politics – Dean Debbie's Debacle: An Allegory of Administrative Incompetence

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.

The Sucker Law firm, was actually short for Sucker, Liar, Bungler, and Cheat. In the law world, though, they were generally referred to as “those assholes over at Sucker,” or just “Sucker.” Sucker was infamous in a world where infamy was pretty much the standard. Where other law firms would manipulate damning evidence to make it look less damning, or try to get it excluded on technical grounds, Sucker attorneys would literally manufacture exculpatory evidence for their clients. You may wonder how any lawyer could get away with something like that. In a world, though, where most cases settle out of court, there was little danger of Sucker’s contempt for the federal rules of evidence being exposed for what it was. This danger was diminished even further by the fact that Sucker specialized in representing colleges and universities. Mostly, they defended these institutions against discrimination lawsuits from students and faculty who rarely had enough money to see a case all the way to trial and frequently had to pull out even before a satisfactory settlement could be reached. That meant Sucker rarely had to face the possibility of exposure, and so far, had managed to avoid exposure even in those few instances where that possibility had loomed threateningly.

The culture at Sucker was, to put it mildly, pretty nasty. Law firms in general are not warm, fuzzy places to work, but Sucker set a new standard of misery for its attorneys. They used every trick in the book, padding hours, overstaffing, making sure that Sucker himself was assigned to every single case they took on so that the firm could bill his hourly rate, in addition to the lower rates of the other attorneys assigned to the cases. Sucker excelled in the creation of what was known within the firm as “fake motions,” or motions that had no chance of being granted, but which provided unparalleled opportunities for padding clients’ bills. Sucker held the record for firms in the tri-state area for number of documents filed in a case with over a thousand documents in what should have been a straightforward discrimination suit, you know, the kind of suit where you had maybe a hundred docs filed at the most.

Sucker did well for a long time. They made money hand over fist. Jock Sucker had discovered, you see, that while personal injury cases were where the big awards were to be had, they were also both costly and risky. Companies tended to spare no expense in defending themselves and going up against them, even for a stellar graduate from a top-tier law school, could involve years of hard work with no payout whatever at the end. Add to that the complication that Sucker wasn’t a stellar graduate of a top-tier law school, but had graduated near the bottom of his class at the now defunct for-profit Louisville Law Academy, and plaintiffs’ personal injury law was simply out of his league.

On the other hand, Sucker discovered quite by accident, that the one place where even the most feeble-minded attorney could clean up was in representing universities in discrimination suits. Like corporations, universities always had their own in-house counsel. Unlike corporations, though, universities seemed to have no standards whatever in terms of who they hired for these positions. They paid less than in-house counsel for corporations (which in turn paid less than any actual law firm) and so, in the world of law, where money is the standard for everything, in-house counsel for universities tended to be the real bottom of the legal barrel. Everyone knew this, of course, but few people worried about it because they figured that any case that the in-house counsel couldn’t handle themselves, would be farmed out to outside counsel, whom, it was assumed, would be more competent.

The only flaw in this system was that the in-house counsel were the people who secured the outside counsel, and being the legal-losers they tended to be, they were unusually subject to obsequious flattery and tended to hire outside counsel based on how effective such counsel was at flattering their egos rather than at winning cases. But again, this rarely mattered because most students and faculty simply couldn’t afford to see a case all the way to trial and so the legal ineptitude of both in-house and outside counsel rarely interfered with the system of law firms that represented colleges and universities bleeding these institutions of what little money they had.

And bleed they did. Most people are afraid of lawyers, even upper-level academic administrators and members of boards of trustees. These people tend to feel, a feeling reinforced by in-house counsel, that they don’t know anything about law. So, rather than keeping watch on what their in-house counsel were doing, they tended to give them an absolutely free rein, a situation exacerbated by the fact that most colleges and universities have legal insurance, so even if their annual legal bills were in the millions of dollars, they generally paid little attention to why. The fact that a law firm paid by the hour had no incentive ever actually to settle any lawsuit, seemed to escape the notice of academic administrators and legal insurance meant that they probably wouldn’t have cared much anyway at a time such as that in which our story is set, when enrollments were declining precipitously and filling seats was a far more urgent issue than reducing legal costs.

Everyone knows the saying that there is no honor among thieves. Few people realize, though, in our smash-and-grab society, that there isn’t much happiness either. Attorneys in general, and the attorneys at Sucker in particular, quickly learn, though few would admit it consciously to themselves, that happiness cannot be obtained by screwing over innocent people, (people who had already been screwed over pretty brutally by their employers), no matter how lavish a living one made doing it. So the attorneys at Sucker were mostly miserable, mostly in perpetual bad moods, and constantly sniping at one another.

They were making money, though. They were making money hand over fist and had been doing so for some time. The problem was that every time a Sucker attorney got away with some sort of fraud or other, the firm as a whole became cockier. That was its undoing. Like Icarus, Sucker ended up flying just a little higher than they should have understood they would be able to get away with. That is, everything was going along more or less fine, until the irresistible force of Jock Sukker’s love of money encountered the immoveable objects of Constance Alethea’s commitment to her vocation of teaching and the fact that she had unlimited free legal support in the form of her boyfriend, the obscure, but brilliantly talented plaintiff’s employment law attorney, James Justice.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When Whoretensia Lügnerin was assigned to defend Cliff Edge College against Constance’s charge of sex discrimination the firm was still doing well. True, they had lost a very high-profile academic freedom case, but they had not yet seen the mass exodus of clients they would later experience. In defense of the debacle Whoretensia made of Constance’s case, I am compelled to point out that she, Whoretensia was, like most attorneys, way overworked. She didn’t bother to do any research concerning whether Weasel’s depiction of Constance’s character and situation in the department was accurate. What attorney in Whoretensia’s position would have wanted to do that, anyway? Weasel’s depiction of Constance was a godsend. Here was an arrogant, bullying, uncollegial, piece of academic deadwood, the kind of “scholar” with which the academy was littered and whom humanity as a whole would be better off without. This was the image of Constance that Whoretensia, and the Sucker firm more generally, needed to promote to win the case, so why bother to do any actual research to determine whether this picture was accurate? There was little danger, after all, that it would ever be exposed as inaccurate, even if that were the case.

Or so it seemed, at the time, to Whoretensia.