“You know what your problem is?” Anshu says to me, though I didn’t ask him. If we’re going through a list of my problems, we’ll be here all afternoon. “You don’t look the part,” he says without waiting for a prompt from me.
“I don’t...” I give myself a once-over, my button-down oxford and blue jeans. “What’s wrong with how I look?”
“You dress like one of the students. You’re supposed to be the professor.”
“What do you want, a tweed coat with patches? Should I carry a pipe, too?”
I’m sitting in my office on the third floor of the law school with Professor Anshuman Bindra, who looks the part naturally, with his owlish face and trim beard, hair the consistency of a scrub brush, which manages to not move but look unkempt regardless. Anshu leans back in his chair. “Simon, my friend, you just got quoted in a U.S. Supreme Court opinion. It’s like the Supremes collectively leaned over from Washington to Chicago and whispered to the committee, ‘Make this guy a full professor.’ You should be walking tall today. You should be the new King of the Fourth Amendment. But instead, you show up looking like you’re going to a frat party.”
“It shouldn’t matter how I dress. It’s what I say, what I teach, what I write, that—”
But he’s already making a mouth out of his hand,yada yada yada.“Now Reid, he looks the part. He wears a sport coat and dress pants every day.”
Reid Southern? That guy is to academia what Pauly Shore is to dramatic acting. He has parents with pull, and that’s it.
“He wears a sport coat because his stomach hangs over his belt,” I say. “And he probably can’t fit into jeans.”
Anshu drops his head, pinches the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, and you run marathons, and half your students probably want to bone you, but Reid looks like a law professor. Heactslike one. The guy listens to Mozart in his office. You listen to REM and Panic! at the Disco and N.W.A.”
“Okay, first of all,” I say, leaning forward, “I do not and would not listen to Panic! at the Disco. And now it matters what music I listen to?”
“It’s not one thing. It’s the whole package. The... grungy look, the music, the whole attitude. You don’t think appearances matter? I know they shouldn’t, but you know—”
“No, they do, I know.” But I’m not going to change for them. Why should I? There’s no dress code here. I’m twice the teacher Reid Southern is. His students hate him. I’ve read the reviews. And his scholarship is pedantic at best. He’s writing about a different way to understand mutual consent in contract law. I’m writing about the government violating the constitutional rights of its citizens on a daily basis.
“You’re too self-deprecating, while we’re at it,” says Anshu.
Sure, why not, let’s keep going.
“You’d rather I was pompous and self-congratulatory? Anshu, jeez, you’re undoing everything my mother taught me.”
He flips his hand at me. “What did you just say to Loomis in the hallway? The vice-chair of the damn tenure committee compliments you on your article getting cited by the Supreme Court and what did you say?”
“I don’t know, what did I say?”
“You said, ‘Must have been a slow day at the Court.’ ”
Oh, yeah, that’s right, I did.
“I mean, how about thank you?” he says. “The highest court in the land just cited one of your articles. Can’t you bask in the glow just a little? But no, you can’t take the compliment. You have to tear yourself down. And Reid doesn’t have a blog,” he adds.
I open my hands. “What’s wrong with my blog?”
“You make jokes,” he says. “You crack wise.”
“And I talk about judicial decisions and whether they’re right or wrong.”
“You wrote a limerick about the chief justice of the United States.”
“Yeah, but it was funny.”
“I know, but you’re so... so casual and irreverent.”
“You mean I’m not stuffy? I don’t use footnotes or Latin words? You know how I feel about footnotes and—”
“Yes, I know how you feel about footnotes.” He reaches out with his hands, as if beseeching me. “But law professors use footnotes! Law professors use Latin!”
I’m not doing it. I’m not changing how I dress and I’m not sucking up to the faculty at poker games and cocktail parties and I’m not using Latin words and I sure as shit am not using footnotes.