The killing and hanging of a goose on the West Central Pennsylvania University campus turns William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s comic budget ultimatum into a public crisis. The goose is found hanging from a tree branch after Devereaux has threatened to kill a duck a day until he gets a budget. The timing makes him a ready suspect, but the evidence does not identify the person who killed the bird. Instead, the episode gathers force through accusation, protest, television, and a classroom argument about what a threat means once it has been made in public.

Background and Accusation

The discovery is reported to Devereaux by Teddy Barnes. Lou Steinmetz, according to Teddy, had been told about the incident by Randy, a security-desk worker; Lou’s immediate reaction was to suspect the beatnik English professor. The remark makes the accusation sound less like the result of an investigation than a reflexive association between Devereaux’s public persona and the crime. Devereaux recognizes Lou’s phrasing, but the call supplies no evidence of authorship and no account of how the goose was killed.

The accusation gains its apparent plausibility from the preceding Friday’s budget threat. In a later television interview, Missy Blaylock presents the hanging as occurring after Devereaux threatened to kill a duck a day unless he got a budget. The interviewer initially calls the bird a duck; someone in the crowd corrects her to goose. That correction matters: the public argument is already condensing a specific event into a simplified version of Devereaux’s earlier threat, even as the threatened animal and the dead one are not the same.

Protest and Public Scrutiny

When Devereaux arrives at the faculty parking lot, a television van is again occupying a VIP space near the pond, and protesters have gathered in numbers he estimates at twice those of the previous gathering. Their cause is the death of a single goose, and their chants are audible through his closed car windows. Devereaux compares their presence with the much larger protests of the Vietnam War era, while recognizing that this time the demonstrators are protesting him. The contrast frames the spectacle as both a campus moral protest and a campaign focused on one professor.

The confrontation moves from the crowd to the hallway outside Devereaux’s office. Missy draws him toward the camera as placards rise and a chant against him and the slaughter resumes. Colleagues who are not teaching come out to watch. In the interview, Devereaux answers the question about his knowledge of the hanging with no comment. The response does not clear him, and the crowd treats his appearance and silence as grounds for suspicion. Later, in class, he observes that he did not deny being the perpetrator on camera; that observation describes how his public response could be read, not proof that he committed the act.

The interview also introduces an official counterclaim. Missy reports that campus executive officer Richard Pope feels certain Devereaux is innocent. Devereaux challenges the certainty by suggesting that Pope could know only if he had done it himself. The insinuation throws the interviewer off stride, but it establishes no allegation supported by evidence. When the camera light goes off, someone calls Devereaux a murderer and the crowd begins chanting again. Lou Steinmetz orders the demonstrators to disperse, and they do so reluctantly before Lou asks Devereaux for a moment. Devereaux refuses to speak with him then, leaving the question of responsibility unresolved.

The Goose in the Classroom

The incident follows Devereaux into his afternoon composition class. His students feel ill-treated: he had asked them for advice in essay form about what to do, yet the goose was killed before they had handed in their papers. Some had attended the interview and heard his threat to continue the killings unless he received his budget. After collecting the essays, Devereaux divides them into two unequal piles and reads three anonymous essays from the larger pile advising him to kill a duck. Their argument is that a threat loses credibility if it is not carried out; the writers support that logic with examples drawn from American military action.

Blair, one of the students, says she saw the goose hanging from the branch that morning and that the sight made her sick. The disclosure brings the argument out of abstraction: the class is no longer considering only a hypothetical response to a budget dispute, but a dead bird witnessed by one of its members. Bobo mocks Blair, and Devereaux tells her she is right but that being right is no use if she will not speak. She gathers her things and leaves quickly. Her exit is followed by silence; no one answers Devereaux’s question about why she was right to be surprised by his public threats.

Consequences and Significance

Devereaux finally offers the distinction the class has failed to articulate. His threat, he explains, was comic rather than serious: he had delivered it while wearing a fake nose and glasses. Carrying out a comic threat with serious consequences makes no sense. The incident does not resolve who killed the goose, and the evidence does not establish that Devereaux did so. It does show how his theatrical ultimatum, once separated from its comic framing and repeated by television and protest, becomes difficult for others to distinguish from intent.

The hanging goose therefore stands at the boundary between performance and harm. Devereaux’s students have treated follow-through as proof of credibility; Blair’s response insists on the actual cost of the proposition. The campus protest, the interview, and the class all recast the same event, but none supplies a confirmed perpetrator. Its decisive consequence is instead interpretive: the joke’s public life has overtaken its intended absurdity, while the dead goose makes that gap impossible to keep purely rhetorical.