Campbell Wheemer

Campbell Wheemer, known in the English department as Orshee, is a young faculty member whose conspicuous teaching methods and gender-conscious interventions turn academic principles into everyday performance. His insistence on correcting masculine language accompanies a more consequential argument: that the department should exclude male candidates from consideration. The novel presents both his earnestness and the colleagues’ impatience with his manner, making him a pointed figure in the department’s disputes over representation and hiring.

Academic Identity and Teaching

At the personnel-committee meeting, Wheemer is described as only four years out of graduate school at Brown and as the sole untenured member of an aging department. He wears his thinning hair in a ponytail secured with a rubber band. At his first departmental gathering after being hired, he announced that he had no interest in literature as such; his academic interests were feminist critical theory and image-oriented culture.

His classroom practice reflects that preference. He records television sitcoms and uses them in the curriculum in place of what he calls phallocentric, symbol-oriented books. His students are not allowed to write: their semester projects are made with video cameras and submitted on cassette. In departmental meetings, he regularly interrupts speakers who use a masculine pronoun to add, “Or she.” The detail becomes a verbal signature, and his colleagues eventually call him Orshee.

Hiring Politics and Gender

During a search discussion, Wheemer proposes eliminating both male candidates. When Teddy Barnes asks whether he means excluding them simply on the basis of gender, Wheemer confirms that he does. He insists that the policy would be moral and right, framing the search as an opportunity for the English department to take a stand against sexism.

Wheemer’s position is sharpened by the circumstances of his own hiring. Phineas Coomb had been his most vocal advocate, apparently interpreting remarks in Wheemer’s interview as signs that he was gay. The account clarifies that Wheemer was instead trying to convey his acceptance of gay, Black, Asian, Latino, and Native American people; he would have preferred to belong to one of those groups himself, politically and morally speaking, had that been possible. After Wheemer argues that the department should have hired a woman instead of him, he says that when he comes up for tenure, his colleagues should vote against him because he was selected over a qualified woman.

Characterization and Departmental Conflict

The meeting scene sets Wheemer’s declared principles against the strained, often comic atmosphere of departmental procedure. He appears close to tears as he argues that the department should have hired a woman and should later deny him tenure. His commitment is presented as sincere, but the account also records that June Barnes, herself a feminist, has grown weary of his manner of correcting others. His nickname condenses that friction: a routine linguistic correction becomes the label by which colleagues recognize him.

Wheemer’s role in these scenes is less that of a detached theorist than an active participant in a contested hiring process. His proposal would exclude both male candidates, while Gracie DuBois objects to Professor Threlkind on separate grounds: she does not want another white man, another twentieth-century specialist, or another poet. The contrast shows that the department’s arguments about representation are entangled with competing judgments about individual candidates and academic fields. Wheemer’s personal willingness to face a negative tenure vote gives his advocacy a self-implicating edge, even as the narrative’s comic framing keeps his convictions in view alongside the department’s skepticism.