As was his habit, Fallner pushed his wire framed glasses back up the bridge of his nose and looked around. This motion was more than a subconscious idiosyncrasy. It was a means of announcing to the class that he was about to discuss a subject near and dear to his heart. To his students it was a signal that their right to freely express their opinions on the subject being considered were, for the next few minutes, suspended.

“Unfortunately,” Fallner began, “our new system was flawed at its very inception. Take Thomas Jefferson. In this man, long held to be the intellectual father of this country, we have the epitome of the hypocrisy that characterized most of his peers. Anyone who compares what this man said and wrote with the life he actually lived cannot help but see that he was a far better preacher than he was a practitioner.” Again Fallner paused to allow his students to chuckle at what he considered funny. But the class before him didn’t crack a smile. Normally a good number of his students would let out a nervous chuckle, or even halfhearted laugh, but not this class. Whatever control he had once exercised over them, whatever power he had once possessed to sway them had been lost, months before, when he had allowed himself to be bested during heated classroom discussions by one of his own students. Even now he couldn’t help but glance over and warily eye that student, wondering when she would interrupt his lecture and present him and the class with an alternate viewpoint.

From her seat Nancy Kozak returned Fallner’s cold stare. He was challenging her, she concluded. His bold statement was bait. He was presenting a view of history which was so outrageous, in her mind, that it could not be ignored. Not yet ready to comment, as she always did whenever he tried to show that America’s mythical heroes were nothing more than lying, self serving little men, Kozak held her tongue.

When his traditional antagonist did not rear up and challenge him, Fallner continued. “On one hand,” he stated as he held out his right hand for emphasis, “Mr. Jefferson writes a declaration which states that all men are created equal. At the same time, however,” throwing out his left hand, palm up, “he not only continues to hold onto the slaves he has, but acquires more. Yet even today, we are forced to listen to supposedly educated people who continue to claim that Jefferson was a great man.”

If Fallner’s remark about “educated people” had been an effort to discourage her from launching into a defense of Jefferson, it failed. Nancy Kozak was too savvy to be dissuaded by such a ploy.

Though he tried hard not to, Fallner glanced over at Kozak with the same anticipation one feels when eyeing a vicious neighborhood dog. He hated adult students, hated them with a passion. They came into the course with preconceived ideas, unprepared and unwilling to accept his views as gospel. Young students, those yet to be contaminated by the world, were far easier to manipulate and persuade.