Marge Harris, one of the younger instructors, tentatively waggled her fingers for attention. “Callie,” she said hesitantly, “we all understand how dedicated you are to the concept of the university as a social support network-”

Harlow made an unpleasant strangled sound.

“-but you haven’t had him in any of your classes,” Marge went on. “He’s constantly unprepared. When he’s not argumentative he’s flippant. When we try to point out what we expect of him, he treats it as a huge joke-”

“Ah!” Callie said, seizing on this, “what we expect of him. Couldn’t that be the problem right there? Have we tried to attune ourselves to his needs? Have we taken the trouble to understand where he’s coming from?”

A telling thrust, Callie thought, but the three of them just sat there, dumb and resisting. You’d think that at least the younger ones would grasp the importance of structural flexibility when you were dealing with a dysfunctional “Can I tell you what happened Friday?” Harlow said, face down, mumbling, talking to all of them. “I was giving my 304 midterm. Mr. Vroom came in fifteen minutes late, sat there five minutes, handed in his paper, and left. Do you know what he wrote?”

“No, what did he write, Harlow?” Callie said with a wooden-lipped attempt at a smile. How strange it was, when you came to think of it, that almost everything she said to Harlow Pollard required this granite-willed attitude of indulgence on her part. At fifty-three, he was nine years her senior, and once upon a time he had been her major professor. She had gotten her Ph. D. under him, right here at Nevada State, and started immediately as a temporary lecturer when he was already a fully tenured associate professor.