From the May/Jun, 2025 issue of *Touchstone*

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Little Acquiescences

Steven Faulkner on Timely Lessons from Cancer Ward

Student protests. They’re here again. Demonstrations, sit-ins, occupations of administrative buildings, tent encampments, placards, shouting, cursing, destruction of university facilities. Some of us are old enough to remember the late 1960s and early 1970s. I finished high school in a quiet Midwestern town that was home to a state agricultural college that had blossomed into a quiet university: Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. Students and town inhabitants were concerned about the Vietnam War; television news reminded us of it every night, and Fort Riley, a few miles away, was funneling soldiers there, but most of us were more interested in the college basketball team and its sudden run of victories than in national or foreign affairs.

In 1968, I left for a college near Chicago, but over the next several years, student demonstrations and street riots erupted across the country: race riots in Detroit and Harlem, war protests in Washington, D.C., snipers on rooftops picking off the firemen and policemen sent to quell arson fires in Indiana; in my hometown, student arsonists burned down a Kansas State gymnasium. There were underground revolutionary groups like the Weathermen, who were quite willing to use violence. The immediate causes of student unrest were, in some ways, different then, but the instigators look remarkably the same these days. And, now as then, graduate teaching assistants, lecturers, adjunct professors, and tenured professors often support, even foster, student protests. Ideologies, from Marxism to feminism to anti-colonialism and Derrida’s deconstructionism had been festering and developing on campuses for years while Judeo-Christian ethics were being abandoned.

Silent & Compliant

Recently, I reread Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s marvelous novel Cancer Ward. I’d forgotten how Solzhenitsyn, like Dostoevsky before him, reveals a wide range of ideologies current in his day by way of his characters. Toward the end of the novel, we get to know a librarian who is about to be operated on for rectal cancer. His name is Aleksei Shulubin. After the Communist Revolution, he had become a university teacher in Moscow. Oleg Kostoglotov, the novel’s main character (who, like Solzhenitsyn himself, had spent years in a concentration camp for political dissent and had also contracted cancer), gets into a conversation with Shulubin.

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Steven Faulkner teaches creative writing at Longwood University in southern Virginia. He is the author of Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts (2007) and Bitterroot: Echoes of Beauty and Loss (2016). Both books are memoirs of father-son journeys that followed the paths of missionary priests: Marquette (in Waterwalk) and De Smet (in Bitterroot).

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