William Henry Devereaux Jr. turns down the deanship

William Henry Devereaux Jr.’s refusal of the deanship and relinquishment of tenure mark a decisive break in his university career, but not a clean departure. He gives the choice a bodily metaphor, treating it as the symbolic equivalent of passing a stone, while his eventual half-year sabbatical leaves him teaching at the university again in the fall.

The Decision and Its Meaning

Devereaux connects turning down the dean’s position with relinquishing his tenure at the university. Looking back after his urinary symptoms have eased, he tells Phil Watson that he had believed he passed a stone: during his first urination, he heard a small plink against porcelain. Watson rejects the physical explanation, reasoning that a stone large enough to make an audible sound could not pass through the ureter without causing bleeding, which Devereaux had not experienced.

A Symbolic Passage

Watson allows a different interpretation: Devereaux’s decision to refuse the deanship and give up tenure may have been the symbolic equivalent of passing a stone. The distinction matters to Devereaux, who finds poetry in the idea, but Watson maintains that symbolic meaning and physical substance remain separate. The episode places a career decision beside a medical mystery without resolving one into the other: the imagined stone gives the choice a bodily form, while the evidence does not establish that a stone actually passed.

An Incomplete Departure

Devereaux’s attempt to sever his university ties does not fully succeed. He tendered his resignation to Jacob Rose, but the letter was lost, and he instead finds himself on a half-year sabbatical that he had forgotten he was owed for agreeing to serve as temporary chair. The arrangement brings him back to teaching in the fall and places him on leave in the spring. His refusal of the deanship therefore initiates a withdrawal from university obligations without ending his institutional connection.