Free Indignation by Philip Roth Page A

appear a sign of my maturity to be making light of the scar? To play it safe, I didn’t write “scar and all” but added a cryptic P.S.—“I am moving toNeil Hall because of a disagreement with my roommate”—and sent the letter off through the campus mail.
    She did not return to sit beside me in class but chose to remain at the back of the classroom, out of my sight. I nonetheless ran off every day at noon to my mailbox in the basement of Jenkins to see if she had answered me. Every day for a week I looked into an empty box, and when a letter finally appeared it was from the dean of men.
    Dear Mr. Messner:
    It has come to my attention that you have taken up residence in Neil Hall after having already briefly occupied two separate rooms in Jenkins. I am concerned about so many changes of residence on the part of a transfer student who has been at Winesburg as a sophomore for less than a semester. Will you please arrange with my secretary to come to my office sometime this week? A short meeting is in order, one that I’m sure will prove useful to both of us.
    Yours sincerely,
    Hawes D. Caudwell,
    Dean of Men
    The meeting with Dean Caudwell was scheduled for the following Wednesday, fifteen minutes afterchapel ended at noon. Though Winesburg became a nonsectarian college only two decades after it was founded as a seminary, one of the last vestiges of the early days, when attending religious services was a daily practice, lay in the strict requirement that a student attend chapel, between eleven and noon on Wednesdays, forty times before he or she graduated. The religious content of the sermons had been diluted into—or camouflaged as—a talk on a high moral topic, and the speakers were not always clergymen: there were occasional religious luminaries like the president of the United Lutheran Church in America, but once or twice a month the speakers were faculty members from Winesburg or nearby colleges, or local judges, or legislators from the state assembly. More than half the time, however, chapel was presided over and the lectern occupied by Dr. Chester Donehower, the chairman of Winesburg’s religion department and a Baptist minister himself, whose continuing topic was “How to Take Stock of Ourselves in the Light of Biblical Teachings.” There was a robed choir of some fifty students, about two-thirds of whom were young women, and every week they sang a Christian hymn to open and close the hour; the Christmasand Easter programs featured the choir singing renditions of seasonal music and were the most popular chapels of the year. Despite the school’s having by then been secularized for nearly a century, chapel was held not in any of the college’s public halls but in a Methodist church, the most imposing church in town, located halfway between Main Street and the campus, and the only one large enough to accommodate the student body.
    I objected strongly to everything about attending chapel, beginning with the venue. I didn’t think it fair to have to sit in a Christian church and listen for forty-five or fifty minutes to Dr. Donehower or anyone else preach to me against my will in order for me to qualify for graduation from a secular institution. I objected not because I was an observant Jew but because I was an ardent atheist.
    Consequently, at the end of my first month at Winesburg, after having listened to a second sermon from Dr. Donehower even more cocksure about “Christ’s example” than the first, I went directly from the church back up to the campus and headed for the library’s reference section to sift through the college catalogues collected there, tolook for another college to transfer to, one where I could continue to be free of my father’s surveillance but where I would not be forced to compromise my conscience by listening to biblical hogwash that I could not bear being subjected to. So as to be free of my father, I’d chosen a school fifteen hours by car from New Jersey, difficult to