Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [171]
Almost immediately I realized that very little had changed since I arrived in 1986. Ten years later I was still trying to overcome the resistance to me. When my tenure was granted, after four years of teaching at the University of Oklahoma, I thought the matter of my full membership in the academic community was settled, only to have it raised again in 1991. How tenuous my claims to the certainty of academic freedom and tenure are when politics is interjected. Even the full funding by the State Regents of Higher Education in December 1995 could not erase the acts of unfairness that others dealt to me and others like me. I could keep quiet about it—but had decided against that once and for all.
The ultimate message of how Boren felt about my presence at the university came in the law school itself. In an open forum, a first-year law student stood and asked how he, Boren, planned to address the negative publicity surrounding Professor Hill. Boren responded with a ten-minute monologue on the parking problem on main campus but never mentioned my name—as though they were words he could not bear to let pass over his lips in public.
By the spring of 1996 I was certain that the institution would never view me as a full member as long as I was an embarrassment to its leadership. And so, despite the warm welcome of support and the sincere respect of many in the student body, I knew that the fall of 1996 was my last semester as a faculty member of the University of Oklahoma. As I participated in the hooding of the law school graduating class, a variety of questions and thoughts filled my head. Since the age of six, other than the three years in Washington, I had been a member of an academic community. How was I to function outside of one? But, having escaped the political assaults and threats, seen one more class receive their degrees, and paved the way for research on issues which were crucial to me, it was now time to move on, as my grandparents did, in search of a better place.
EPILOGUE
What happened in October 1991 should not have happened to me or anyone else. Nevertheless, it did, and is now such an integral part of who I am that I cannot imagine how my life would be today if it hadn’t. My life has been forever changed. I will never again feel as safe and secure as I did before I received the first threats on my life. One day recently in a supermarket in Norman, a friend came up behind me, without identifying himself, and put his hands over my eyes. I panicked and for hours afterward was shaken at the act and the fear it brought to the surface. I reacted in the same way when, two years after the hearing, an NBC news crew rushed toward me in my driveway seeking a comment on the endowed professorship. I had declined the network’s requests for an interview. As they hurriedly approached me, I had no idea who they were or that what they might have wanted was an ambush interview. I only saw three men rushing toward me, and given my experience and the threats, I assumed their intent was bad. My first reaction was fear, but afterward, when the realization that they were simply overzealous journalists sank in, I wondered if I would ever be free to say no with confidence that the choice would be respected. Despite the fact that, as an NBC executive explained to me, the network policy was to use ambush interviews in only the most extreme circumstances, NBC chose to run the footage of me attempting to leave my home on the nightly news.
I am now more apt to speak my mind and show less patience in the face of what I think are injustices large and small. Of course, personal slights today have far less impact when weighed against the insults I suffered at the hands of certain senators and members of the public and press. More