Dave’s Diabolical Plans Go Awry

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.

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.

Dave’s Plan to Save the Religion Program!

Cliff Edge did not have a religious affiliation and neither the faculty nor the administration had much sympathy for religion of any kind. That is, the faculty was dominated by a bunch of liberal-leaning types for whom religion was synonymous with superstition and hence an outright offense to all properly-educated persons. The administration had no commitment to anything, including education. They just wanted to keep their cushy high-paying jobs, which meant that they had to maintain some semblance of commitment to education, hence the humanities departments were allowed to stagger on, chronically underfunded. Nearly all the instruction was provided by contingent faculty, which were about half “instructors” who received benefits and, until the pandemic, multiple-year contracts, and half adjuncts, who were paid by the course. There were a few older tenured faculty, but almost no new tenure hires and the provost and president were constantly powwowing on how they might get away with eliminating all tenure-line positions and still maintain their accreditation.

Pretty much every institution of higher education needs an English department, so the English faculty tended to be pretty checked out in terms of institutional planning. Such was not the case, however, with the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Both disciplines knew their situation was extremely precarious, hence they were constantly plotting ways to promote themselves in order to keep the department from being axed.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the philosophers loathed and despised the religion faculty. They’d have liked nothing better than to have shed themselves of that portion of the department. Not only did the philosophy faculty labor under the same simplistic conflation of religion with superstition that is pervasive among self-congratulatory pseudo-intellectuals, they were absolutely convinced that graduate training in philosophy was the most rigorous of any discipline in the humanities and that graduate training in religion was the least rigorous.

The problem was that it was easier to get grants in religion than in philosophy and several of the religion faculty had actually secured small grants in recent years. Moreover, Cliff Edge was in the midwest. It wasn’t actually the Bible belt, but midwesterners tended to look more kindly on religion than people in many other parts of the country, and Cliff Edge was pathologically averse to negative PR. They feared that outright axing the religion program would inevitably generate some negative PR, so their less than subtle plan was simply to starve the program until it could no longer be justified. If the numbers of majors became sufficiently low, then it would be impossible to justify running any of the upper-level religion courses. Once those courses had been eliminated, they reasoned, then the religion major could be eliminated. It wouldn’t be long before they could get rid of the minor as well and once that was gone, it would be only a matter of time before the religion faculty would become superfluous. That is, the plan was the gradual elimination of religion as a discipline at Cliff Edge. No single step in this process, they reasoned, would be newsworthy, hence the program could eventually be eliminated with very little, if any, risk of negative PR.

What Cliff Edge’s administrators had not sufficiently appreciated was the ingenuity of scholars, that is, people with years of graduate training, who knew that if their discipline was eliminated, they’d be out on the street. That is, the faculty were keenly aware that higher education was in crisis, that no one was hiring and hence that any academic who lost his or her job would have to find another profession or be permanently unemployed. And if you are still paying off student loans, as many of the faculty were, then neither training for a new profession nor being permanently unemployed was viable option.

So faculty hit on all kinds of ways to make it appear their programs were doing better than they, in fact, were. Chief among the ways of bolstering enrollment numbers in religion classes, was simply to require no work of the students. The sciences, because they had objective measures of determining pedagogical effectiveness, tended to shy away from this tactic, but they weren’t threatened the way the humanities were. The religion faculty devised a plan they felt sure would protect their discipline from elimination.

The plan had developed more or less organically. Dave was the first to figure it out. He’d been the director of the religion program for something like fifteen years, despite that he was only an instructor.

(People outside academia think that it is very stratified, with the tenure-line faculty holding all the power and looking down contemptuously on the contingent faculty. There were certainly plenty of tenure-line faculty who looked down contemptuously on the contingent faculty, but they didn’t have any power over them. Instructors were generally hired by committees comprised exclusively of other instructors, and adjuncts were hired directly by program directors, most of whom were themselves only instructors. Moreover, department heads were increasingly finding instructors made much more compliant program directors and committee chairs, etc., than did tenure-line faculty, so nearly all those position were held by contingent faculty. In fact, to be blunt, instructors had a considerable amount of power over tenure-line faculty, whereas tenure-line faculty had no power whatever over instructors.)

Dave had originally been puzzled when he noticed a gradual increase both in the enrollments in religion classes and in religion majors and minors as the proportion of contingent to tenure-line faculty increased. He’d assumed at first that this was merely a coincidence. The correlation continued, however, and, in fact, actually got stronger over time. The higher the proportion of religion courses taught by contingent faculty, the higher were the enrollments in those courses and the greater were the numbers of new majors and minors.

Dave might never have figured it out had Constance not constantly been plagued by student complaints, complaints the students inevitably brought to Dave as he was the Religion program director. The complaints against Constance were myriad. She had a mandatory attendance requirement. Students were allowed to miss only three classes, more than that, and they automatically failed. She had regular writing assignments and tended to be fairly inflexible with the deadlines. She was also considered by students to be a pretty tough grader. Her classes, even her intro classes, always had lower enrollments than all the other religion classes, and students were constantly besieging Dave with complaints about her. One student vented his frustration to Dave with an outrage that suggested he believed himself to be the victim of a serious injustice. It seems the student had enrolled in REL 100: Introduction to Religion, on the assumption that he would never actually have to attend class or submit any work, at least not before the end of the term, and had been rudely surprised when he’d received an email from Constance informing him that he’d failed the course because he’d exceeded the maximum number of unexcused absences.

“The whole reason I signed up for the course” the student practically screamed, “was because I had a friend who took it last term and told me that it was an easy A, that I’d never even have to go to class.” (It is a sad statement on the quality of higher education today, that it did not even occur to this student that a program director might be disturbed to think there were courses in his program that required little if any work, no actual attendance, and were liberal in their distribution of As.)

A few questions to the student revealed that his friend had taken a section of Religion 100 that had been taught by an adjunct. Even then the situation wasn’t immediately clear to Dave. It was only after he began to read the student teaching evaluations with a more critical eye that he began to see what was going on. Contingent faculty, you see, had no requirement to publish scholarship. Instructors, because they did hold nearly all the lower-level administrative positions, were evaluated annually on both teaching and service, but adjuncts were hired and fired based on student teaching evaluations alone!

And how else would one evaluate the quality of adjunct instruction? Actually studying their syllabi and reviewing examples of graded assignments, etc., in their courses would have been far too labor intensive for administrators who busy attending meetings and jetting around the country to conferences with their peers at other institutions (unlike faculty, administrators had unlimited travel budgets because, in the words of Dean Debbie, what they did was “very important to the institution.”) When Dave began to study the teaching evaluations of adjuncts, he started to understand why adjuncts had the highest enrollments in their courses. Instructors were next, and tenure-line faculty dead last.

Dave, who was consumed by a hatred of tenure-line faculty so intense that he could not admit the depth of it to himself, had always assumed that the differences in the teaching evaluations of tenure-line faculty and contingent faculty was a result of the fact that tenure-line faculty were bad teachers, imperious and officious and unsympathetic to their young charges, so to speak. The student evaluations told the true story, though, to anyone who looked beyond the numerical scores to read the student comments. Students loved teachers who were “fun,” who understood how overburdened they were with coursework (because after all, the sciences did still require work of students) and hence didn’t assign much. They pilloried professors who they felt assigned too much work and who they perceived to be harsh graders.

This situation was exacerbated by the fact that contingent faculty typically had approximately twice the teaching load of tenure line faculty. Instructors at Cliff Edge taught four courses per term, for a total of eight courses per year. The intro courses could have as many as 40 students each, so instructors typically had between 150-160 students per term. Instructors simply didn’t have time to grade much work, unless they could develop multiple-choice assignments that could be computer graded.

The situation was even worse for adjuncts. Cliff Edge wouldn’t allow adjuncts to teach more than two courses per term, for a total of four in a single year, because more than that would have made them technically full time, and Cliff Edge would have had to give them benefits. The thing is, adjunct pay was so low that it was impossible to to live on it, so most adjuncts taught even more courses per term than did instructors—just at different institutions. Most adjuncts had over 200 students per term, so they clearly didn’t have much time to grade either.

Contingent faculty had this double incentive not to assign students much work and not to give much feedback on what little work they did assign, and yet despite this to give uniformly high grades. That is, there was the time constraint issue and the job security issue. They couldn’t give much work because they didn’t have time to grade it, but they were understandably afraid of low scores on their teaching evaluations because low scores would mean they might not have their contracts renewed.

It was unclear whether upper-level administrators, who were bent on getting rid of as many tenure-line faculty as possible, understood the implications of turning nearly all the instruction at Cliff Edge over to the overworked and underpaid contingent faculty. It’s unlikely they would have cared, though, even if they had understood how this was serving to undermine the quality of the “education” Cliff Edge was offering, because their chief concern was keeping enrollments up. They conceived of their students as customers and were determined to do anything and everything they reasonably could to do keep these customers happy. The issue of whether it is properly the students who should be conceived as customers or their eventual employers who were increasingly disappointed by the ill preparedness of Cliff Edge graduates, was one that received insufficient attention by Cliff Edge administrators who sat cheerfully sawing off the very branch they were sitting on,

So that was it. Contingent faculty, and especially adjuncts, were popular with students because their classes were easy. In fact, “easy” was more or less a euphemism. Many of those classes were complete shams. There was always some sort of assignment or other listed in the syllabi of adjuncts, but it was usually a term paper, which was pretty much a useless exercise, not simply because the average Cliff Edge student couldn’t write well enough to do a decent term paper, but because the overwhelming majority of them would never see the instructor in question again, so they almost never bothered to read the comments on these papers, if indeed there were any comments on them, which there generally weren’t because the adjuncts knew that their students were not going to actually look at their papers unless they got what they felt was an unjustly low grade. But that eventuality could be averted by simply giving nearly everyone really high grades!

So that was it. Adjuncts assigned little if any work, had no attendance requirements, and gave uniformly high grades. Students loved them and enrolled in their courses in droves! The situation was analogous, if not quite so extreme, with instructors.

This realization was initially unsettling to Dave, until he self-interestedly decided that this sort of “casual, fun” approach to “learning” was exactly what Cliff Edge’s stressed-out students needed! In the past, Dave, in keeping with official departmental policy, as well as long-established convention in academia, had given the tenure-line faculty priority in scheduling. That had meant, of course, that they taught all the upper-level seminars. Because their courses were less popular than those of the adjuncts and instructors, though, these seminars often had to be cancelled due to low enrollment and their repeated cancellation actually threatened the major because many of these courses were required for the major.

Dave figured out that if he could shift many of these upper-level seminars to adjuncts, that he could increase their enrollments. The problem was figuring out how to do this without violating department policy. He tried to encourage tenure-line faculty to teach more into courses by pointing out that these courses were gateway courses for potential majors and hence at least some of them needed to be taught by tenure-line faculty. That had had some mild success, but not enough to satisfy Dave. So he hit on the technique of scheduling too many upper-level seminars in a single term with the inevitable result that those assigned to tenure-line faculty would be cancelled at the last minute due to low enrollments. Tenure-line faculty were required to teach five courses a year, so if their seminar was cancelled, they’d be switched to teaching another course, usually an intro. After a few terms of having one’s seminar cancelled at the last minute and having to struggle to put together a syllabus for an intro course one probably hadn’t taught in years, and tenure-line faculty actually began to request to be assigned to intro courses. This then left Dave free to reduce the number of seminars he’d been offering and to assign the majority of them to contingent faculty.

It took the tenure-line faculty awhile to figure out what was going on. Constance was the first to figure it out, but Dave had a justification at the ready. He explained that the contingent faculty needed to teach upper-level seminars to make themselves attractive on the job market. No tenure-line professor dared to point out what in fact everyone knew, i.e., that anyone who didn’t land a tenure-line position right out of grade school, but who was forced to accept a position as an instructor or adjunct, was never going to get a tenure-line position. For a tenure-line professor to point out that the contingent faculty were effectively condemned to labor forever in the coal mines of their overworked, underpaid, insecure positions, would have seemed the height of arrogance. Word would get out and the professor in question would be mercilessly bullied and ridiculed the contingent faculty who, it is important to remember, were vastly in the majority at Cliff Edge.

No, Dave’s system was foolproof!