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we were denied permission to bring anyone to campus. In February we were reminded of the hiring freeze and that we had no guarantee that an exception would be made for us, even to hire a new chair. By March allbut six of the remaining applicants had either accepted other positions or decided they were better off staying where they were than throwing in with people who were running a search as screwed up as this one. In April we were advised by the dean to narrow our list to three and rank the candidates. There was no need to narrow the list. By then only three remained out of the original two hundred.
    “Is the dean pushing?” Finny wanted to know. This was the sort of thing I should be able to find out, he was suggesting, since Jacob Rose and I were friends. My not having concrete information to report was evidence to Finny, were any needed, that I was attempting to scuttle the search for a new chair, a search I’ve not been in favor of from the beginning. My position has been that our department is so deeply divided, that we have grown so contemptuous of each other over the years, that the sole purpose of bringing in a new chair from the outside was to prevent any of us from assuming the reigns of power. We’re looking not so much for a chair as for a blood sacrifice. As a result of my stated position, Finny suspects that the dean and I are secretly attempting to subvert both the search and the department’s democratic principles.
    “I believe it would be accurate to describe the dean as more pushed against than pushing,” I reported.
    “He’s a wimp,” June agreed, though she and Teddy are also friends with Jacob.
    “Or she,” I added, apropos of nothing.
    Orshee looked up, confused. This was his line. Had he missed an opportunity to say it?
    “Why are we here?” Teddy wondered, not at all philosophically. “Why not wait until the position has been approved before ranking the candidates? This is liable to take hours, and we have no guarantee that the position won’t be rescinded tomorrow, in which case we will have wasted our time.”
    “The dean has requested that we rank the remaining candidates,” Finny intoned, “and so rank them we shall.”
    Common sense efficiently disposed of, endless discussion of the three remaining candidates ensued. Twice I had to be requested to stop gurgling. Three times I beat Campbell Wheemer to his “or she” line. No one seemed able to recall what had attracted us to these three candidatesto begin with. I doubted, in fact, that we ever
were
attracted to them. They represented what was left after we’d winnowed out the applications that were personally threatening. To hire someone distinguished would be to invite comparison with ourselves, who were undistinguished. Not that this particular logic ever got voiced openly. Rather, we reminded each other how difficult it was to retain candidates with excellent qualifications. To make matters worse, we were suspicious of any good candidate who expressed interest in us. We suspected that he (or she!) might be involved in salary negotiations with the institution that currently employed him (or her!) and trying to attract other offers to be used as leverage with their own deans.
    Gracie was anxious to whittle the final three applicants down to two, having discovered something alarming about the third. “Professor Threlkind is an untenable candidate given our present scheme,” she pointed out. As she spoke, she referred to notes on the untenable Threlkind that she’d written down in her large spiral notebook. During the course of our personnel committee meetings, she’d worried the spiral out of its coil, so that its hooked, lethal end was exposed, using it to chip flecks of lacquer from her raspberry thumbnail. “We’re already overstaffed in Twentieth Century,” she reminded us. “Also, we have no demonstrated need for a second poet,” she added, since the candidate had listed several poetry publications in little