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them that further experiments in driving the university into the arms of the private sector would be warranted, that actually paying for the university out of state funds was irresponsible, or even immoral, or even criminal (robbing widows and children, etc., to fatten sleek professors who couldn’t find real employment, etc.).
    Ivar stared at the tiny scrap and counted the names, ticking each with the tip of his pencil. Fifteen names that only he could read. Then he pressed the button on his phone. Mrs. Walker’s voice came through like the voice of God. He said, “Mrs. Walker, tell me again the amount of the possible reallocation.”
    “Seven million.” That made it true.
    “This early in the fiscal year.”
    “This early in the fiscal year.”
    “Thank you.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    No single donor had ever come up with seven million, except for a named building with a bust of said donor bigger than life in the lobby. But though perhaps somewhere some billionaire on his deathbed was longing for a respectable home for his wealth, Ivar hadn’t heard of any.
    Good-bye to Nuclear Engineering.
    Good-bye to Women’s Studies.
    Good-bye to Clothing Design and Fiber Science.
    Good-bye to Broadcast Journalism and the university radio station.
    Good-bye to Oceanography.
    Good-bye to the Geological Station in Colorado.
    Good-bye to the university chamber orchestra.
    Good-bye to every secretary hired in the last six months.
    Good-bye to Xeroxing, hello to dittoing.
    Ivar turned his paper over and wrote down another name, then another. He sighed.
    It was all true, what everybody knew, all true about the Marxists and the vipers and the indifference of the legislature. Only the axe murders weren’t true. Those, he had heard, took place on some campus in northern California.

5

Secular Humanism
    M ARLY H ELLMICH did have a semester of college. What she remembered most clearly was how her freshman English teacher wrote the words “critical thinking” on the board, and then, after some discussion, during which all of the students, including Marly, expressed discomfort with the idea of “critical thinking,” the teacher had written the phrase “Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion.” After the semester, Marly understood that the converse was true also—faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging. The wiser course, she had decided, was to cast her lot with faith and forget liberal education, and that was what she had done, and she had felt much better for it, while at the same time noting the irony that her unskilled labor was worth more to the university than it was to any of the other employers in town. And so she had spent all of her adulthood in the arms of the university after all, serving the cause of critical thinking, or at least the critical thinkers, with what, some days, seemed like all her strength.
    Father saw the university as a set of one-way streets in the middle of town that sometimes were confusing, and always snarled traffic. When he used to drive more, he would come home perennially surprised—“I don’t know what they’re doing down there, but it took me twenty minutes to get through.” Marly’s brother, who worked in a feed mill in a nearby town, saw the conspiracy of secular humanism moving forward at the university every day on every front by measurable degrees. Computers, he told her, had been designed specifically to forward the progress of secular humanism—“Christians had to count one thing at a time, so they went slow. The secular humanists weren’t going to stand for that, nosiree. The computer is the atom bomb of secular humanism. You ever seen a computer that acknowledges the Lord? The computer is the greatest false prophet there ever was. I wouldn’t touch a computer with a fork.”
    Marly’s view was more complex. What she saw was a stream of people who often didn’t acknowledge her, and so