English Department Wars

English Department Wars names the persistent factional conflict within West Central Pennsylvania University’s English Department, where struggles over who holds authority repeatedly turn procedural decisions into tests of allegiance. The conflict is not confined to meetings: William Henry Devereaux, Jr. traces it back to competing ideas about privacy and community in Allegheny Wells, while later battles over a chair search, university cuts, and union action show how personal grievances become institutional politics. Its recurring pattern is stalemate punctuated by abrupt, consequential interventions, without a lasting settlement among the people who must continue working together.

Origins in Allegheny Wells

The department’s wars have a domestic prehistory. After a service road was cleared through the trees on the hill in Allegheny Wells, home construction began to spread. Jacob Rose bought a two-acre lot and started building a house; Finny and his wife purchased another lot at the bottom of the hill. Alarmed by the accumulating Sold signs, William Henry Devereaux, Jr. borrowed money from a credit union to buy two adjacent lots with Lily. He understood the purchases as protection against the arrival of colleagues from whom the couple had moved away. Lily did not share his sense of impending threat, and their disagreement exposed a difference in what each considered a reasonable fear.

Paul Rourke’s offer for the lots arrived three months after the purchase. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. refused to sell. Lily later identified the acquisition of the lots, rather than the construction of their house, as the beginning of the English Department Wars. In her account, that decision began a chain of consequences that reached as far as Gracie DuBois’s later attack with her spiral notebook. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. likewise connects the old refusal to his continuing hostility with Paul Rourke, arguing that present conflict can grow from a grievance planted years earlier. The lots therefore function as both property and a compact explanation of the department’s habit of carrying old disputes into new encounters.

The Failed Chair Search

The search for a new department chair reenacts the factional deadlock through a sequence of institutional delays. Permission to search came in September, but the position was not funded in October. The department was allowed to make a shortlist and interview candidates at a convention in December, then denied permission to bring anyone to campus in January. In February, the hiring freeze and the lack of a guaranteed exception were reiterated. By March, only six applicants remained; most of the others had taken positions elsewhere or decided not to join a search they considered badly managed. In April, the dean asked the department to narrow the list to three and rank the candidates. By then, only three remained from an initial pool of two hundred.

Finny suspected William Henry Devereaux, Jr. of trying to sabotage the search because he had opposed hiring an outsider from the beginning. Devereaux’s stated rationale was that the department was so divided and contemptuous of itself that an external chair would serve chiefly to prevent any current member from gaining power. Finny, in turn, suspected a secret arrangement between Devereaux and the dean that would undermine both the search and the department’s democratic procedures. These competing suspicions made the search more than a hiring exercise: even a lack of information about the dean’s position could be read as evidence of obstruction.

When the department met to rank the final candidates, Teddy Barnes questioned the point of spending hours on a process whose funding might still be withdrawn. Finny answered by insisting on compliance with the dean’s request, and discussion proceeded despite the uncertainty. The participants could not clearly recall what had attracted them to the remaining candidates. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. recognized that applicants who seemed distinguished could feel threatening, inviting comparison with the department’s own members; strong candidates were also suspected of using interest in the job to strengthen negotiations with their current employers. Gracie DuBois sought to remove one candidate, Professor Threlkind, citing the department’s existing staffing in Twentieth Century and its lack of a demonstrated need for a second poet. A candidate’s scholarly merits thus became entangled with staffing calculations and the faculty’s anxieties about its own standing.

Interim Power and Institutional Reversal

William Henry Devereaux, Jr. became interim chair in part because colleagues regarded him as an unlikely political operator. His public criticism of the department’s problems as failures of imagination and goodwill, his occasional votes alongside opponents, inattention to political maneuvering, and short-term memory made him seem like a safe compromise for a divided department. His lack of administrative skill was so widely assumed that colleagues expected little harm from a temporary appointment. That expectation changed when Rachel, his competent secretary, helped him find and handle the forms needed to act.

The contrast with Teddy Barnes sharpened the change. Teddy’s six years as chair ended after his use of power came to be seen as abusive, despite his habit of presenting himself as a diplomat. The department’s operating paper formally made the chair an egalitarian facilitator with limited power if its rules were followed literally. Teddy had instead maintained the appearance of following those rules while exercising authority, and had wanted to retain the job and its reduced teaching load. William Henry Devereaux, Jr., by contrast, did not want the position and therefore felt little reason to conceal his actions behind procedural appearances. In two semesters, he demonstrated that a chair could disrupt the department’s long-running paralysis, even while undermining the egalitarian democratic principles that had helped sustain it.

The response included vitriolic letters to the dean, the campus executive officer, and the student newspaper; anonymous late-night memos left in department mailboxes; and official documents delivered by registered mail that threatened litigation unless he stopped. Gracie’s message requesting a meeting after her attack on the chair contained no apology or expression of regret. The written protests and the personal injury belong to the same conflict, but they also reveal its uneven register: formal complaints and legal threats coexist with longstanding animosities and open contempt.

Factions, Union Politics, and the Strike Vote

The departmental divisions became entangled with the wider fight over university cuts and labor action. Herbert Schonberg, the faculty union representative, approached William Henry Devereaux, Jr. about the union’s campaign. He argued that the chair could become its public point person, especially because English had more votes than any other department. Devereaux’s television appearances, Herbert suggested, might help rally faculty even if Devereaux did not identify as a union man. The appeal carried a warning beneath its praise: Herbert had already spoken with Teddy Barnes and June Barnes, who were aligned with Paul Rourke and Finny, and Devereaux’s friends and department might be arraying themselves against him.

Herbert asked Devereaux to state whether he would join the union’s side or align with Dickie Pope, emphasizing that neutrality could leave him without allies. That pressure illustrates how factional conflict worked beyond formal votes: relationships shaped expectations of political loyalty, while union strategy treated departments and friendships as potential blocs. Billy Quigley also invoked the possibility of a recall vote, threatening to support Finny and a Jesuit if Devereaux did not help him. Devereaux recognized that Billy’s threat was not sincere, but its use still shows how the prospect of removing the chair had entered ordinary personal bargaining.

Near the end of the term, Herbert called for a strike vote. The stated aim was to prevent seniors from graduating, a tactic presented as one of the faculty’s few available sources of political leverage. The vote ultimately went overwhelmingly against a strike after faculty learned that Dickie Pope had been dismissed and Jacob Rose, a longtime and respected colleague, would become chief executive officer. The decision opposed the union’s own position and the interests of faculty, including Finny, who would be directly affected by the following year’s budget cuts. The reversal did not erase the department’s divisions; it changed the circumstances under which its factions confronted one another.

Recurrence and Unsettled Consequences

A classroom discussion of William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s public threat to kill a duck each day until he received a budget reveals another tension in the department’s politics: the gap between comic provocation and serious consequence. He asked why a student had been surprised by the threat, given its deliberately comic presentation, including his fake nose and glasses. The class fell silent, and the bell ended the discussion before his explanation could resolve the matter. The episode echoes the larger wars: humor and performance can expose the absurdity of institutional conflict, but they do not guarantee that the conflict will remain harmless or that others will read it as intended.

The strike’s defeat leaves Finny waiting for William Henry Devereaux, Jr. after the university’s leadership has shifted. Finny appears to expect that their shared reversal of fortune may have made them allies, but that expectation rests on a hopeful reading of circumstances rather than an established reconciliation. A white, spotted sheet lies at Finny’s feet, and Devereaux approaches without yet knowing what it signifies. The encounter ends with the departmental struggle still active: personnel decisions, labor politics, and private loyalties have rearranged the field, but they have not settled the old conflicts that gave the English Department Wars their force.