Gus!

Thanks!

What do you have?

A French Martini in Manhattan! I will have one too.

How do you like retirement?

No office hours, no committees, no faculty meetings...

I am looking forward to all of that.

Until June... You used to hate meetings.

I don't blame you, but I would have expected to find you in a library, a museum, a theatre, a concert hall...

You sound almost conventional.

That's why I said it. You haven't heard any papers, asked any embarrassing questions?

You must have noticed: everywhere you go around here you see angry women coming at you.

I'm not a Christian.

... I refuse to apologize.

Revenge is uncouth.

What makes you think there is any?

You are lucky. If there is any, we have limited access to it. Isn't that the first lesson we should teach our students?

I would feel as if I were sitting on a tortoise's back dangling a carrot in front of his beak.

I used to enjoy meetings. If you saw interesting people, you could excuse yourself for looking at their badge and ask them if they knew someone you knew at the same place.

I was more interested in whether his or her book had come out.

Yes, and they would show me how interested they were.

It was amusing.

The feminists will say that the women used to run after the men.

Now we watch from the sidelines as angry women grind their axe and submissive men turn the grindstone.

... It all depends on who you turn it for.

You are welcome to your luxury. It doesn't matter any more whether a poet wrote profound and beautiful poetry. All that matters is whether he was a woman or at least saw women as some them want us to see them.

I haven't found any, but I haven't looked very hard.

I used to find that a courteous and cordial distance from women inspired mutual respect, but now some of them expect me to share their contempt for men or even concede the superiority of women.

Poison ivy in a hothouse.

Indeed!

It wouldn't have spilled the wind from her sails. The furies are convinced that men have been overawing women for centuries, so it's time to turn the tables on us. I don't like being relegated to a minority of braggarts.

Notice how they treat Julie-Anne.

And backbitingly beyond. Sometimes I can't believe my ears, but it's useless to say anything.

What awful adolescents they must have been!

Only when I can guess what's coming.

Parents feel sorry enough for themselves.

Come on, Gus, the university isn't a prison.

You are exaggerating as usual. You can't beat a trend, but you only have to bend a little bit until it spends itself.

All industries generate waste and trends are highly degradable.

Some minds are born to waste themselves. The loss of shelf space is an annoyance, but at least some candidates for the PhD will delight in a neglected dissertation subject.

Thanks for your restraint! Trends only require a little lip-service. Substituting a few words for the others never hurt anyone.

Remember Tilda Libbie?

Remember her memo telling us, in thorough detail, how to treat any "visually underprivileged person" who might take one of our classes?

Please!

Yes I do. Frustrating yours amuses me.

The social sciences pride themselves on complicating the expression of simple ideas to impress the uninitiated.

That doesn't keep them from milking governments and grant agencies for the exorbitant sums they squander.

Most of their employees majored in a social science.

The humanities are cheap in comparison with the two sciences. I can't remember a time when they weren't nibbling at our budget on the excuse that they are useful.

A sinister plot!

You don't think you were misleading them?

Then what was so sinister about working with the rest of us to recruit students for our courses and our programs?

I'm glad you didn't, but I suspect that most of them were aware of it.

I have always had the same impression.

No, you wouldn't like that.

I know you did.

Yes, in themselves especially.

No, but I know it exists.

Many of them

I have always wondered what makes them attractive to students and unattractive to their colleagues.

The immaturity of the youthful perspective? You could spend a lot of time trying to find out. A handlebar moustache or a cute goatee works wonders.

Good professors are friendly, helpful...

So you think evaluations are just a safety valve allowing them to let off steam? What about professors who don't prepare their courses, who treat their students harshly or unfairly, who neglect them for research?

Sérigny?

I had the same impression, but he returned to his beloved Lyon and evaluations helped persuade him to leave.

They are not my friends.

Wheelwright? He is my friend and yours too.

Gus, that isn't very charitable.

Not bad!

I'm afraid no one wanted to try that.

True, but the humanities diversify the minds of the professors who work in them so that each develops his own grading policy. You were asking them to abandon personal standards that they had spent much time and effort refining. The problem is more complex than you admit.

Students thought you were both tough and kind.

It's the other way around for me. I enjoy giving them the grades they deserve.

No, the grades they deserve. You have to be objective.

I can be objective within the frame of reference determined by the relative truth I have discovered. Perhaps you felt uneasy about grading because you tried to conceive a frame of reference founded on ultimate truth.

Perhaps. Your zeal in correcting tests, exams and papers discouraged them. You covered the pages with red marks and remarks. A student once told me that they looked like they had the measles. You really have to ignore minor mistakes, particularly with graduate students who think they already know something.

You don't have to worry about that any more. Nor will I have to put up with the ignorant and vulgar multitude after May. I am not like you, I don't like students and, paradoxically, I have more success with them than you used to. You must have a tragic flaw.

I do like a few of them. Occasionally, I discover someone curteous, cultivated, curious... please excuse this alliteration...

If it's a young man, I invite him to lunch in the Windsor Room where my other students won't see us.

That happened once. If it's a young woman, I invite her to my house with other students or young faculty. I couldn't stand the vast majority of my students at my table or in my house. When I first began to teach in Concordia, I realized that state universities are truly democratic in the sense that all kinds of students come from all kinds of places.

I taught some of those too. They remind you how ineffective most public schools are, how ignorant the teachers are...

You must have something particular in mind?

What's wrong with them?

Your objections seem more theoretical than practical to me. Students are not so naïve as to try and outguess the experts who devise the test. I see nothing mediocre about these experts and I think they achieve their purpose. There is no better way to test a large number of students and select the best.

No better way? Standardized tests are certainly the cheapest and most convenient way, and that's why administrators embrace them with such determination. But they are also unfair, because they test the ability to remember rather than the ability to think. Testing the ability to think would necessitate essays and administrators hate all solutions that require much work by many employees whom they would have to pay. All they really care about is paper proof that they can show the public to justify their selection of candidates.

You would like something like the Bac, wouldn't you?

They have their traditions and we have ours. Americans would find subjective evaluation by many different teachers unfair. One teacher can compare essays with each other, but grades assigned by different teachers wouldn't conform to common standards enough to satisfy the public. Lawyers would make a lot of money.

You would never be able to establish them in the United States and anything you tried to establish wouldn't work.

Why on earth would we ever want to do that?

I have seen little of either. You emphasize the abuses at the expense of the advantages. The teacher who writes a recommendation has to consider that any exaggeration to the advantage or disadvantage of his student will hurt his own reputation if the student's performance contradicts his letter.

We do well enough by letters of recommendation and we would do worse by grading hundreds or thousands of essays. All of your reforms would run the risk of unforeseeable disaster.

Let's talk about something else.

You can't be serious! I had to deal with the workers who built my house. My expectations were modest and yet I was appalled by their ignorance and vulgarity. They were so unreliable, so mendacious, so... primitive...

He was certainly the exception and not the rule.

Your reaction to the level of intelligence must have resembled mine.

had covered the ridge by a slight bulge in the plaster and blended the new swirls into the old ones. He had us look at it from both sides so that the difference in lighting enabled us to appreciate the blend. "It's like a green in the late afternoon," he said. "The light comes in at a low angle so you can plot the path of your put and compensate for the variations in the texture of the grass."

Again, the exception doesn't prove the rule.

I don't know enough about such skills to argue with you, but surely you wouldn't consider them academic?

Which would leave French out, to say nothing of poetry and the essay, but I wouldn't go that far.

You and I managed to ride the great computer wave. Others were afraid to get their feet wet.

On the other hand, you and I are incompatible even in our choice of technology.

Are you in contact with your friends in Concordia?

Why did you move away? You gave up the library, the lectures, the concerts, the films, the theatre...

And the students.

were capable. You and your friends -- I mean friends in the broadest possible sense of the word -- had persistently sabotaged my efforts and frustrated my ambitions for reasons that I can't respect... You asked me, Si, and I have to tell you.

Well, I asked because I wanted to know. You are aware that I don't agree with you?

That seems pessimistic to me. What are you disagreeing on these days?

What do you mean?

I don't know whether to accuse you of false modesty or self-denigration. It's more likely that you wanted to dedicate yourself to study. I think we have that in common. I refuse to include you among colleagues who entered this profession because they were afraid of the others. The competition would have been stiff and they would have had to work hard.

I told you, they are not my friends.

Hardly!

I know, I know.

So you thought you could follow an academic career and write a little literature on the side?

Could you?

Your scepticism is justified. But now I have the time to do what I have been dying to do for thirty-five years.

I'm shaking and trembling.

If you were like me, you had gone to bed something worse the night before.

You are going to tell me that you are writing a novel. I can feel it coming.

A conversation? What kind of conversation? The kind we are having right now?

You are going to put words in my mouth.

I shake and tremble a little less, but I'm afraid this thought will be as negative as usual and I can't believe you don't intend to publish it.

How many readers do you expect to reach that way?

You do? Wouldn't you rather know whether you are wasting your time?

Well, I wish you luck and, if you publish your conversation soon enough, you will have at least one reader.

Oh, I might forget. I promise I will throw a tantrum worthy of your expectations.

I plan to throw an obstacle in the path of readers. I will let them read the first half free. If they want to read the second half, they will have to pay me $5 and I will send it to them.

The second half will be even more interesting than the first?

Thank you, but I will be shaking like your hero.

You should have been a mathematician, a physicist, an engineer. You would have been a happier professor.

That sounds like soccer.

I was playing the piano.

I suppose you keep up with the research in your field?

I hope you haven't forgotten?

Any more papers?

... Do you miss teaching?

You were doing some unusual things. Students mentioned them occasionally, but, since it was none of my business, I refrained from asking for clarification. I will say that the good ones liked them and the bad ones didn't, if you will excuse the distinction.

They often show us a thing or two that way. They don't necessarily grow up by reaching the age of seventeen and going away to college, as too many parents assume.

I have noticed the frozen smiles. Similar illusions affect alumni and even ordinary citizens. No one seems to understand that a university faces the same kind of problems as any large, diverse public institution: money, people...

You were telling me about your teaching methodology. You gave your students test and exam questions in advance.

what they have learned. What purpose does memorization serve when they have access to books and other sources where they can refresh their memory and even expand their knowledge? The evaluation, comparison, combination and development of ideas remains secondary. I wanted to give them an opportunity to demonstrate the critical skills I was trying to teach them. I shifted the emphasis from memorization to analysis by telling them in advance the subjects of one or two essays I would ask them to write. I even let them use their books and notes because I wanted them to concentrate on rethinking the material they had learned and planning the essays they would write. They often find term papers and take-home exams hard to finish, so I required them to write their essays during a class period and most of them managed to finish on time. I even encouraged them, once they had prepared to their own satisfaction, to engage in discussions of the material with other members of the class. If they were desperate, on the other hand, they had my phone number and I was usually able to put some order in their chaos. I felt like a radar operator talking a plane down on to the runway in bad weather.

Your exams must have been more interesting to read.

I can see advantages and disadvantages in your method. The greatest disadvantage would be that other professors are training students to do something entirely different. No wonder your approach exposed you to complaints from those who felt disadvantaged! The experience was certainly good for them, but I am not convinced that traditional teaching merely reinforces memorization. You and I learned that way. Furthermore, you could never persuade a significant number of colleagues to follow your example.

The administration would probably agree.

I'm afraid they not only waste it on reshuffling traditions, but also on pedagogical phantasy.

I'm sure that works fine in kindergartens and schools of education.

I share your opinion, but what can we do about it?

It would take more money than that to achieve a significant reduction. Many professors would rather lecture anyway.

... You have some interesting ideas about teaching and other things as well, but you go too far too fast.

That's a bad metaphor. Fleas feed on the flesh under the fleece. The changes would cause more chaos than any improvements that they may or may not achieve would be worth.

How do you know? We would have to implement the changes to find out and the risks are too great.

That's unfair.

I thought you would get around to your favorite example.

I can't think of any offhand, but these oligarchies rarely neglect the needs of the whole.

Utopia!

Too much democracy, like too much of anything, would only do harm.

You never came close!

She was too cute and too clever.

Yesss!

Wisdom prevailed. The charter was a provocation. It did challenge the dean by purporting to deprive him of his legitimate control over the 

department. The mandatory election of a chairperson by the departmental faculty would usurp his power to appoint one. The faculty would claim the right to make decisions traditionally reserved to him and force him to crush the revolt by threatening to cut the budget.

Ever so lightly! But you are casting lead soldiers again. Some administrators polish shoes as you say and some don't.

That's not true.

If you insisted that she polishes shoes, I wouldn't argue with you.

... At the beginning of a career, who can survive without polishing shoes? If you told me that you didn't even polish any then, I wouldn't believe you. I find it as demeaning as you do, I have done it as little as possible and even less since I was dean of international relations.

You are trying to provoke me. If you had tried, I wouldn't have let you.

Now you are insulting me.

That doesn't sound like a fact.

Not necessarily.

A possibility.

You are quibbling. In any case, Morph threw a hot potato in your lap because he knew you and your friends were determined to deny me tenure.

You were dangerous.

Right.

I would like to hear you tell it.

Ha! Ha! Ha! You hadn't realized yet how much I enjoy reactions to unwelcome surprizes.

You told me that I had had my Pearl Harbor and that you were going to get your Hiroshima, then I burst out laughing. I have to admit that laughter was inappropriate under the circumstances. I apologize.

There were a few others.

You shouldn't be celebrating Christmas anyway.

Sort of. I drink good wine. French wine, in fact.

Nothing. I rather enjoy Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year... Holidays are opportunities to meet friends and have a good time... You haven't 

come to the absolutely devastating climax of your story.

Now, now!

What doesn't astonish you? Administrators are just like everyone else.

You are getting off the subject again.

You keep getting off the subject.

You need to refine your technique.

I wouldn't have done that. You could be trusted, but others would expect the same treatment.

And?

In following the rules, you had shown me your recommendation, which you then inserted in the dossier before sending it to the dean. This was something else.

So?

I am.

With mistakes in spelling if not in grammar.

How did you feel when you read that?

Ha! Ha! Ha! A few centuries ago, you would have sent me an invitation to meet on Jackson Green at daybreak. A pair of foils or pistols would have been waiting on a folding table.

They didn't have champagne yet.

I am particularly fond of the oboe.

my students. I was more wary of a Catholic reaction than a Jewish, yet, as I was explaining Pascal's hatred of the Jews, Nathan looked as if I had thrown a bucket of icewater in his face. Although his French was good for a freshman, it was not good enough to keep him from missing some of those little words that make such a big difference. Since he had spoken to me a few times after class, I waited for another opportunity, but none came. He was probably embarrassed... Do you still think I am anti-Semitic?

You are going to get a bucket of icewater in the face. I never thought you were prejudiced against the Jews.

No, I didn't.

I don't like Jewish zealots, but they can be useful. You had spoken out against Steve Wannamaker's course on the Holocaust because you thought it was Zionist propaganda. He was on the dean's tenure committee along with a few of the other self-righteous militants you have been condemning. A word to the wise...

Yes, I did, I threw you to the lions.

You don't want me to lie, do you?

No, I have no remorse... except that I botched the job. I made a mistake in timing. The lions weren't hungry.

No. I am surprized you didn't already know that. You had too many Jewish friends. Ezra was a friend of your friends and, the first thing I knew, he was your friend too.

What do you mean?

I never heard anything about that.

Tell?

Everyone knows the chancellor doesn't control enough budget to wield much power, but I am surprized that Ezra admitted it.

No, you would have gotten a job in a four-year college.

Probably.

Not in the least. I would have taken satisfaction in the elimination of a permanent threat. I wouldn't have had to oppose all your attempts to change things. I would have had more time for research. You had won the first battle. I spent the rest of the war forestalling defeat.

I didn't win the war.

I wouldn't think of letting your steam cool. Waiter?

I'm on medication. We were talking about the charter.

Give me an example.

follow lectures or that they will have to listen carefully and attend assiduously to keep up with them.

I can see why Growly might accept such an argument. Even a bad lecturer in political science can interest some of his listeners some of the time. But he would need an excuse for the other listeners and the other times.

Peyton Arnoldi, who has to listen to him practically every time, had counted 37 the last time I spoke with him. He writes such things in that agenda he slips out of his pocket as if to take notes.

I didn't know that Abigail had turned some of the untenured professors against the charter. I'm less inclined to accept Gervaise's version than to assume that she talked some sense into their heads. How could democracy govern a department, much less a university?

Ha! Ha! Ha! Before long, you are going to compare me with the man who named the continent that Columbus had discovered after himself. Amerigo...

None.

You look like Sinkovitch about to stand up.

Perhaps you would have lost that vote too. Abigail had already converted your majority by one into a minority by two.

I think you are treating her unfairly. I don't like her, I don't trust her, I resent her mismanagement of the department and her delegation of routine administration to Millie. She is looking for a job somewhere else and I hope she finds one, although her fiasco in Concordia will make the presidency or deanship she once coveted impossible. She had the same illusion as you do, that administration is easy. She thought she could feminize the department so successfully that colleges and universities would compete with each other to hire her and let her wave her wand over them. But you should recognize that the opportunity she gave everyone around the table to express his or her opinion freely was intelligent, generous and, why not? democratic. I am surprized to hear you attack the one enlightened move she made.

The procedure was strictly democratic.

I told you: I don't like her.

Why should it have? We all agreed that you were destructive and we forgot our differences in a common effort to resist you. What could have been more democratic than that?

We nearly always had majority support.

You pronounce his name wrong.

I disagree.

charter. We saw it coming. George and I had even warned the troops.

You were seducing the younger faculty with your demagoguery. We just proposed a more orderly procedure. The traditional solution was obviously the best, so we advocated a committee to formulate a proposal for departmental governance, but we made you a concession by allowing election to the committee by the faculty rather than appointment by the chairperson.

Aren't elbows more humane than fingernails? I should think you would be more sensitive to such an improvement! Where is the hypocrisy in making untenured faculty aware of the risk they would run? That seems humane to me too. Making enemies is no way to get tenure.

Has there ever been an election without a campaign? What's wrong with trying to dissuade opponents from competing with your candidate? Abigail had invited all interested professors to declare their candidacy.

You are insulting me again.

Millie to adulterate the curriculum with trendy material, the Teaching Committee which Mumpet uses to gather compromising evidence for tenure dossiers and the Student Committee from which Sinkovitch wangles complaints against colleagues he doesn't like, me for instance. Nor have I forgotten the promotion of the graduate advisor to director of graduate studies who, in departments where he exists, is either a power behind or an heir to the throne. Since the first appealed to you more than the second, Abigail consented to it on the condition that you do her some favors. You effectively gave her veto power over nearly every possible initiative the faculty could take and enabled her to override any objection they might have to her decisions. Worse, you increased her authority over the untenured faculty so that she could use it to subjugate them even more than before. She could make or break their careers depending on whether they pleased her or not. After denying them any representation on your committee, you enslaved them to her.

Phew!

We were only doing what senior professors have always done to preserve the rights that they have earned by years of dedication to the department. Stability and continuity depend on this tradition. The young faculty you are so anxious to defend will do exactly the same thing.

You wouldn't really expect us to compete with Princeton and Yale?

Come now! What is so original about writing down the rules and procedures by which we govern the department? You admit that the 

governance document is entirely different from the charter. What struck me when I first read your proposal was the personal ambition lurking behind a display of idealism. We did salvage the few articles that had a leg to stand on. We kept the election of the chairperson by secret ballot, for instance.

Acknowledging the dean's right to make the final decision doesn't invite him to ignore the election.

I don't know what you are talking about.

He has always had the right to choose a candidate supported by a substantial minority, likewise the right to choose between several candidates acceptable to a majority.

Growly may feel obligated to political science, but his successor will have no such obligation. Depriving the dean of his right to choose his own chairpeople would ruin the university.

I feel as if I were listening to a man from Mars.

Your drawl sounds just as eerie.

So that is what I am! I have always wondered... The most offensive element of your campaign to impose a charter on us was the secrecy. You have spoken frankly with me and I will speak frankly with you. You went behind our backs trying to turn the younger faculty against us.

And exhilerating for womankind. On the contrary, I'm sorry I wasn't there.

That would be unpleasant.

He has a family.

The epithet is inappropriate. He saw your overture as an attempt to compromise him. He confided in colleagues he had confidence in. He discussed the matter with me and I told him to see Abigail.

Weren't you?

He didn't believe you.

I didn't say that.

Lion tamers adopt the scowl of the lions they tame.

She did tell the story as you suppose and get the sympathy she expected, but she didn't fool me. Actually, I envy you. I would have enjoyed the spectacle and you probably didn't, despite your laughter. On the other hand, Abigail's fury was useful in defeating the charter. Why didn't you ask her to put the idea on the agenda of a faculty meeting right away so we could discuss it in a meeting? She could have appointed a committee to develop a project. You tried to short-circuit the traditional procedure by springing a drastic reorganization of the department on us. That didn't seem very democratic to us. You think Wendel is a traitor. We think he's a hero.

We would have discussed it.

At the next meeting.

I don't understand your question.

The items at the end may seem trivial to you, but I can tell you that a chairperson encounters annoyances that he can best settle in a faculty meeting.

That wasn't what I meant by trivia. When she let us discuss an idea she didn't like, she scheduled a countermeasure like Millie's survey and, if that didn't discourage us, the rest of you were ready with all the negative arguments you could find. She would already have told the vulnerable fence sitters how to vote if it came to that.

You have a gift for casting legitimate traditions in a malevolent light. How could a chairperson run his department without wielding influence? He would get nowhere.

Haven't I already refuted that charge? It's time to talk about something else.

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