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.

Manny Wahrsagen

Mandelbrot, aka Manny, Wahrsagen was the Associate Dean for Academic Standards, and kind of the Greek chorus of everything that went on in the College of Arts and Sciences, or he would have been, if he’d ever commented on anything that went on in the College of Arts and Sciences. Mostly he just looked unhappy. He saw everything, though. Nothing escaped Manny. Sadly, he had almost no authority to actually do anything. He’d been chasing Vince Viscous ever since he’d learned that Vince basically taught only one course. Manny, you see, was the one assigned to ensure quality control of the curriculum. Manny was the one who had to make sure that everything was ship shape when the accreditation people did there periodic reviews of the college. The problem was that he had no authority to speak directly to Vince about the disturbing uniformity of his various syllabi.

Manny had to work through the College Curriculum Committee of which he was an ex officio member. He could come down hard on new course proposals that failed to adhere to the guidelines established by the provost’s office. Once a course was approved, however, it could basically be taught any old way the person assigned to teach it wanted. This made some people, such as Tanya, wonder what was the purpose of the course approval process. Syllabi were always subjected to merciless scrutiny to ensure that they conformed to the Provost’s Office guidelines, first by departmental curriculum committees and then by the college curriculum committee, and then, finally by the Senate Committee on Academic Matters. They were frequently returned to the instructor in question, at various stages of the approval process, with detailed instructions for elaborate revisions. But then once a course was approved, “academic freedom” dictated it could be taught any old way any old instructor wanted, which meant, or course, that the instructor in question could substitute an entirely new syllabus for the one that had been approved.

Manny’s authority extended only so far as his position on the College Curriculum Committee. He could make it known, of course, to program directors and to heads of departments that he was aware that many of the syllabi faculty actually used bore no relation whatever to the syllabi that were included with new course proposals as part of the course approval process and that he was not happy about this. That was all he could do, though. It was the job of program directors to ensure that faculty under their direction approached their courses in a responsible manner and the job of department chairs to make sure that program directors did this.

The problem was that program directors had no means of disciplining errant faculty and department chairs had few means of disciplining program directors. Everyone at every level of university administration enjoyed his or her post, more or less, at the behest of the faculty. Program directors had no control over raises, all they could do to discipline faculty was to assign them shitty courses at shitty times. If they actually did that, however, they risked faculty complaining to the chair about them. Department chairs don’t want to have to deal with faculty complaints, so program directors generally tried to make the faculty under their direction happy, and that meant, of course, that they were extremely reluctant to criticize them.

Department chairs were in a similarly powerless position. There was a steep learning curve for program directors because program directors handled the scheduling of what was sometimes upward of a hundred courses. They had to be familiar with the scheduling of courses in other departments so that they could avoid scheduling courses that conflicted with required courses in other disciplines. English majors, for example, were required to take History 101 their first year, along with MATH 100: Math for Humanities Majors, so it was incumbent upon the program directors that they be aware of when these course were offered so that they would not schedule ENG 101 on the same day and at the same time as either of those other two courses.

There were lots of these potential conflicts. When one figured in the situation of English minors as well as majors, scheduling became almost unmanageably complex (that Cliff Edge had not developed scheduling software that would automatically detect such conflicts was one of the enduring mysteries of the place, as was the fact that they paid millions of dollars for online learning platform software, human resources, and payroll and benefits software, etc., when one would have thought that faculty and graduate students over in the College of Information Sciences could have developed software for the university for which they would not have had to pay anything over and above faculty salaries and graduate-student stipends they already paid). It took so long for program directors to learn the ropes that once they did, department chairs were extremely reluctant to replace them.

Of course when we talk about disciplining faculty, we are referring to the proverbial stick and everyone knows that the carrot is a much better motivator than the stick. But alas, raises, when they came (because some years they didn’t) had hovered between 1%-2% for as long as anyone could remember. Worse, department chairs were not free to give anyone and everyone even these minuscule raises. Dean Debbie was so tight with the college purse strings that there was seldom enough money to give more than a couple of people the whopping 2% raise. Most people would have to be content with less, and some people would have to be content with no raise at all, independently of how hard they had worked. These were hard times in higher education, Dean Debbie always explained.

And yes, indeed they were hard times because department chairs, typically felt that they could not give glowing annual reviews to people to whom they knew they could not give raises, so they often strained to find something in everyone’s performance of which they could be critical. Sometimes they flat-out invented things, such as when Willard Weasel penalized Tanya for not giving finals when, in fact, she did give finals, just in the form of a final essay rather than a final exam. Of course these grasping at negative straws made the process of giving and receiving annual reviews incredibly unpleasant. Not only did chairs have to face disgruntled faculty one on one in their annual review meetings, they were hounded during those long fall months in which the reviews took place by the specter of open faculty revolt.

Manny was a firm believer in the carrot over the stick and felt that praise often worked as well as raises depending on the faculty member. In this respect, however, he was a voice crying in the wilderness. The thing that really galled him, though, was that the stick was so often wielded for the wrong reasons. Willard was the worst offender in that regard. Tanya, one of the most promising members to join Cliff Edge’s faculty in years, was routinely throttled by Willard, while Vince, whose skills at ingratiating himself with anyone and everyone with any authority obscured that his “scholarship” consisted of publishing what was essentially the same paper over and over again, was one of the few faculty whom Willard provided with a steady diet of carrot salad. Vince had been given every break in the book. While Tanya was routinely criticized for everything from her teaching to how she carried out the committee work that was piled upon her, Vince received course release after course release and was publicly lauded for everything he wrote, even letters to the editor of the local paper.

As I said, Manny had been chasing Vince for some time. It wasn’t just that he felt his position as the guarantor of academic quality in the College necessitated ferreting out fraudsters such as Vince. It was personal. That is, Manny felt that Vince was making a mockery of higher education more generally and hence lowering the public esteem which Manny’s mathematician parents had ensured him that he also would enjoy if he pursued a career in the ivory tower. Manny, being basically decent and kind hearted, found it difficult to admit to himself that his pursuit of Vince was based not merely on professional reasons, but also personal contempt and loathing. He was in one of those unusual situations where the right thing to do was also the selfish thing to do, hence it was relatively easy for him to avoid acknowledging the schadenfruede that now accompanied his conviction that he finally had Vince (and possibly also Willard) in his clutches.