In the audience, many of them nodded as he spoke.
“My friend Eli wrote, in his wonderful book, that autodidacticism is a gift, from ourselves, to ourselves, but also a response to the vacuum where an institutional education is supposed to be. In his case, there was no institutional education. In mine, a completely inadequate one, because there was such a powerful orthodoxy at work in my school.” Unlike Eli, he told them, he’d had an upbringing of privilege, with a front-loaded expectation that he’d graduate from high school, attend college, and likely earn a graduate degree. Yet even in his premier institution, with its low admission rate and absurd tuition, with its credentialed teachers and penchant for the seminar table and “politically alert” student body, he’d still reached the hard conclusion that he’d have to educate himself. And because, at Walden, there had been no celebration of disagreement, educating himself had meant learning both sides of every argument. That, it turned out, had been a very useful thing.
The watermelon story had begun as a senior prank, a few days before his own graduation. Senior prank was a Walden tradition, in which graduating students would arrive early to string toilet paper through the trees on either side of the school’s front door, or paint the elegant iron bars pink with poster paint. One year a pet ferret had been loosed in the Commons, and Harrison remembered a vat of viscous red slime strategically hidden inside the faculty lounge. The plan, when his own class was about to graduate, was for each senior to bring in a watermelon, delivering the fruit to a hallway outside the art room where the rinds would be coated with oil. From there the watermelons would be distributed around the campus and left to be discovered （and hopefully lifted!） by persons unknown, leaving cracked-open explosions of red flesh and seeds everywhere in an obvious expression of senior pride!
What could go wrong?
Teenagers, tearing toward the end of school, have a lot on their minds, which possibly explained the fact that only four seniors remembered their watermelons. （Another possible reason, which Harrison did not add, was that they had already received their college acceptances, and were stoned out of their wits.） When the pair of students in charge saw how few watermelons they had to work with, they made an executive decision to consolidate them, placing all four in the office of their class dean.
Who happened, Harrison informed the members of the Hayek Institute, to be Black.
Crisis and horror. Devastation and dismay. Before an hour had passed, Walden’s principal had emailed the community, canceled classes, and set out the microphones for a public （and attendance mandatory!） all-school rending of garments. That Walden students, so relentlessly schooled in the narratives of oppression, had committed an act of such thoughtless, callous denigration! How was it possible? What could it mean? All of that consciousness-raising, all of that decency, and yes, all of that tuition, and they had still ended up wielding a particularly vicious racist trope to make fun at a Black teacher’s expense. Was there not one Walden senior well enough informed to have intervened and prevented this?
In fact, there was one Walden senior. A single Walden senior. Harrison explained to the members of the Hayek Institute that having effectively wrested his own intellectual life from the exclusive dominion of the Walden School, and having read widely from an index of forbidden texts, and having thought deeply outside the bubble of sanctioned ideologies, he himself was fully cognizant of the powerful symbol that was … the watermelon, and would have been more than capable of communicating what a bad, bad idea this was to that pair of pranksters, if they had happened to ask him. Harrison had read Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative and Buckley’s God and Man at Yale. He’d read Thomas Carlyle’s 1849 “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” and John Stuart Mill’s thunderous reply, “The Negro Question.” He had even read The Turner Diaries after the Oklahoma City bombing, just to discover what puerile fantasy had addled the brain of that moron, Timothy McVeigh, and he had found it absurd, laughably manipulative and, incidentally, appallingly written, but also, in its way, illuminating. （None of these books, of course, had been in the collection of the Walden library—which, by way of contrast, had no fewer than three copies of Heather Has Two Mommies in the K-5 section. He’d had to purchase them, in the case of the Goldwater and the Buckley. For The Turner Diaries, he’d had to fill out an interlibrary loan request at the Brooklyn Public Library, under the baleful and plainly suspicious eye of a librarian.）