Henry Breaks the Departmental Deadlock While Serving as Interim Chair

William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s interim chairmanship turns an appointment meant to contain departmental conflict into a means of unsettling it. Colleagues choose him because they expect little administrative action from a famously inept proceduralist; aided by Rachel’s command of the paperwork and untroubled by the need to preserve his position, he proves capable of disturbing the English department’s long stalemate. His tenure exposes the distance between egalitarian rules on paper and the power exercised in practice.

Appointment and Expectations

Devereaux reaches the chair through compromise rather than confidence in his administrative ability. For twenty years, he has argued publicly that collective problems arise not from defective policy but from failures of imagination and goodwill. His colleagues also know his weak political instincts, his inattentiveness to the mechanics of departmental maneuvering, and his short-term memory lapses. At times, he has even sided with opponents, to Teddy Barnes’s dismay when Barnes was chair and Devereaux’s vote could decide an issue.

Those traits make Devereaux seem a safe choice for a department that has been divided and suspended in indecision for more than a decade. He is appointed temporarily because colleagues assume that his administrative deficiencies will limit the damage he can do. Their estimate rests on a familiar expectation: that a chair who cannot manage procedure will be unable to make much happen.

Rachel and the Capacity to Act

The decisive change is not that Devereaux suddenly becomes attentive to administration. It is that Rachel can supply the competence he lacks. He describes her as a secretary who knows where the forms are, how to complete them, who should receive them, and when they should be sent. Her practical command of the process enables him to act through a system in which others had assumed he could not even find the necessary paperwork.

A morning’s messages show the pressures gathering around the position. Gracie DuBois requests a meeting without expressing regret over their recent conflict, while Herbert Schonberg, the faculty union representative, has been seeking an audience for weeks, apparently over Devereaux’s conduct as interim chair. These communications place him amid both personal animosity and formal scrutiny. The passage does not specify particular forms or decisions Rachel handles, but it identifies her administrative knowledge as the condition that lets Devereaux’s chairmanship have consequences.

A Different Model of Chairmanship

Devereaux’s approach becomes clearest in contrast with Barnes’s. The department’s operating paper sets out rules that, read literally, make the chair an egalitarian facilitator with little power. Barnes, during six years in the role, did not intend to obey those limits so much as to appear to do so. His eventual fall from favor is attributed to an abuse of power that had been masked by persistent diplomacy; the length of time before it became apparent reflects both his administrative skill and his desire to keep the job, including its reduced teaching load.

Devereaux has a different incentive. Because he does not want the position, he sees no reason to maintain the same kind of subterfuge. The contrast is not simply between an inept chair and a competent one: Barnes is skilled at managing appearances, while Devereaux’s indifference to the position frees him to disregard the conventions that kept departmental conflict suspended. His own account describes the result as a serious challenge to the egalitarian principles that had helped preserve that stalemate.

Resistance and Consequences

The consequences accumulate over nearly a full academic year. Devereaux becomes the target of hostile letters to the dean, the campus executive officer, and the student newspaper. Anonymous memos appear in departmental mailboxes late at night, and official documents arrive by registered mail threatening litigation unless he stops his conduct. Gracie’s request for a meeting and Schonberg’s persistent effort to see him belong to this wider atmosphere of dispute, though the evidence does not establish that each communication concerns the same issue.

Devereaux’s tenure is therefore consequential not because the account lists a single reform or resolution, but because he makes a supposedly powerless office disruptive. He can withstand ridicule, personal attacks, and threats, and he has Rachel’s administrative competence behind him. What his colleagues expected to be a harmless temporary appointment instead becomes a sustained challenge to the routines by which their divided department had avoided decisive change.