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musical and vibrant.
    “That’s fine.” She assigned the girl a seat.
    “Hola,” she said. The semester had begun.

4

The Common Wisdom
    I T WAS well known among the citizens of the state that the university had pots of money and that there were highly paid faculty members in every department who had once taught Marxism and now taught something called deconstructionism which was only Marxism gone underground in preparation for emergence at a time of national weakness.
    It was well known among the legislators that the faculty as a whole was determined to undermine the moral and commercial well-being of the state, and that supporting a large and nationally famous university with state monies was exactly analogous to raising a nest of vipers in your own bed.
    It was well known among the faculty that the governor and the state legislature had lost interest in education some twenty years before and that it was only a matter of time before all classes would be taught as lectures, all exams given as computer-graded multiple choice, all subscriptions to professional journals at the library stopped, and all research time given up to committee work and administrative red tape. All the best faculty were known to be looking for other jobs, and this was known to be a matter of indifference to the state board of governors.
    It was well known among the secretaries in every office and every department that the faculty and administrators could, in fact, run the Xerox and even the ditto machines. They were just too lazy to do so.
    It was well known among the janitorial staff that if you wanted to maintain your belief in human nature, it was better never, ever to look, even by chance, into any wastebasket, but to adopt a technique of lifting and twisting the garbage bag in one motion and tossing it without even remarking to yourself that it was unusual in weight or bulk or odor.
    It was well known among the students that the dormitories, like airlines, were always overbooked, and that temporary quarters incorridors and common rooms happened by design rather than accident. It was also well known to the students that there had been three axe murders on the campus the year before, that the victims’ names had started with “A” or “M,” and that the murderer had never been found, and that the university would do anything to hush these crimes up. It was well known to the students that the chili served in the dorms every Thursday noon contained all the various kinds of leftover meat from the preceding week, even meat left on plates. Some students found it tasty anyway. It was a further tenet of popular student belief that the bars stopped checking IDs at midnight Fridays and Saturdays. This happened, in fact, to be true.
    It was well known to all members of the campus population that other, unnamed groups reaped unimagined monetary advantages in comparison to the monetary disadvantages of one’s own group, and that if funds were distributed fairly, according to real merit, for once, some people would have another think coming.
    I VAR H ARSTAD , the provost, knew all these things and plenty more. Only his secretary, Mrs. Walker, whom he called “Mrs. Walker,” while she addressed him as “Ivar,” had been around the campus longer and knew more. One of the things that Ivar knew about Mrs. Walker was that she would only tell him what she knew if he asked the right question, so he spent a portion of his time meditating over what he might ask Mrs. Walker and how he might phrase the question. He understood that this was much like being married, but he had no firsthand knowledge of that. He lived with his twin brother, Nils, the dean of ag extension, in a large brick house with two sunporches in the best neighborhood in town. One thing he knew was that he and Nils bore the disrespectful appellation of “the Albino Nordic Twins,” but Mrs. Walker had assured him that this moniker was no longer in widespread usage, since Jacob Grunwald, who