigned reading under a section titled 'Common Structural Failures.' It has been on that syllabus for two semesters."
I looked at her.
"Two semesters," I said.
"Yes.
Which means he began using it the semester after you submitted it — while you were still enrolled and completing your final year."
The room was very quiet.
"He was teaching his students that my work was an example of failure," I said, "while I was still his student."
"Yes," Dr.
Marsh said.
"That is what the evidence shows."
She let that sit.
She was right to let it sit.
"I want to be honest with you about what comes next," she said.
"I've asked Professor Holt to meet with me this afternoon.
He doesn't know the specifics of what I know.
I wanted to speak with you first."
"What are you going to do?" I asked.
"That depends, in part, on what he says." She folded her hands on the desk.
"But I want you to understand that regardless of what he says, the use of a current student's work as a negative teaching example — without consent, without disclosure, and while that student was under his academic supervision — is a serious breach of professional conduct.
The university has a policy.
I intend to follow it."
"I'm not looking for him to be punished," I said.
She looked at me steadily.
"I understand.
But this isn't only about you, Mr.
Calloway.
If he did this with your thesis, we have to ask whether he's done it with others."
I hadn't considered that.
"There's one more thing," she said.
She opened a folder on her desk and slid a single page across to me.
"I read your thesis last night."
I looked at the page.
It was the cover sheet of my thesis — my name, the title, the date.
"All of it?" I asked.
"All of it," she said.
"I want to tell you something, and I want you to receive it as a professional assessment, not as a consolation." She paused.
"Your argument about working-class voice in postwar British fiction is original.
The framework you built in your third chapter is something I have not seen approached that way before.
It is not a perfect thesis — no thesis is — but it is the work of a genuine thinker.
It should not have passed?
It passed because it deserved to pass."
My hands were steady on my knees.
I made sure of that.
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't thank me," she said.
"I'm correcting a record."
I walked back across campus afterward.
Students moved around me in both directions — young people with backpacks and coffee cups and somewhere to be.
I had been one of them, in my way, for four years.
I had sat in the same lecture halls, written the same exams, handed in papers to the same department office.
And somewhere in that building, a man had taken my work and used it to teach others what failure looked like.
My phone buzzed.
A text from Paul: *Lily wants to know if you'll video call her tonight to talk about the books.*
I stopped walking.
Stood in the middle of the quad.
I typed back: *Tell her seven o'clock.
Tell her to have questions ready.*
Paul replied immediately: *She already has a list.*
I put the phone in my pocket and kept walking.
That afternoon, Professor Holt walked into Dr.
Marsh's office.
I was not there.
May you like
I did not need to be.
But Daniel called me that evening, and what he told me next made me sit down slowly in my kitchen chair.
