Mind Change

by T'Gracie Reese

  The entire gym fell silent.

  “Farewell happy fields,” whispered Tyra, “We’re all fired. Well…be it so, since she who now is Sovran can dispose and bid what shall be right. Oh, God, she’s getting ready to talk. The President. One who brings a mind not to be changed by place or time.”

  The microphone wheezed and screamed. A maintenance worker appeared like some helpful rabbit in a Disney movie, tinkered with it, tapped it with his finger, made it wheeze and scream again, shrugged, and left it to Lucinda Herndon who, probably like Satan in the mind of Tyra if not the assembled throng, spoke: “This morning,” she said, “the faculty and administration chose to accept early retirement. I would now like to ask you to run the university in their place.”

  There was first absolute silence, then a kind of general hubbub; then atrophied physical movement—erratic head shaking, limb quivering, foot and leg discontrol––then incoherent questions, and then questions somewhat coherent but incomplete and second-language sounding.

  “Could you?”

  “I––”

  “Did I––”

  “What?”

  It soon became clear that Lucinda Herndon knew every part-timer in the hall, and referred to them by first name, an impossible task since, not only had nobody else at the university bothered to learn the identity of even one part-time professor, most were convinced that no part-time professor even had a first name.

  “I would like for all of you to meet your colleague Thomas Swinton. Dr. Swinton has his doctorate from Princeton. He teaches two sections of remedial German for us. Did you have a question for me, Dr. Swinton?”

  “I––I––”

  “Oh. Well, then let me repeat myself. The full-time faculty and administration accepted early retirement this morning. I would now like to ask all of you to run the university in their place.”

  “But––but I––”

  “I know. This is difficult. Let’s begin by doing this: everyone waiting at the doors of both ends of the gymnasium, please come in now!”

  And this loosed into the gymnasium, a stream of creatures which might have come from Milton, whom Nina resolved––in deference to Tyra––to read more thoroughly. There were people in orange uniforms carrying black boxes, the kind Lucinda Herndon had brought to the Board meeting. There were photographers, at least twenty or more, some of them with outlandish hair and Rolling Stones outfits, others, she assumed from Fox News and Affiliates, wearing grey suits with little American Flags in the lapels––all of them carrying gigantic cameras, many of them kneeling, some trying to get as high up on chairs as possible, the others trying to get as low down close to the floor as possible, all trying to get as close to Lucinda Herndon as possible.

  “All right.”

  Those two words had the effect of slowing everything down slightly. Certainly not stopping it, but of changing from 78 rpm to 33 1/3 rpm—that is, things began to go slower, which was certainly good, but they became more dreamlike, and continued to go around in circles.

  “All right, let me do this first.”

  So saying, she reached into one of the Black Boxes.

  “These are contracts,” she said. “There are approximately a thousand of them. I’d like you to sign them. You have been making two thousand dollars a course, and you were limited to two courses per semester. The university didn’t want to let you teach more because we would’ve had to pay for your health care and benefits. You will now be making five thousand dollars a course and we’ll ask you to teach eight to ten courses per year. That’s forty to fifty thousand dollars a year, but, of course, we will pay your health care and benefits. Is that clear to everyone?”

  There was a moment of silence.

  Then everyone stood up exactly at the same time and started clapping.

  The clapping got generally louder, but it was interrupted in its general increase because it had to be interrupted by the hugging and the crying and the daubing of the eyes and the shaking of the heads and all of the general emotional let going that would have happened in the Joads’ migrant camp in California if somebody important had driven through yelling, “Steaks and jobs for everybody!”

  “Sit down, please. Be quiet.”

  Finally, everybody did, but it was with difficulty.

  There was general jubilation and unbelief.

  The faculty––because now, obviously, they weren’t the part-timers anymore, but were going to be the faculty––were leaning forward like the first night audience of Psycho, smiling the vacant smile of the suddenly insane, waiting eagerly for the next murder.

  “We will be receiving twenty new ten-story buildings next year as a reward for firing—sorry, offering early retirement—to our old faculty and administration. Ten of those are for you.”

  This time a gasp. A general gasp.

  “There will be room for a thousand teaching faculty in the most modern apartments Peter Stockton and his friends can manage. Rent free. There will be cafeterias in all of the buildings and you can have every meal there that you want, also for free. Where you are, the university is. Where you are, learning takes place. And I want you here working with our students, and not at the Drake Hotel in San Francisco getting drunk on martinis and talking about structuralism.”

  Finally, someone actually stood up and asked a coherent question:

  “How can you afford to double our pay, give us benefits, and give us free room and board?”

  “We can afford it because the people who took early retirement made more than two hundred and sixty million dollars a year and did little to no actual work, leaving you to do most of the teaching. Doubling your salaries, housing you and feeding you, as well as giving you the benefits you deserve, will cost sixty million dollars a year. We will actually be making a huge savings. We will pass that savings on to you and to our students. Whom we will finally––finally––begin to teach.”

  More clapping.

  When the clapping was finally over, the president got the floor again.

  The gym was packed now; there was also chaos going on outside. Nina could hear sirens, helicopters—and could even see people’s faces pressed against the high windows up over the top section.

  “Sit down and be quiet!” the President ordered.

  And, gradually, everybody did.

  “We need to hire an administration.”

  “What is happening?” Rick asked.

  “Why do you think,” Nina answered, “that I would begin to know that now?”

  “Here are the duties,” Lucinda Herndon pronounced, “of the Provost. This comes, by the way, from the University Handbook:”

  1. Fostering interfaculty collaboration in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

  2. Fostering interfaculty collaboration in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

  3. Improving university performance in building a diverse pipeline of scholars and in developing scholars at all stages of the academic career ladder.

  4. Advancing university-wide approaches to compliance and research policy.

  5. Oversight and coordination of international activities.

  6. Support for University cultural and artistic entities and projects.

  7. Oversight of academic and administrative computing initiatives undertaken by the University’s Central Administration Information Technology group.

  8. Oversight of activities pertaining to intellectual property, technology transfer, research collaborations with industry, and trademark licensing.

  “How many of you can foster, foster, improve, advance, oversee, and support? Oh, by the way, the previous provost was paid $475,000 dollars per year for fostering, coordinating, and overseeing. In the new pay scale, the job offers a thousand dollars a year. But we still need someone to do it, I suppose. Now, who thinks you can do these things?”

  Every hand in the audience went up.

  “How many of you play golf?”

  Most of the hands went down.

 
“All right, of those volunteers remaining, how many like chicken salad?”

  Only two hands remained.

  “One of you is the Provost. The other assists the Provost in doing all of these things and thus becomes the Assistant Provost. Two people associate themselves with the Assistant Provost and thus become the two Associates to the Assistant Provost. All of these jobs originally paid from $250,000 to $300,000 per year, and we are now offering five hundred dollars. There are 123 administrative contracts up here waiting for signatures, all of them paying $200 to $800 a year for jobs that require no training, no special ability, and no physical work. I’d like them all signed before you leave. Now, I have today been sternly admonished for banning useless bureaucracy and studies disguised as research from this campus. To that, I can only quote Emerson in The American Scholar. He said:

  ‘The deafness, the stone-blind custom, the overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance—by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it a death blow.’

  She looked around. Then, she said:

  “The necessity of what has been passing for research, the necessity of more than one hundred bureaucrats doing nothing and taking our money for it––these things are lies. And they’re dead. Don’t be afraid of them anymore.”

  Finally:

  “Emerson also said: ‘Free should the scholar be. Free and brave.’ All right. I know you’re brave, because I know what you’ve had to endure. Now you are free. Go and teach.”

  And she walked away from the microphone.

  No one moved for a second.

  Then almost everybody moved.

  There was a mad dash for the gym floor and for the contracts.

  Tyra remained motionless for a moment, simply shaking her head in disbelief.

  Rick looked her straight in the face and said:

  “Tyra, the president has just fired the whole full-time faculty. She now wants you and the rest of the part-timers to replace them, for about a tenth of the money. Will you do it, or will you boycott classes in support of the full-timers?”

  Tyra responded: “We care about the full-time faculty just as much as they have always cared about us. Most of them don’t even know our names. To hell with them!”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Now let’s go get our contracts!”

  They stood up and made their way down the stairs as well as they could, trying to make sense of the general pandemonium going on around them.

  They were on the gym floor now. So was everybody else, milling, crying, or laughing. They were in an adjunct river after the research dam had broken and was being washed away.

  Everyone, obviously, was trying to talk to Lucinda Herndon, but she broke away from a mob of photographers and made her way over to Nina, into whose ear she whispered:

  “Do you know where the administration building is?”

  Nina nodded, saying:

  “I was there yesterday. It’s the most depressing place I’ve ever seen.”

  “Well, it’s about to change. My office is on the second floor, room 224. If you and Mr. Barnes will meet me there in twenty minutes, I need to offer you a job, a big job.”

  “You mean teaching English?”

  “No, dear. I mean helping me lead this revolution.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN: A JOB OFFER

  The Administration Building was filling up with people not knowing what was going on. There were ex-adjunct faculty who now believed themselves to be administrators, and were rushing to take possession of their offices. There were real (former?) administrators who either were cleaning out their offices or barricading them, vowing to fight what they saw as an insane decision or a huge joke.

  Shouts could be heard coming from the various corridors and floating down the staircases.

  Policemen had begun to arrive and were walking the halls, nervously communicating with each other on walkie-talkies.

  Nina and Rick entered the main floor and turned left. Office of the Vice Provost; this was Mathieson, one of the administrators to whom Nina had spoken the previous day. He peered at them through the glass wall for an instant or so, standing, completely motionless, beside what had some hours before been his desk. Then he smiled and beckoned for them to come in.

  “Shall we go in?” asked Nina

  “It’s a story.”

  “Why do you think so, Rick?”

  “Because from now on, everything on this campus is a story.”

  They tried the door and found it locked.

  The man inside threw up his hands and made the little counter-clockwise finger gesture indicating insanity.

  Then, smiling, he ambled around the desk and opened the door.

  “Come in, come in. What can I do for you?”

  It was a question he must have asked a thousand times in his life, and enjoyed asking it, his tanned face dotted like a brown map with laugh lines and crows feet that betokened a constant and easy smile.

  He hardly seemed aware of how out of place the question seemed now, when clearly there was very little he could do for the two of them, or for anybody else, now or at any other time. Ever.

  Because he was fired.

  “Dean Matheson, I’m Rick Barnes of The Gazette.”

  “Ah yes! Well, you’re becoming a celebrity! I’ve heard a great deal about you today!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “about that.”

  “Don’t be! You’re just doing your job. I think this is a big story we have going on here.”

  “Yes, sir, it is.”

  “Then I’ll ask you again, what may I do for you?”

  “I wanted to get some comments from you.”

  “Oh, you mean for publication? For print?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t know that I have much to say.”

  “Are you going to contest your firing?”

  He shook his head, slowly.

  “No. No, I’ve never tried to go against the university. I––all of us, you know––serve at the pleasure of the President.”

  There was for five seconds, six hours of uncomfortable silence.

  “Do you know, sir, if most of your colleagues are reacting in the same way?”

  He shrugged.

  “I’ve only been able to reach a few people. Some of them are very angry.”

  “Of course.”

  “Some are just still in shock.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “This is, of course, unprecedented.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When I first heard about it—actually I was mowing the lawn. I was supposed to be with the provost in Hattiesburg, at a conference of college and university administrators. But something came up. I had to cancel at the last minute.”

  He chuckled.

  “And so I was here. Mowing the lawn. If you can believe that. Well, my wife came out and told me that she’d heard it over the radio. And I said, ‘What did you hear?’ and she answered, ‘They’re firing everyone, Charles! They’re firing everyone!’ I ran over and held her––of course, she was crying, and I asked, ‘Are they firing me too, Claire?’ and she had her face buried in my chest and just kept nodding and nodding and I remember thinking, “This can’t be true. It can’t be true. There has to be some kind of horrible misunderstanding.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I had no idea when she said, ‘They’re firing everyone,’ what she meant by they. That’s such a horrible word, isn’t it? It’s so impersonal. Such horrible things have been done by they. I could only think of wars and mass killings, and the specter of screaming women running out of buildings, shouting ‘They’re killing everyone! They’re killing everyone!’ No, this they was so frigid, so anatomically catastrophic.”

  He looked up, then shrugged again.

  “For a moment, I thought it must be some kind of joke and then I realized––no––things would never be right again.”

&nbs
p; He waited for a time. Then:

  “Of course, there were phone calls, speculations, outraged people running here and there and everywhere. The wives met and tried to support each other. I know Claire had several people over. I wandered about helplessly, not knowing if I should dress up and go to campus, or just wait where I was for some kind of instructions. But the common thread running through all of it was that the president had somehow gone insane. There was simply shock and astonishment that one person had the power to inflict such total destruction. Such total, personal destruction. So we thought, ‘She’s lost her mind.’ We kept telling each other that. But then we heard the news of the Board’s––well––the Board’s non-decision. They did nothing at all. Which means, I assume, that we are still dismissed.”

  He could not, for a while, continue.

  Then:

  “The hardest part of all of it, of course, is what the president apparently said about our––well, our uselessness.”

  “I don’t think,” Rick said quietly, “that she was talking about you, sir.”

  Although Nina knew that he was exactly who she was talking about.

  “No, I suppose not. But when you’re told early in your life that you’re useless, then you do something to make yourself useful. But when it comes late, and you look back, and, think you’ve done a pretty good job, and been a good colleague and provider––well, you just––”

  He shook his head.

  “I shall miss dealing with the students. I’ve always like being around them. We always seemed to have something to talk about.”

  He thought for a while, then stood, and then extended his hand:

  “I bet you folks have work to do. The whole country is taking an interest, I hear. Firing 1200 people––an entire faculty, an entire administration. It must be newsworthy.”

  “Yes, sir. It is.”

  “Of course. Well, as for my official statement, Mr. Barnes, are you ready?”

  “Go ahead, sir.”

  ‘“I regret the actions of the President, but I support her, as I always have, and will support any course of action that the Board deems proper for the well-being of the University and the students of our state.’ How’s that?”