Dave Denial was a dedicated teacher. Or at least he like to think of himself as a dedicated teacher. Dave repressed a lot. He was so full of anger at having been twice passed over for tenure-line positions in the department that the anger just oozed out of him, even in his interactions with students. He had an incredibly self-effacing affect. But it was such a caricature of genuine deference to others that it fooled only the incorrigibly stupid. It was obvious to most people that Dave was a huge hypocrite, that while he pretended to cater to everyone’s wishes, even at the expense of his own time and happiness, in fact, he didn’t really care about anything other than nursing his own sense of righteous indignation over the unjustness of his fate.
Dave had developed a positive genius for undermining the attempts of all the other faculty in the department, with the exception of the adjuncts, to actually accomplish anything. He always surveyed the other religion faculty concerning their views on issues relating to the religion program, but then he would go ahead and make all the decisions concerning those issues himself and report them as a fait accompli to the rest of the faculty. It hadn’t always been this way, though. To be fair to Dave, it is important to acknowledge that in the beginning, Dave had made genuine efforts to involve the other faculty in the decision-making process. The thing is, most of the faculty, the tenure-line faculty anyway, didn’t give a crap whether the religion program offered a certificate in, for example, spiritual counseling, or when program events were scheduled. So Dave had gradually given up on them. And when he realized that no one seemed to be aware that he was effectively running the program all by himself, he began to devise ways to take advantage of this to make the lives of those professors against which he had particular grudges a living hell.
I have already remarked on Dave’s devious scheduling practices, so I won’t go over them again here. Sabotaging the schedules of professors he hated was only one way Dave had of making them miserable. There were myriad other things Dave could do. For example, he had access to the teaching schedules of all the religion faculty, so it was easy for him to schedule events with students at times when professors he disliked would be unavailable. Since he was usually the person who organized such events, he was also the person other faculty consulted when they, uncharacteristically, attempted to organize events themselves. He would bend over backwards (or at least appear to be bending over backwards) recommending locations that would turn out to be completely unsuitable and recommending food vendors that were so expensive the poor professor would exhaust the budget they’d been allowed for the event and end up having to pay for many of the refreshments themselves.
Constance, for whom Dave had developed such a hatred it had achieve pathological proportions, had suffered so much at Dave’s hands that she had, oh so gradually, figured out what he was up to and had begun repeatedly complaining about him to Willard Weasel, the department head. Unfortunately, Willard was one of the few incorrigibly stupid people who was actually taken in by Dave’s thin veneer of pretended consideration for others, so Constances complaints to Willard about him fell on deaf ears.
Constance was one of the professors whose schedules Dave repeatedly sabotaged. He’d schedule her classes during the same term he scheduled competing classes. For example, if Constance were scheduled to teach a seminar on the New Testament, Dave would make sure that an introductory course on the New Testament was scheduled for the same term. The religion program was so small that there were not enough religion majors to fill a seminar on such a subject, so in order for the course to get enough students to run, it would have to draw on non-majors. No non-major will take a seminar on a subject, though, if there is an introductory course on the same subject scheduled for the same term, so the intro course would fill, but the seminar wouldn’t and would have to be cancelled at the last minute, forcing Constance to scramble at the to teach a course she had not been prepared to teach.
Dave could also reduce the pool of students for a particular course Constance was scheduled to teach by simply scheduling a high number of sections of the same course in the terms immediately preceding the one in which Constance was scheduled to teach it, so that by the time Constance was supposed to teach it, there were no longer enough students who needed to take it that year to fill the course, and again, it would be cancelled at the last minute due to low enrollment.
This term, Dave felt he had actually outdone himself. Never before had he devised such a diabolical plan. Constance had had a student for several classes who had become genuinely devoted to her. Constance’s students had a habit of doing that, which irked Dave no end because he had convinced himself (Constance’s teaching evaluations notwithstanding) that Constance was a really shitty teacher. So anyway, Constance had had this student who had wanted to do an independent study with her on religious existentialism, but Dave, as Religious Studies program director, had to approve that plan and he had convinced the disappointed student that Vince was actually the person the student needed to work with. So the student had dutifully done that. Dave had known, of course, that Vince was flat-out allergic to work and that it was unlikely that he’d meet very often with the student, so he went to the student, just after the midterm, to inquire how the independent study was going.
Dave feigned exaggerated concern when the student complained that he had been unable to arrange more than one meeting with Vince. “Oh that is not good!” Dave had replied, realizing, as he rubbed his gnarled hands together gleefully (which gesture the student thought was pretty weird), that he could effectively kill two birds with one stone by getting Vince in trouble for not meeting with the student, even while he would make Constance’s life more difficult by dumping this student on her only a few weeks before the end of the term. Because Constance, he was sure, could not possibly refuse to take on one of her favorite students who had been abandoned by the feckless Vince.
Except, Dave was wrong there. He’d overplayed his hand some time ago, though he didn’t realize it until Constance, who had finally gotten wise to his tricks, refused to take on the responsibility for the independent study so late in the term. She responded politely but firmly that such an act would be a disservice not only to herself, by adding immeasurably to her workload that term, given what would be required to create an entire course included readings and assignments, etc., it would, more importantly, be a disservice to the student, who could not possibly get from the few remaining weeks what he should have been able to get out of a course that ran an entire term. No, Constance had declared firmly, the only thing to do was to get the student a late withdrawal and to allow him to arrange a new independent study with her the next term.
Dave had not seen that coming. It was bad! That is, Dave was now stuck in the position of leaving the student to the sham independent study with Vince, a course he had directly admitted to Constance was a sham, and about which he feared she might complain to Weasel, or actually allow the student to withdraw and endure the unpleasant grilling about the dwindling enrollments and course offerings in the Religion program in his annual review for that year. The latter, he quickly decided, was the greater threat, because he needed to keep the numbers of students enrolled in Religion courses up in order to keep the program from being axed, and had to that end, actually been arranging an number of these sham independent studies with Vince for some time.
On the other hand, he’d so defamed Constance to Weasel that he felt he could be fairly confident that any complaints she might bring to Weasel would fall on deaf ears. And he was right about that, of course. What he hadn’t counted on was taht but by this time, Constance knew he was right about that, so after she learned that Vince had flat-out refused to meet with the student because in his own words (which Dave had quoted in an email to Constance in the hope of coercing her into taking on the responsibility for the independent study), he felt it was a “waste of his time,” and after she learned that the student had received credit for the course, which meant that he’d actually paid tuition for it and that Vince had gotten credit for “teaching” it despite that he had not taught it, she wrote not to Weasel, but to Manny Wahrsagen, the associate dean for academic standards.
