POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN

Like many academics, I am a devotee of crime fiction, especially of the noirish and hard-boiled varieties.  On a plane trip earlier this summer I was enjoying a collection of stories, Jewish Noir, edited by Kenneth Wishnia (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), when one tale leaped out as unique.  “Living Underwater,” by B.K. Stevens, republished below, while dark in atmosphere and ending, is not about crime per se.  It is instead a wickedly smart and spot-on satire on the excesses of the assessment craze in higher education, with a clear understanding of the peril this can pose for academic freedom.  The AAUP is even mentioned!  I knew immediately that I had to share it on this blog.  Readers here will find much that is all too familiar in this tale.  The publisher granted permission, but I needed the go-ahead from the author.  So I found her website, where I learned that Bonnie Stevens, who taught English at multiple colleges and universities over many years, had published several book-length mysteries, numerous short stories, as well as non-fiction works.  Using a contact form, I sought permission to republish “Living Underwater” on this blog.  I soon received an email from Dennis Stevens, the author’s husband and a political scientist who is currently provost at Hampden-Sidney College in Virginia, informing me of the sad news that his wife had passed away.  Nonetheless, Professor Stevens said he was both authorized and “delighted” to grant permission to republish “because I am a member of AAUP and a big supporter of its mission and activities.”  My thanks and condolences to Dennis Stevens.  If you like this story you might want to check out the other pieces in Jewish Noir and the website of the story’s author, the late B.K. Stevens.

“Living Underwater”

By B.K. Stevens

He had always feared people like her—perky, enthusiastic people, people who smiled a lot and sprinkled their e-mails with emoticons and exclamation points. From the moment Helen Stavros stood up at the September faculty meeting, he knew she was one of those people. When she stepped to the podium, when she flung her arms out wide and spoke, moist-eyed, of her respect for faculty autonomy and her eagerness to learn from others, a wave of dread washed over him. Helen Stavros held a PhD in Institutional Effectiveness and had come to Edson College to serve as associate dean for academic assessment. She had the power to drain his life of all dignity, all reason. And he felt sure she had the will.

Before the first week of classes ended, she made her move. On Wednesday afternoon, he climbed the three flights of stairs to the seminar room where the English department held its meetings. There she was, sitting near the head of the long rectangular table, to the right of nervous little Dr. Simpson. Behind them loomed the Cuthbert Window, a magnificent floor-to-ceiling stained glass collage donated to the college by an alumnus who had learned to love William Blake during his time at Edson. Decades later, after he’d made a fortune in rubber, he’d commissioned an artist to piece together intricate, vibrant images of shepherds and laughing children, of bards and chimney sweepers and a naked child on a cloud. Beneath the glory of that window, Helen Stavros spoke to Dr. Simpson in a rapid whisper, her face warmed by the late afternoon sunlight filtering through a languishing glass rose.

Dr. Simpson looked away from her, spotted him, and waved. “Sam,” he said, “have you met Dr. Stavros? Dr. Stavros, this is Dr. Sam Meyer, seventeenth-century English literature.”

Helen Stavros looked him over. She was blond and buxom, probably midforties, prettier than most, eyebrows plucked to high, thin arcs. She wore a gray pinstriped suit and a silky red top that plunged deep. “Great to meet you, Sam,” she said, seizing his hand. “These are exciting times, aren’t they? Ready for a challenge?”

Had he ever before in his life taken such an immediate, intense dislike to another human being? He forced a tight smile. “That depends on the nature of the challenge.”

“Oh, the best kind of challenge.” Her grip on his hand tightened. “The kind that helps you think in new ways and makes you feel better about going to work every day. How does that sound?”’

“Unlikely.” He pulled his hand away, walked to the other end of the table, and sat down next to Jake Nachshon, his mentor since his first day at Edson, the only other Jew in the department. “My God, Jake,” he said. “Where do they find these people? And Simpson won’t stand up to her.”

“He probably can’t,” Jake said. “But wait and see. Maybe it won’t be so bad.”

It was bad. Dr. Simpson mumbled a bit, welcoming the one new tenure-track department member and the six new adjuncts, then turned the meeting over to Helen Stavros and sank into his chair, wheezing. She popped to her feet and pressed a button on a remote, and a screen descended from the ceiling, covering the Cuthbert Window.

“Here’s the scoop!” she declared, and pressed a key on a laptop.

Nothing happened. She pressed the key again, nothing happened again, and a lank young man in an olive-green T-shirt rushed forward. For the next several minutes, he fiddled with things, she fiddled with things, and they consulted in whispers. Finally, somebody did something right, and the image of a cone topped by a perfectly symmetrical mound of strawberry ice cream appeared on the screen.

“Here’s the scoop!” she cried again. “For many years—far too many years—higher education in America was all about accounting.”

“ACCOUNTING” appeared on the screen—all capitals, in a thick, squat font—surrounded by random gray numbers that came in and out of focus.

“For too many years, we just kept track of the numbers,” she said. “We made sure students sat in classrooms for a certain number of hours each week. We made sure they piled up a certain number of credits each semester. When the numbers looked right, we said the students were educated and handed them their diplomas. Had they actually learned anything? We didn’t know. We’d never bothered to find a way to keep track of that. The only things we kept track of were the numbers. Hours. Credits. We didn’t care about anything else.”

“Dr. Stavros,” Jake said, “that’s hardly a fair or accurate way to describe—”

She whipped her head around to smile at him, a broad, joyless smile taut with warning. “Please. Call me Helen. And this isn’t a time to get defensive. It’s a time to listen, and to learn. Things are about to get very exciting.”

She pressed another key, and “ACCOUNTING” morphed into “ACCOUNTABILITY” and then into “ASSESSMENT!”—hot-pink letters in a jazzy, peppy font, with multicolored sunbursts constantly exploding in all directions.

“But that couldn’t go on forever,” she said. “Parents wanted more. The federal government demanded more. And we finally realized our students deserved more. Reforms were introduced, laws were passed, and now we have the Central Association for College Accreditation to guide us toward ways of making sure our students really get an education. We’re moving from mere accounting to true accountability, to genuine assessment. But so far, Edson College’s efforts at assessment haven’t been terribly successful, have they?”

She paused long enough to cast one sorrowful glance around the room, not long enough to let anyone else speak. Two halves of a blood-red heart appeared on opposite sides of the screen and moved toward each other, merging in a shower of fireworks as the word WHOLE-HEARTED pulsed forward.

“We need a whole-hearted commitment to assessment from every one of you,” she said. “That’s why the college created my position. No more simply going through the motions. It’s no wonder Edson was nearly put on warning last spring. I read your eight-year status report—all 456 pages of it—and I won’t lie. It was shabby. Damn shabby. It was evasive and incomplete and shallow. No wonder you got three solid pages of cautions about things that have to be done better for the final ten-year report. If I’d been on the visiting committee, I would’ve voted for warning. I might’ve voted for probation. And you know what that would mean.”

They knew. The college had been placed on warning after its five-year interim report. Press accounts had turned scorching, enrollment had dipped, alumni donations had sagged, campus morale had soured. Probation would be far worse, and denial of accreditation would be a death sentence—all federal funding cut off, no government loans for students. It would be time for professors to launch desperate searches for new jobs, for the college to start converting dormitories into motels and hiring bankruptcy lawyers.

Dr. Madison, a senior member of the department, sat forward. “But the cautions weren’t based on anything real,” she said. “Nobody criticized the quality of our teaching, and nobody denied our students find good jobs and get into top graduate and professional schools. The only problem was that we hadn’t fully documented—”

“If you can’t document something,” Helen cut in, “how do you know it’s real? You can tell yourself that you’re doing a good job, but why should anyone believe you? Luckily, I’m here now, and I’ll show you how to document what you do. I warn you—it’ll take hard work.”

An image of Rosie the Riveter flexing her biceps appeared on the screen.

“And sometimes, it might get scary,” Helen said.

An image of a dark hallway appeared, with ghosts popping out of doorways, saying, “BOO!”

“But in the end,” Helen said, and paused. She half-closed her eyes, inhaling long and deep as her shoulders drew back and her bosom heaved upward. Then she exhaled, slowly, and opened her eyes. “In the end,” she said softly, “it’s going to be beautiful.”

Sam glanced at the screen long enough to get a general impression of bunnies frolicking amid daisies, of a waterfall and a rainbow and some sort of bird. He bent forward, staring down at the table, gripping his forehead with both hands. I did fine on the LSATs, he thought. Why didn’t I go to law school?

Not that he thought professors shouldn’t be held accountable. In theory, he favored vigorous assessment. He worked hard, and he knew some professors barely worked at all. They came to class unprepared, graded quickly and carelessly, made students wait weeks before handing essays back, sneaked out of office hours early. If assessment ever focused on trying to eliminate such offenses, Sam would be all for it. But assessment never aimed that low. It sought, instead, to enforce grandiose, amorphous theories about what education should be, and to quantify results with scientific precision. And since the people who designed assessment programs usually hadn’t spent much time actually teaching, their theories tended to be silly, and they had no idea of which sorts of results could be measured objectively and which had to be estimated in a spirit of humility.

Helen gave herself a little shake, as if coming out of a trance. “I wish we could’ve gotten started last spring,” she said. “I like at least two solid years of data heading into a ten-year. But we’ll do what we can to salvage this semester, and before spring semester starts, we’ll have everything in place. So. The first step, obviously, is that you all have to redo your fall syllabi.”

Every professor in the room made a noise—a groan, an exclamation of disbelief, an obscenity. “I spent most of August reworking my syllabi,” Dr. Madison said. “I’ve already given them to my students. That’s like handing them a contract. How can I make changes at this point?”

Helen gave her a smile—a kind smile, sympathetic but firm. “You’ll simply have to, won’t you? Your students will understand. And I have to be honest. The English department’s syllabi are probably the weakest in the whole college. Let’s start with first-year composition. You all teach sections of that course, right? And the director of composition is Jacob Nachshon?”

Jake half-raised his hand. “For over twenty years. Yes.”

“Ouch!” She grimaced, as if embarrassed for him. “Then it’s high time to start doing it right. For one thing, from now on, everyone teaching first-year composition will use a common syllabus and the same textbooks.”

“You can’t do that,” a young professor said. “Administrators don’t have the right to tell us how to teach our classes. It’s an infringement of academic freedom.”

“Lots of composition programs use common syllabi and common textbooks. The Central Association prefers that, and the dean’s approved it. And I’ve checked with the college lawyer. If it’s my professional opinion that a change is vital to Edson’s accreditation efforts, I can insist the change be made.” She smiled. “So that’s what we’ll do. Now, all composition classes will have the same student learning outcomes, or SLOs. We’ll need at least four, all stated in clear, specific language—for example, ‘By the end of the course, students’ ability to identify and correct the following grammatical errors will improve by 70 percent.’ The syllabus must also list the specific steps you’ll take to achieve each SLO—how much class time, how many individual conferences, how many Writing Center visits—and you’ll need to keep careful records to show all these steps have in fact been taken.”

She went on for nearly another hour. She spoke of the need for multiple assessment tools, of the need to evaluate each student’s progress toward each SLO at least four times each semester. No, grades on regular assignments could not count as assessments. She spoke of pretests and posttests, of developing a special template to evaluate essays used as assessment tools. No, neither the pretest nor the posttest could count toward the student’s grade in the class, and the templates could not double as rubrics for grading essays. Assessment and grading had to be separate, and professors must keep separate records for each. She spoke of the need to write end-of-semester reports evaluating SLOs and assessment tools. She spoke of the importance of using language precisely and showed a ten-minute video about the difference between “goals” and “objectives.” She spoke of turning “can’t” into “can,” of immersive learning and differentiated learning, of utilizing educational technologies to promote new literacies.

At first, Sam tried to take notes, but after ten minutes he threw down his pen and sat brooding, staring at his legal pad. She’s an idiot, he thought. She actually believes this garbage. And she’s an idiot with power, an idiot who can force me to fill my syllabi with nonsense, use language I hate, and devise useless assignments to measure things that aren’t worth measuring. He pictured himself counting grammatical errors, computing percentages, keeping two sets of records, writing reports assessing his attempts at assessment. It’s absurd, he thought, absurd and wrongheaded. And she’s loving every minute of it, because she’s a bully who thrives on humiliating people.

At least she seemed to be winding down. She beamed at them, eyes sparkling, every pore of her exuding goodwill. “I’ll need those revised fall syllabi by Monday,” she said, “and your spring syllabi in two weeks. Then I’ll come to your October meeting to review them. The good news is that you don’t have to worry about whether students actually reach your SLOs. SLOs can always be adjusted—they should be adjusted, every semester. If not enough students reach them, lower them; if too many students reach them, raise them. The important thing is to state SLOs in appropriate language and document everything you do to facilitate them. Remember, there’s no such thing as failure or success in assessment. It’s all about continuous learning.”

“More like continuous busywork,” Sam muttered.

At least, he’d meant to mutter it. He hadn’t meant anyone but Jake to hear it. Apparently, though, he’d said it out loud, because Helen turned to him with a determined little smile.

“What’s that, Sam?” she said. “Busywork? You think all this is busywork?”

He lifted his hands. “I’m sorry. That was rude. And I’m sure you mean well. But I can’t honestly agree—”

“You aren’t comfortable with this new way of thinking yet, are you?” she cut in, and winked at him. “That’s okay. Give yourself time. You’ll catch on eventually—I promise! Now, I hear you folks always have a holiday party in December, and you serve some pretty potent eggnog. I love eggnog! So I’m inviting myself to that party, to celebrate all the progress we’ll make this semester. And we will make progress. Probably, some of you are worried about whether you can pull all these changes off. In fact, right now, you may be feeling like this.”

She pressed a key on her laptop, and an image of Munch’s The Scream appeared on the screen. She chuckled. No one else did.

“It’s natural to have doubts at first,” she said, “but you’ll get past them. By December, you’ll be feeling great!”

The man on the bridge morphed into an image of Santa Claus, a redcheeked Santa doubled over with merriment, the jolliest Santa Sam had ever seen.

“Now, here’s someone who makes us all feel great,” Helen Stavros said. “And by the time he comes around to visit you in December, you’ll be feeling great about your new approach to assessment, too. But remember—between now and then, just like Santa, I’ll be watching you! I’ll be making a list and checking it twice. So you’d better make sure you’re nice, not naughty, or you could end up with a big lump of coal in your stocking! Now I want to come shake hands with each of you and start to get to know you.”

Sam felt his chest heaving with panic. I can’t stand it, he thought, not another second of it. Before she could reach him, he fled, running down the three flights of stairs, out of the building, down the gravel path dividing humanities buildings from science buildings. He didn’t pause until he heard Jake behind him, calling his name. Then he leaned his back against an oak and waited for his friend to catch up, his face burning from the run and from the end-of-summer heat.

Jake came to stand next to him. He raised an eyebrow, shook his head. “Not an especially tactful exit. She noticed. She didn’t like it.”

“I couldn’t take any more,” Sam said as they continued down the path, heading for the faculty parking lot. “It was Kafkaesque. It was beyond Kafka. That inane PowerPoint presentation—did she expect us to take that seriously? What’s wrong with her?”

“Common rhetorical mistake,” Jake said. “Failure to understand one’s audience. She’s not an academic at heart.”

“There’s an understatement. She’s got a doctorate in a make-believe discipline, she’s determined to quantify things that can’t be quantified, and she’s probably never taught. Twenty years ago, what college would have hired an associate academic dean who’d never taught? And the way she talked to you, the way she sneered at everything you’ve done for the composition program—how could you stand it?”

Jake lifted a shoulder. “It wasn’t fun. But if that’s the worst thing that happens to me this week, I’ll live.”

“We’ve got to get rid of her,” Sam said. “Simpson’s a coward, the dean’s a fool, but we could go to the president. Or the board of trustees. You’ve got a former student on the board, right? Could you call her?”

“It wouldn’t do any good. Even if she wanted to help us, she couldn’t. Neither could the president. This is the future, Sam. It’s not just Edson, not just the Central Association. There are a dozen other accreditation agencies just like it, and they can do pretty much whatever they want. The federal government’s given them that power. If we resist, they can shut us down. Every college in the country is going through what we’re going through.”

“So we just give in. Is that what you’re saying? We let this ignoramus reshape our classes, we spend endless hours scrambling to generate meaningless data she can plug into her report?”

They’d reached Jake’s car. Jake unlocked his door and turned to face Sam. “Let me tell you a joke.”

Sam grimaced. “Not in the mood, Jake.”

“This is a good one. It’s relevant. Top scientists from all over the world got together, they did studies, and they went on TV and announced, ‘In three days, there’s going to be a huge flood, and every inch of land on the planet will be permanently covered by water.’ The Christians said, ‘It’s all right—you still have three days to accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior.’ And the Jews said, ‘It’s all right—we still have three days to figure out how to live underwater.’”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Fine. Very funny. But there’s no way to live with this.”

“What other choice do we have? Pumping out the basement isn’t an option—the waters are too deep.”

Sam sighed impatiently. “What about building an ark?”

“That worked for forty days and forty nights. This flood will last a lot longer. So. You and Leah are coming over for dinner Saturday, right? Mira and I are looking forward to it.”

“So are we,” Sam said. “Thanks.” Probably, they spent too many Saturdays having dinner with Jake and Mira. Leah liked them, and she never complained, but he could tell she was bored.

Bored or not, she baked an elegant French apple cake for Saturday night. Leah was, among other things, an accomplished baker, an inventive cook, and a cheerful, energetic mother. Their twin boys adored her. They loved Sam too, of course, and always ran out to greet him when he came home from work—he suspected Leah had told them to do that—but she was close to them in a way he could never equal. Sometimes, in the evenings, he felt as if he were visiting Leah’s charming family. She was successful professionally, too, already the director of a senior residence center that included both assisted living units and a nursing home. And she was probably smarter than he was. Sam worked hard at trying not to resent any of that.

He also worked at trying not to sound petty around her. While they were eating Mira’s overcooked chicken piccata, though, Jake started talking about Helen Stavros, and Sam was doomed.

“She and I met yesterday to discuss the composition program,” Jake said, “and I think I sneaked in a couple of small victories. We agreed everyone would use the same grammar handbook—all the major ones are very similar anyway—and that’ll be the textbook for the course. I asked if individual professors could also assign ‘supplemental readings.’ She fussed a while but finally said okay, as long as we don’t call them textbooks. So you can still use that prose anthology you like so much—we can all use the ones we prefer.”

Sam lifted a shoulder. “It’s ridiculous that we can’t call them textbooks. I hardly use the handbook. The anthology’s the main textbook for my course.”

“The point is, you can use it. We also agreed on four SLOs I think we can live with.”

“What’s an SLO?” Mira asked.

“Sorry,” Jake said. “A Student Learning Outcome. It’s a kind of goal. For example, one of our SLOs will be that students will write an essay containing at least five unified paragraphs developing a central idea.”

“You agreed to that?” Sam put down his fork. “Well, I can’t. It’s setting the bar too low—it sounds like a middle-school standard. It says nothing about the complexity or originality of the ideas developed, or the quality of the writing. Five unified paragraphs developing a central idea! That’s how you define a good college essay?”

Jake sighed. “No. That’s how I try to get Helen Stavros to back off so we can teach. And it’s something we can evaluate quickly. It’s only for assessment, Sam, not for grading. Stavros wants us to keep those separate. So we take a few minutes to check things off on the assessment template, and then we grade the essay. Conceivably, a student could get 100 percent on the template and an F on the essay. We can use any grading standards we consider appropriate. We just can’t put them in the syllabus.”

“So we withhold information from our students,” Sam said, “and we play word games to trick Stavros. This is one of those ‘small victories’ you were talking about?”

“Calm down, Sam,” Leah said. “That’s no way to talk to Jake.”

Sam raised a hand in acknowledgment. “Sorry. Jake knows I didn’t mean anything by that. And I know he’s doing the best he can. But we should be able to state our real standards straightforwardly, and we shouldn’t have to waste time filling out meaningless templates that have nothing to do with what students really need to learn.”

“I wish you could see how many meaningless forms I fill out every day,” Leah said. “I have to comply with all sorts of regulations and provide documentation for everything. Sometimes, it gets pretty silly. But it’s part of my job, so I do it. Well, now it’s part of your job. You’ll get used to it.”

She’d been like that all week. Whenever he’d tried to explain about Helen Stavros, Leah had shrugged and walked off to check on the boys, or on dinner. He pushed down his irritation, clasped his hands, and tried again. “This is different. Professors are hired because they’re experts in their fields, because they’re the ones who know what should be taught and how it should be taught. What does Helen Stavros know about literature, or about writing? She misuses language in appalling ways, and she communicates through glitzy, childish PowerPoint presentations, through cartoons and captions. Why should she have the power to shape courses in things she knows nothing about?”

There was that shrug again. “You think all the officials I have to satisfy know what they’re talking about? Anyway, Jake’s showing you how to handle the situation. You can still teach pretty much the way you want to.” “

Yes, only ‘pretty much,’” Sam said, feeling his face grow hotter. “And only if I’m willing to lie and mislead, and only by spending hours on useless busywork. Where am I supposed to find the time?”

She started drumming her fingers on the table. “You can cut back on other things. All the time you spend writing pages and pages of comments on students’ essays—half the students probably don’t read them anyway. And you don’t have to reread a book every time you teach it, not if you’ve already read it a hundred times. That’s a real waste of time. You’ll have to make some compromises, Sam. The rest of us do. Stop thinking you’re so special and brilliant that you shouldn’t have to do it, too.” She turned away from him, twisting in her chair to look at Mira. “How does your daughter like law school?”

They didn’t make love that night. Leah barely spoke to him on the drive home, lingered in the bathroom, marched straight to bed, and turned to face the wall. He lay awake a long time in the darkness, brooding. Compromises. Yes, that was the easy answer. Tell a few lies, bend a few principles, skim a few hours from work that made sense and devote it to appeasing bullies. As time went on, there would be more compromises, and things would keep getting worse. And Helen Stavros was the symbol of everything wrong with what he’d be forced to do, the embodiment of the lie.

He got a cheery little e-mail from her a week later, briskly identifying eight major problems and four minor glitches with the revised fall syllabi he’d sent her. She misused “enormity,” misused a semicolon, and made two errors in pronoun agreement; he took comfort in printing the e-mail and circling the errors in red. She also reminded him to get busy on his spring syllabi, so she’d have time to evaluate them before the October department meeting. “Don’t worry, Sam!” she wrote. “You had a rough time with these, but I KNOW you’ll do better with the spring syllabi! You WILL figure this out! I believe in you! ?”

Bitch, he thought, and stayed late at his office, missing dinner with Leah and the boys, rewriting his syllabi again and again. He’d compromise. He’d use some of the hideous jargon Stavros loved. But he would not sacrifice his integrity. He’d concentrate on making the syllabi so good she couldn’t possibly criticize them. At 2:00 A.M., he was satisfied and sent the syllabi off. He drove home, spent an hour pulling old class notes together, decided his Intro to Lit students would have to wait another two days to get their essays back, and crawled into bed beside Leah. She didn’t stir in her sleep.

Two weeks later, he climbed the three flights of stairs to the seminar room again and sat waiting for the meeting to begin. He stared at the Cuthbert window, at the image of a person lying, arms outstretched, beneath the low, mottled branches of a poison tree. Blake’s poison tree, he thought. That would be so much better, if we could simply think our enemies dead. If all we had to do was to hide our anger, and nurture it, and watch it grow. If we never had to do anything violent, if we could simply wait until our wrath became strong enough, bright enough to draw our enemy into death.

Helen Stavros walked into the room, laughing, talking to Dr. Simpson. She sat at his right hand, smiling and nodding as he rushed through regular department business, gazing at him tolerantly. He sat down, she stood up, and the screen descended from the ceiling. She gave them all a bright, happy look.

“Let’s get down to brass tacks!” she cried, and pressed a laptop key.

Nothing happened. The lank young man, today wearing a gray sweatshirt, rushed forward, and eventually an image of dozens of glistening tacks appeared.

“Let’s get down to brass tacks!” she cried again. “The good news is, all of you sent me your spring syllabi! Thank you! I’d like to give you all a big hand!”

A grinning, fuzzy-haired cartoon figure with a right hand the size of a border collie appeared on the screen. Helen Stavros giggled. Sam pictured the building collapsing around her, pictured the ceiling beams crushing her skull. He pictured the earth opening to swallow her up.

She tilted her head to the side, turned down the corners of her mouth, made her eyes go wide. She looked glum, pouty, adorable. “But here’s the bad news. A few of you have absorbed some fundamental principles of formative, diagnostic assessment, and you’ve produced syllabi that’ll promote multidimensional learning. Yay for you! But the rest of you—well, the rest of you still have a long road ahead. Let’s look at some examples, starting with a very good example.”

Now, the screen showed the syllabus for Eric Burke’s Introduction to Literary Theory course. That figures, Sam thought. Somebody who wrote a dissertation on transgressive modalities in fictive postcolonial constructs probably wouldn’t have much trouble adjusting to the way Helen Stavros used language. Helen went through the syllabus quickly, praising the wording of the Student Learning Outcomes and the variety of assessment tools and methods.

“How about you, Eric?” she asked. “How do you feel about the changes you’ve made?”

Eric Burke was sitting back from the table, his right leg draped over his left, his arms crossed over his chest. “Oh, I’ve drunk the assessment Kool-Aid,” he said. “I love setting things up this way. I’ve got a clearer sense of where I’m headed, and I can give students more concrete feedback.”

She beamed at him. “Good for you! I know how tempting it is to stick to the old, familiar ways. That’s the comfortable thing to do, the easy thing. But it’s great when professors are willing to work a little harder, to climb out of their ruts for the sake of their students. The transition can be challenging, but the results are worth it.”

“No question,” Eric said. “Totally worth it.”

Well, Eric Burke had always been trendy and shallow. But Sam was dismayed to see most of his colleagues listening intently, taking notes, studying the screen without a hint of rebellion on their faces. Some of them, of course, might be prudently hiding their disgust—but if they’d decided to hide it, they probably wouldn’t act on it. If Sam took a stand against this garbage, he’d probably have to stand alone.

“There were other promising syllabi,” Helen Stavros was saying, “but Eric’s was the best of the best.” She paused and sighed. “And then, sadly, we have the worst of the worst.”

The first page of Sam’s Introduction to Literature syllabus appeared on the screen. People looked at it, saw his name in the upper right-hand corner, and chuckled. It was a sympathetic, unsurprised chuckle, as if all his colleagues had expected him to produce the worst of the worst.

Helen tilted her head to the side again, winced a cute little wince, and smiled. “You don’t mind, do you, Sam? You seem like a good sport. I figure you can take it.”

“It’s fine,” he said. She’s a moron, he thought, a corrupt moron. If she thinks my syllabus is the worst of the worst, that’s a compliment.

But he’d always been an A student. He’d always felt driven to excel, to be at the top of the class; he felt embarrassed when he couldn’t ace a vision test. Whenever his teachers had used an assignment of his as an example— and they’d done that a lot—they’d used it as a model for others to try to emulate. And now something he’d done was being used as an example of what not to do, and everybody else in the room would feel superior to him.

“Let’s make this an interactive learning experience,” Helen said. “I could simply stand here and list all the problems with Sam’s syllabus, but that wouldn’t get you involved in the process. You’ll learn so much more if you tell me what the problems are. Sam, if you start to get a sense of where you went wrong, feel free to join right in!”

No, he didn’t feel like joining right in, but hands shot up all around the table.

“His Student Learning Outcomes are messed up,” Eric Burke said. “For one thing, he uses ‘should,’ not ‘will’—‘Students should strive to understand and appreciate various literary genres more fully.’ It should be ‘students will,’ right?”

“But I can’t see into the future,” Sam said. “I can say what should happen, but not what will. And I know from experience that not all students will reach these goals. How can I make a statement that goes contrary to what experience and common sense tell me?”

“Have a little confidence, Sam,” Helen said. “Eric’s absolutely right. Always use ‘will.’ And get rid of ‘strive to.’ If some students don’t achieve an outcome, your assessments will reflect that. But don’t get all mealy-mouthed. State your SLOs in bold, clear language.”

“And he shouldn’t use ‘understand’ or ‘appreciate,’ should he?” Dr. Madison asked. “You told me to avoid them.”

“Right,” Helen said, “because they don’t mean anything.”

Sam sighed. “Of course they mean something. That’s why we teach Introduction to Literature—to help students understand and appreciate literature more fully. That’s our central objective in that course.”

“Oops,” Helen said, wincing prettily. “You mean ‘goal,’ not ‘objective.’ You’d better watch that video again. But any goal or SLO that uses ‘understand’ or ‘appreciate’ would be too vague to be useful. What does it mean to say a student ‘understands’ literature? How would you measure something like that?”

“By reading the student’s essays,” Sam said, “and seeing if they reflect an enhanced understanding of—”

Helen Stavros laughed. “Try getting two professors to agree about that! It’s too vague, too subjective. Using language like that is a crutch. It allows you to claim you’ve achieved your outcomes without having to back it up with solid data. Now, you refer to ‘various literary genres.’ Who can give me a well-stated SLO relating to literary genres?”

One of the younger department members raised her hand. “Students will be able to identify and define five literary genres.”

“Excellent!” Helen Stavros fist-pumped twice. “Woo hoo!”

Sam pictured fire descending from heaven, consuming her. “Fine. But that’s a tiny part of what we do in Introduction to Literature. That course isn’t about memorizing definitions. It’s about helping students become more careful, perceptive readers who can recognize the value of—”

“More meaningless words,” Helen cut in. “You have to learn to use language more precisely, Sam. Now, what’s wrong with Sam’s other SLOs?”

“That was brutal,” Jake said nearly an hour later, as they walked to the parking lot together. The air felt cooler, fresher now, and leaves had begun to brighten and break free. “I’m sorry you had to go through it.”

“That was revenge.” Sam drew his foot back, then brought it forward sharply, sending a few bits of gravel skidding down the path. “She was punishing me for running out of the room last month, for not giving in completely on the syllabi. Well, she did a good job. To have to sit there in front of the whole damn department while Helen Stavros tells me I need to use language more precisely—God!”

“I know,” Jake said. “I’m sorry. Well, at least you’re tenured. If you weren’t, I’d worry that she’d go after your job. And she seems satisfied with my syllabi, so maybe I can help you with yours. I know you don’t want to make more concessions, but—”

“I don’t want to,” Sam said, “and I won’t. There’s no point in trying to work with that woman, Jake. I bent as far as I could, and she responded by humiliating me. So tomorrow, I’m making appointments to see the president and the college lawyer. I’ve looked into the Board of Trustees Committee on Academic Affairs. It’s got a couple of academics who might be sympathetic. I’ll write to them. Then there’s the American Association of University Professors—it’s a big defender of academic freedom. I’ll see if I can file a grievance with AAUP.”

Jake shook his head. “You might as well paint a target on your back. You know I don’t like Stavros any more than you do, but defying her is dangerous. We’ve just seen how she treats people she views as enemies. Worse, it’s useless. We can’t win by opposing her openly. We’ll do better if we focus on damage control. We pretend to swallow her nonsense, we smile, we never disagree with anything she says, and meanwhile we preserve as much as we can.”

Sam half-smiled as memories of long-ago religious school history lessons came back. “Sounds like you’re talking about Marranos. As I recall, a lot of them ended up getting burned at the stake, once people figured out what they were up to.”

Jake lifted his hands. “And a lot of people who refused to hide their Judaism left Spain in leaky ships and died at sea.”

“In your metaphors, people who aren’t crafty enough always drown.”

Jake shrugged. “Whatever. I’m not saying any approach is completely safe, but I think mine has a better chance than yours does. What do you say?”

It was tempting. Taking on the whole college, constantly getting involved in arguments, perhaps having to speak out in public—that would take up so much time, and involve so much conflict. And Jake was probably right. It would probably be useless anyway. But to capitulate after that woman had embarrassed him in public, to let her think she’d won, to let his colleagues think she’d intimidated him or, worse, persuaded him— no. He couldn’t stand that.

Over the next two months, he spent many evenings making phone calls, sending e-mails, writing letters. He made appointments and met with people. Many professors said they hated Stavros and her ideas, too, but only a few agreed to support him publicly—and their support didn’t count for much anyway, since they were as powerless as he. Even people who agreed with him began finding reasons to avoid him. He sometimes heard people whispering and chuckling after he walked by them. He suspected he was becoming ridiculous.

No administrator or trustee admitted to agreeing with him about anything. Everyone told him the actions he was taking were inappropriate and pointless for one reason or another, and all urged him to look for ways to cooperate. Dr. Simpson called him in to discuss his application for promotion to full professor and hinted it might be easier if he gave up this hopeless campaign against assessment.

Several times, Leah also tried to persuade him to give up. He couldn’t help getting heated when he explained why she was wrong, though, so she stopped mentioning the subject and retreated into silence. One day, when he came home from work, he realized that his sons had stopped running out to greet him. In fact, he realized, they’d stopped a week or so ago. He just hadn’t noticed.

He heard regularly from Helen Stavros, who sent him friendly little e-mails with suggestions about ways to improve his syllabi. She also sent him inspiring articles to read and urged him to come to her office to discuss their differences. He labored for hours on his responses, drafting them in Word and revising them meticulously before pasting them into e-mail. He refused to make any further changes in his syllabi, or in anything else.

One chilly Sunday afternoon, two weeks before the department’s December party, he and Leah took the boys to the zoo. The boys raced ahead of them, running from enclosure to enclosure, calling out to the animals, laughing and jumping. He and Leah reached the Great Cats exhibit and paused at an enclosure where a male Indian tiger paced, massive but agile, his entire body rippling with every step. Sam pointed at it, grinning.

“Maybe I should see if I can rent this guy for an hour or so. He could take care of Helen Stavros for me.”

She didn’t smile. “That’s a horrible thing to say. Don’t ever say anything like that in front of the boys.”

He stared at her. “Of course I wouldn’t. You know me better than that.”

“Do I?” She turned away from him to gaze into the enclosure. “I thought I knew you, but you’ve become so obsessed with this thing that sometimes I wonder if I ever really knew you at all.”

“Don’t get melodramatic. Look, I don’t expect you to understand. You’re not an academic, so how could you? But I’d think you could trust me that it’s important. I’m taking a stand for academic freedom. And I’m not giving up.”

She looked ahead to where their children were pointing and laughing in front of the cheetah exhibit. “Well, I may be giving up, Sam. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve put up with a lot, for a long time. I work hard, but I leave my job at the office. You grade essays and prepare classes every evening, every weekend. I don’t like that, but I’ve accepted it. This semester, it’s worse. It’s much worse. I don’t like having our boys grow up in a house so full of anger and frustration. I don’t like having to answer their questions about why Daddy seems so mad all the time, why he doesn’t talk to them much anymore, why he doesn’t really seem to be listening when they talk to him. Frankly, I don’t much like living in that kind of house, either. I’ve been thinking it might be best if you moved out, at least for a while.”

It was a shock, but only for a few seconds. Then it seemed inevitable, and he blamed himself for not seeing it coming. She was right—he hadn’t been paying attention to her, or to the boys. “But you love me,” he said. “Don’t you?”

She still wouldn’t turn to look at him directly. “I did. I could again— I’m quite sure I could. Right now, I don’t know how I feel. You have to focus on loving me, Sam, and on loving the boys, and on making things right at home. You have to focus on that more than on other things. If you could do that, I think we might be all right.”

“I will,” he said. “I promise. Classes will end soon, and then I just have to deal with exams and turn my grades in, and finish revising a reply to the chair of the academic affairs committee, and get past the December party. Then we’ll have the semester break, and I can really focus on home. Once I revise my spring syllabi.”

She sighed, and gazed at the tiger. “Well,” she said. “We’ll see.”

The day of the December party arrived, and Sam climbed the three flights of stairs to the seminar room again. The food service had supplied big trays of thick, hard sugar cookies in festive shapes, decorated with white frosting and blue sprinkles. There were also cheese trays, vegetable trays, and the famous English department eggnog, though why it was famous Sam didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine any adult wanting to drink a mixture of egg yolks, milk, heavy cream, and sugar.

He got himself a cup of it, though. Normally, he stuck to bottled water at these parties, but today he needed more. He took a first sip. The consistency almost made him gag, but now he understood why people drank this stuff. He’d known it was spiked but he thought that meant he’d detect a faint trace of bourbon. No. The bourbon overwhelmed every other taste, and he could feel it clear through his body. Someone had been feeling very jolly indeed while mixing up the eggnog this afternoon.

He drained his cup and refilled it, then stood listening as Eric Burke and Jake talked about basketball. Ten more minutes, he thought, and he could leave without seeming unsociable. Helen Stavros had said she’d come but hadn’t shown up yet. With luck, he could leave without seeing her at all. He could say he had to pick the boys up from school. It wasn’t true, of course. Some sort of carpool brought the boys home from school every day; Leah had set that up long ago. But nobody here knew that. They shouldn’t have any trouble believing Sam was the kind of father who sometimes picked his children up from school, a good father.

They didn’t yet know how close he was to losing his sons, or at least to losing the right to live with them. This morning, after the carpool took the boys away, Leah had poured Sam a second cup of coffee and said they needed to talk. It wasn’t working, she’d said. She needed a break from all the tension and anger, and so did the boys. He needed to move out, and he needed to do it now. For fifteen minutes, he’d tried to reason with her, and she listened politely. Then she’d stood up and handed him several sheets of paper. She’d found some listings for suitable apartments on the internet, she said,and she wanted him to start checking them out today.

He got a third cup of eggnog and turned to gaze at the Cuthbert window. Blake’s illustrations had clearly inspired the stained-glass artist, but he hadn’t copied them exactly. His figures were more solid and realistic, less dreamlike. The lamb and the tiger, for example, facing each other at the center of the window—the stained-glass lamb was fuller and fluffier than Blake’s. Did that make it an even more tempting sacrifice? And the tiger. Sam had always thought Blake’s tiger looked like a marginally out-of-shape stuffed animal. This one looked more like the tiger Sam had seen at the zoo two weeks ago, more in line with the poem’s allusions to rebels such as Icarus and Prometheus.

Sam glanced at his watch. A quarter of four. He could go. He started for the door, feeling slightly unsteady. Well, it hadn’t been smart to drink so much eggnog so quickly, but driving still shouldn’t be a problem. Even the few minutes it would take to walk to his car would clear his head.

But Helen Stavros walked in, together with a slim young woman he’d never seen before. Damn, he thought. I can’t leave the minute she arrives. It’ll look like I’m running away from her. Ten more minutes, then. I just have to leave before she begins whatever asinine presentation she has planned.

She headed straight for him and put a hand on his arm. “Sam!” she said. “Great to see you! Merry Christmas! I’m so glad you’re here. I can’t wait to have you see our presentation!”

He hated the weight of her hand on his arm, hated any physical contact with her, even through layers of clothing. “Unfortunately, I have to leave right now. I’m picking my sons up from school.”

Her face creased with dismay. “But you can’t go yet! There’s something you have to see! Three minutes, okay? Your sons won’t mind waiting for three little minutes. Come on, Sharon!”

She bustled up to the front of the room and stood waving her arms while the other woman went to the podium to set up the laptop.

“Everybody!” Helen Stavros cried. “Everybody! I’m not going to take up much of your time. I know this is a day for celebrating, not for talking about assessment, and I can’t wait to enjoy some of your eggnog, but there are a couple of things I have to tell you! First, I want you to meet my brand-new assistant dean for academic assessment, Sharon Olson. The dean finally agreed there’s far too much assessment work for one person to handle, so Sharon’s joining our team. She has a master’s in higher education administration, and I know she’ll have so much to contribute. Let’s give her a big Edson College welcome!”

Sam made himself clap. Assistant dean, he thought. She looks twelve years old, and she’s got a degree in another make-believe discipline. Just yesterday, the English department had learned that, despite near-promises made last year, it could not hire someone to replace Dr. Madison when she retired. For the first time since the Depression, the department would not have a medievalist. The college had to cut costs, the president had said, and that, unfortunately, meant eliminating some faculty positions.

But they can always find money to hire another administrator, Sam thought. The size of the administration seems to be increasing faster than the faculty is shrinking. He felt his spine stiffening, his pulse quickening, his blood pulsing hot through his body. He got another cup of eggnog.

“Sharon has lots of special gifts,” Helen was saying. “One that I especially appreciate is that she’s a genius with technology. So from now on, she’ll handle the PowerPoint whenever I do a presentation. And we have a special presentation for you today—short, but very special. We finally have our Edson College Assessment website up! Sharon, show them the home page!”

Sharon pressed a key on the laptop, and this time there were no glitches. The home page leapt onto the screen. The Edson College colors, catchy graphics—and a striking still photo of Sam Meyer, smiling broadly as he and a student looked through a brochure together.

He recognized that picture. It was taken about two years ago, when he was showing a student brochures about summer study-abroad programs. It had nothing to do with assessment.

He heard gasps all around him, exclamations of surprise, a chuckle. And then more chuckles, then a horrible second when the entire room exploded in laughter.

Helen Stavros’s face flushed hot red, and her eyes burned. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “meet the new face of assessment at Edson College! And don’t think you can get out of this, Sam! Remember that little green form you sign every year when you sign your contract, the one saying the college can use your image for any promotional purposes it deems appropriate? I’ve got you—one way or another, I knew I’d get you! You are my official assessment poster boy!”

The laughter grew louder. Sam looked around desperately. People were doubled over, unable to control themselves, panting, choking. Even Jake was chuckling, hiding his mouth behind his hand. Sam felt the laughter pounding against the walls, billowing on all sides, rising above his head. At the front of the room, Helen Stavros bounced in place, helpless with glee.

The hatred surged upward, nearly blinding him. He threw down his cup and charged her, running to the front of the room, grabbing her by the throat and slamming her body against the wall. He looked deep into her eyes, savoring the terror he saw there, savoring the power he’d finally gained over her. And she couldn’t speak—her lips were moving, she was trying to call out, but only a gurgle emerged. He’d silenced her. He tightened his grip on her throat.

But people were pulling on his arms, pushing him away from her, prying his fingers loose. Then someone managed to punch him in the face, and he lost his grip on her. He stumbled backward, away from her, away from all of them.

She half-collapsed against the wall, massaging her throat and taking deep, ragged breaths while people rushed in to support and comfort her. Everyone else in the room stood staring at Sam, afraid to come closer to him, too stunned to speak.

Had he really done that? A lifetime of tightly controlling his actions, all negated in a moment. He staggered back another step, the room swirling in front of him, his eyes unable to focus. Somewhere behind the blur, he had quick, sharp images of Leah looking grim but unsurprised, his boys confused and frightened, disgrace, dismissal, arrest, prison. And already, Helen Stavros was standing up straighter, breathing more evenly. Everyone would sympathize with her. No one would dare oppose her, for fear of being associated with his madness. He hadn’t stopped her. He’d strengthened her.

He had to get out of there, but the door was too far away. They’d never let him reach it. He looked at the window, at the image of the tiger, its eyes so knowing, its body so tensed and ready.

Sam threw his head back and roared. Then he ran forward, hurling himself against the window as hard as he could. He heard glass crack, felt cold air rush against his face, felt himself falling. And then the frozen ground.

People ran to the window and stared at the body spread-eagled on the snow.

“Dear God,” Dr Simpson said. “What happened?”

Jake looked down at his friend for a moment before turning his face away. “He drowned,” he said.