“Take your friends with you to high ground”

The high-ground metaphor links the university’s threatened twenty-percent cuts to a tidal wave: if the disruption cannot be stopped, the people with power can at least choose whom to protect. Dickie Pope offers the image to Hank Devereaux as reassurance and recruitment; Hank repeats it to someone else, turning the advice into a personal invitation colored by his usual irony.

The Metaphor and the Cuts

Dickie Pope tells Hank that the coming reductions cannot be prevented, comparing them to a tidal wave. His advice is to find high ground and take friends along. The image makes an administrative threat sound like a natural disaster: the wave is too large to control, so the only remaining choice is where to stand and whom to bring.

Dickie then explains the scale behind the metaphor. The chancellor has given all campus executive officers a systemwide mandate to draw up plans reducing staff and costs across the curriculum by twenty percent. He stresses that the plans are not guaranteed to be implemented, but that they must be prepared. The high ground therefore means protection amid a still-uncertain process, not proof that anyone has already been saved.

Hank’s Reframing

Hank tests the personal implication of Dickie’s offer, asking whether it means he can save his friends and watch his enemies drown. He then jokes that, if the choice is between rescuing friends and abandoning enemies, the cuts could go much further than twenty percent. The exaggeration exposes the ruthless logic hiding inside the comforting metaphor: survival is collective, but the proposed circle of safety is selective.

Dickie answers by assuring Hank that he is respected, popular as a teacher, and well published, and that senior administrators know who the university’s valuable people are. His offer of high ground is thus also an overture to Hank, presenting friendship with Dickie as a possible form of protection. The assurance remains qualified by the unresolved cuts and by the fact that a plan must be drawn up regardless.

Repetition as Invitation

Later, Hank compresses the advice into a phrase of his own: “Tidal wave,” he tells a woman, then says it “Can’t be stopped” and that the only option is to move to high ground and take friends along. He asks whether she wants to come with him and adds that he may have room for one more. The borrowed image has shifted from Dickie’s account of institutional upheaval to Hank’s direct, lightly teasing invitation; the offer of safety now carries the possibility of choosing one another as allies.

The exchange does not resolve what the university will implement or who will ultimately be protected. Instead, the repeated image gives the threat a memorable shape while preserving its uncertainty. A tidal wave cannot be negotiated with, but the metaphor leaves one meaningful decision open: whom to take along.