During my stint as faculty coordinator, she had implied several times that I ran things with authoritarian tendencies. The chair had mentioned that as well.
“I’m not saying that you do,” she had said, “but if people perceive it that way, we have a problem.”
“Ingvill thinks everyone has authoritarian tendencies,” I’d said. “That’s what her life is based on. She’s a perpetual victim.”
“Who said we were talking about Ingvill?” the chair had responded.
I watched Ingvill now, slurping coffee out of her eco-friendly mug, pulling out a gray pencil eraser and a sorry notepad she had procured from the supply closet.
“I see that we’re all here,” said the chair. “So, to get right down to business: As some of you already know, we’ve been instructed to revise all our course offerings. Whether we are for or against this, the fact is that the College of Arts and Letters passed a resolution and now we need to follow up. Thus, there’s no point in discussing the merits of the revision. The only matter of business at this juncture is a practical consideration of how to organize our programs and which classes to cut. And this needs to be done quickly, preferably by the end of the semester.”
A sigh ran through the room, creating a vacuum that made my scalp tingle. I only had five minutes and they were running out.
Ingvill had managed to take a half page of notes in her notepad already. She was probably psychoanalyzing herself. In Ingvill’s universe there was only one person. The rest of us were props.
Peter raised his hand.
“May I remind you,” he said, “that the last course revision was only two years ago.”
“Yes, in a sense that’s correct,” the chair said.
“So…”
“So now we’re implementing a new one.”
Peter sniffed disapprovingly.
“What do we need to do?” Ingvill asked nervously.
“First of all, we need to increase the number of credits for our courses so that we’re better aligned with the rest of the Norwegian university system.”
“May I remind everyone,” Peter said again, “that two years ago we reduced the credit weighting for all the courses for that very reason?”
His voice quivered in indignation, and the chair began to quickly enumerate all the excellent reasons for the credit realignment. She came off sounding impartial, but it was no secret that she, along with many other members of the administration, would have preferred to have a university without any faculty members at all. They found us annoying, argumentative, overly neurotic, and generally useless. The dregs of the university system.
As I watched Ingvill, it occurred to me that you couldn’t really blame them. As the chair’s list grew steadily more complicated and elaborate, her face grew increasingly pinker and her thoughtful expression deepened. Eventually she looked completely flummoxed.
“But as I said, this meeting is just for informational purposes,” the chair concluded. “Now you know what needs to be done college-wide. The administration is asking that we take this back with us to the department and figure out where to make cuts and how to accomplish the restructuring.”
I turned on my cell phone to check the time. I could still make it. If only no one said anything now.
I held my breath.
“What will this mean for internationalization efforts?” Frank asked.
I saw Peter put his hand over his eyes and I wanted to thunk my head on the table. The chair smiled triumphantly. Everyone knows that internationalization is to the university what ecumenical is to the church. Whoever brought up this concept automatically got points for taking the conversation seriously, no matter what we were talking about, but whoever answered the question would also win brownie points for their familiarity with institutional priorities.
The chair responded with a long and unnecessarily detailed response about how many foreign students this reform might bring in, and Frank nodded attentively and took notes on the notepad he had brought. I glared at him. He was wearing some kind of a shark-tooth pendant on a leather cord that hung over the front of his sweater.
Who did he think he was fooling? I studied his scrawny arm, holding his pen, and thought how easily I could take him in a fight. Take ahold of that little head of his and bring my knee up into his face until his nose and forehead were bleeding.
He looked up and our eyes met. I looked away.
“If it’s good for internationalization, I’m all for it,” he told the chair. “After all, we have a duty to live up to the Bologna Process by helping to harmonize higher education throughout Europe. As you may know, I was recently selected to serve on the committee that will travel to Saint Petersburg to work specifically toward achieving some sort of bilateral cooperation.”
The chair seconded this with a nod while I rolled my eyes, even though I’d been specifically banned from doing just that.
“We don’t roll our eyes, no matter how dumb we think other people are,” the chair had informed me during our little chat. “And perhaps we might all benefit from giving a little thought to the possibility that we might not always be entirely infallible?”
“What are you trying to say?” I had asked.
“Excessive contact with students?”
“You heard that from Ingvill, too,” I hissed.
“No comment.”
“A student brushed my arm! And it was meant tongue in cheek!”
“That’s what you say. We have had instances of sexual harassment involving students here in the past, before my time. I have two years left now in my tenure as chair and I will not, I repeat not, have any of that under my watch. Is that clear?”
“Check,” I had muttered. “No sexual harassment.”
“You just rolled your eyes again!”
“Fine. No sexual harassment or eye rolling, even though the very idea of something like that is completely absurd. Have you seen what I look like these days? I haven’t shaved my armpits since last summer, and it’s not because I never wear anything sleeveless. I don’t have breasts anymore. I never wear foundation or mascara. I own only one lipstick, which I bought in 1997. I cut my own hair after a glass of wine. And I’m almost forty!”
She had studied me for a moment and then sighed.
“Just quit rolling your eyes so much, OK?”
Occasionally I was able to pull off an eye roll in my mind, but not always, not this time.
The room had grown quiet, and I peeked at the time again. Ingvill was reading through her eight pages of notes. Her mouse-tail braids dangled over the table.
“Couldn’t we just revert the courses back to the way they were before?” I asked in an attempt to wrap up the meeting. “Then the problem would be solved. The way they were before the last revision, I mean. We must still have all that information in the system somewhere or other, right?”
Peter made a hiccuping sound that could have been a laugh. The chair looked at him.
“Unfortunately we can’t do that, because we no longer have the resources that we used to,” she informed us.
“What does that mean?”
“For those who get to stay in the department, it means more work for the same or less pay,” Peter translated grimly, “and the rest would be reassigned elsewhere in the university.”
“Not necessarily,” the chair objected, which resulted in more hiccuping along with vigorous head shaking from Peter. “But as I said, we will need to cut a number of courses. At least three at the BA level and four at the MA level.”
“But… reassignment?” Ingvill asked breathlessly.
“We’re not talking about that now, but it’s widely known that they need more people in the preschool-teacher education program.”