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Ethics: Problems, Principles, and Prospects
, Blau and Federman, editors, was due to go into production in less than a month. Bruce Federman was one of those academics who spends most semesters on leave in pleasant places like Florence or Geneva. At the moment, he was in Majorca, having left all the work of putting together the third edition to Ben.
    Next came four requests for letters of recommendation. Two of these had come from graduate students for whom he had letters on file that would take only a few minutes to adapt. The third was from an undergraduate major who'd gone on to do graduate work at NYU and was now on the job market. He remembered her as a capable but odd girl whose affect was so disturbingly flat that encounters with her left him feeling as if he'd just stepped out of a high-speed elevator. She suffered from chronic postnasal drip; her classmates complained about her disruptive snorts and swallowings. Hard to imagine what kind of teacher she'd make, but he'd learned how to leave a soft spot here and there on the otherwise tautly inflated surfaces of these recommendations to convey reservations he couldn't make explicit. The last was from a student he'd apparently taught eleven years ago, of whom he had no memory. There were no computer records from that era and the physical files had long since been moved from academic offices to a morgue in the basement of the administration building. The days when he could have wandered down there and looked through the files himself were over; he'd have to go through an elaborate procedure to initiate a search for this student's transcript. Or Dolores would, if he could bring himself to delegate such a small task, or perhaps the work-study student.
    Finally, there was a memo from Roberta Mitten-Kurz, the humanities dean. “Dear Colleague” it began:
    As you may remember, the on-site review team from SCAC will be visiting campus this fall. This is the next step in the accreditation process. As you were cautioned last spring, these visits can occur anytime during the semester. Please be aware that members of the SCAC teamhave been charged with the task of interviewing faculty members and staff and visiting classes unannounced.
    SCAC was the acronym for Southern Collegiate Assessment Commission, an initiative aimed at enforcing accreditation standards according to a purportedly objective set of criteria. Grades, he understood, wouldn't do—too subjective—and neither would student transcripts. Instead, the dean's office barraged department chairs with forms and questionnaires and charts and long explanatory memos, all of which Ben had been ignoring for months. There had been some mention of keeping writing samples for entering freshmen on file and comparing them to writing samples produced at graduation, but that seemed so manifestly unfeasible that he'd forgotten it instantly.
    Ben's style as chair had always been minimalist and laissez-faire. He had no particular interest in special programs or cross-disciplinary dialogue, only in maintaining the department's day-to-day functioning and, when necessary, making sound hiring decisions. His colleagues didn't seem to mind. He'd heard a rumble or two about administrative dissatisfaction but that hadn't bothered him. Fine, he thought. Let them find another chair. Muriel Draybrooke, for example, who wore the same egg-yolk-encrusted seersucker jacket day in and day out, or Stuart Dilbert, who raised pointless objections in faculty meetings and whose toneless bray put everyone's back up. Ben had no great investment in the job. He was doing it, in fact, for the fairly unselfish reason that he was the only member of the department both capable and willing. He'd seen no reason to pay the SCAC business much attention. He'd understood it as yet another ambitious bureaucraticscheme, the kind that blew in and out of Lola with the regularity of storms from the Gulf
    But the mention of a “next step” in the process alarmed him. What