Dean Debbie

Dean Debbie was a classic over-achiever. Most people don’t know what that term means. They think it’s something positive. It isn’t. An “overachiever” is someone who simply works harder than most people so that their accomplishments positively misrepresent their abilities. That is, they work so hard that they come off looking smarter than they are. That was Dean Debbie all over. She’d been daddy’s girl. She’d worked so hard at the little no-name college she’d attended that she’d graduated cum laude and actually gotten into a third rate Ph.D. program – in education

She was basically kind and good natured and still so determined to please daddy that she’d somehow ended up as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cliff Edge. That was partly, of course, because no one really cared about the “arts” and Cliff Edge, and the scientists, they figured, could take care of themselves. Dean Debbie was attractive and charmingly inarticulate, but she could also be a real bitch. She was just the kind of Arts and Sciences dean you would want at a school that was fundamentally anti-intellectual. 

Dean Debbie was no intellectual, but she had sensed very early that the higher ups viewed the “arts” half of the college of Arts and Sciences as a regrettable encumbrance. The former president had decided that Cliff Edge needed to “rebrand” itself as a “research 1” university in order to fare well in the increasingly competitive world of higher education. So basically, Cliff Edge was stuck with the “arts,” which is to say the humanities, whether they liked it or not. The only bright spot Debbie realized was that the humanities could be run on the cheap. The history department, the department of modern languages (if they had one, which they didn’t), the English department, etc., could be run on a shoestring. Which is what she did, to the great consternation of the faculties in those departments. 

Poor Dean Debbie. You had to have some sympathy for her. She was supposed to make these departments look good, without actually allotting them any resources that would help them to achieve this. And then there was the fact that these departments were teaming with resentful faculty. No one goes through the hell of a Ph.D. program in history or English, or political science, to end up teaching at Cliff Edge, which no matter how vigorously it tried to rebrand itself as the MIT of the Midwest, would never fool anyone because of how conservative academia is.

So anyway, Dean Debbie takes over the College of Arts and Sciences. only to find that being a dean is not, as she had been led to believe, like herding cats, but more like herding a bunch of black widow spiders. Every time she turned around someone was either there waiting to pounce on her, or actually pouncing on her. Departments were constantly feuding amongst themselves. Tenured English faculty refused to teach composition because they felt it was beneath them, so all the writing instruction was turned over to adjuncts who had to teach so many courses that they rarely had time to do more than glance at student assignments, let alone write any actual comments on them. The result of this, of course, was that Cliff Edge students had notoriously poor communication skills, a fact that was making it increasingly difficult for them to find, or at least to keep, jobs upon graduation.

And, of course, everyone blamed Dean Debbie for everything, even though in point of fact, she had almost no control over anything. She had learned to her sorrow that you can’t actually make tenured faculty do anything they don’t want to, including actually teach. They were always missing classes, failing to give feedback on assignments, and with increasing frequency even failing to give assignments. Mostly, they seemed to just like to come into the classroom and regale their captive audiences with tales about how civilization was coming undone. And those were the benign faculty. The malignant one were constantly plotting against her. 

Chief among these was Frank Forkedtongue. Frank, a religion professor, liked to pretend he was Native American. He’d gotten into Dartmouth, on that pretext, but hadn’t particularly distinguished himself. He had hoped to go to Oxford or Cambridge for graduate school, but Oklahoma State had been the only place that had offered him any money. This unfortunately, had led to the creation of an enormous chip on his shoulder a chip that had, over the years, reached pathological proportions. It hadn’t helped that he’d enjoyed a brief stint in the Provost’s office. He hadn’t been the provost, perish the thought. He’d only been one of a number of vice provosts and that only briefly. The thing is, he’d been a particularly vociferous opponent of the idea that Cliff Edge should start offering online degree programs. 

So anyway, in order to neutralize Frank’s opposition to the creation of online degree programs, he was offered a position in the provost’s office. Poor Frank had just the right combination of vanity and feeblemindedness to believe that he was being groomed to one day take over as provost. That dream was rudely shattered when the online degree programs were finally a done deal and in less than two years in the Olympian heights of the provost’s office Frank was cast back down again into his department. The humiliation of it was searing. It caused him, sadly, to lose completely what had always been his rather tenuous grip on reality. 

Ever since that wretched day when Frank had slunk back to his old office in the department, only to find it occupied by four adjuncts with whom he was temporarily forced to share it until they finally found him a new “office” in what had originally been a closet, he’d vowed to wreak revenge on any and every administrator at Cliff Edge. Even committee chairs could become targets of his scheming and plotting.

When he wasn’t explaining how it was that he had failed ever to make full professor despite having been at Cliff Edge for almost 30 years, he was regaling naïve new hires with stories of how he was frequently asked to take on the position of president of this or that small liberal-arts college. And all of this was done with an expression of such intense seriousness that it was almost hypnotic. To look at Frank while he was speaking was to risk being pulled down into the vortex of the alternate reality in which he lived, that’s why older more experienced faculty rarely looked him in the eye. They would listen to him with strained patience, because what the hell else are you going to do when you’ve been effectively interred with this nut for the rest of your professional life, and sometimes even interest, because Frank, just like the famous stopped clock, was occasionally correct, even if only by accident.

Sadly, there were more than a few other faculty in Frank’s department who were seething with similar resentment against a fate that had led them to end their days in ignominious academic obscurity. Ricard Ressentiment, for one, had made the mistake of looking a little too long at Frank when he was ranting about some phantom injustice that had been done to the good name of their mutual department. 

Frank and Ricard were sort of soul mates, or so Ricard thought. Neither of them had ever made it past the rank of associate professor, even though both had dreamed of distinguished careers as upper-level administrators. Like Frank, Ricard had served a stint in the administration. He’d been only an associate dean, however, and like Frank, not for very long. Dean Debbie had basically done a clean sweep of the dean’s office when she’d come in. That had been a huge mistake, but how was she to know? She’d been told: “Get your own people in there!” How was she to know that every single person she’d sent packing back to his or her department would despise her and vow to seek revenge on her. All academics at low-tier schools have to crow about is titles. It’s okay to be affiliated with a place such as Cliff Edge if you are at least a dean or something. But to simply be faculty was the ultimate insult to the fragile ego of the failed intellectual. 

So Frank and Ricard would sit and commiserate with each other over the unjustness of their respective fates and plan ways that they could humiliate this or that administrator, or indeed anyone who appeared to be achieving anything, or to have any kind of a future. Of course neither would have admitted that this was what they were doing. Both were incredibly self righteous and occasionally even championed the cause of younger colleagues who were shrewd enough to know to stroke their egos.