Kill a duck a day until I get a budget

Kill a duck a day until I get a budget is William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s comic ultimatum linking the threatened killing of campus waterfowl to the English department’s demand for a budget. The phrase turns a budget dispute into a test of persuasion: first a provocation that becomes a classroom assignment, then a televised controversy, and finally a lesson in how little control a speaker retains over the consequences of a threat.

The Threat as a Teaching Prompt

The ultimatum enters the classroom when a student asks whether William Henry Devereaux, Jr. is actually going to kill a duck. With ten minutes left in a class that began late, Devereaux redirects the challenge into an assignment. Each student must write a cogent, persuasive essay arguing either that he should kill a duck or that he should not; proposing to maim or pluck one is explicitly ruled out. The blunt either-or structure makes the classroom confront the proposition rather than evade it.

Devereaux frames the assignment as a response to an unexpected contribution from a student he calls Bobo, who is present because Devereaux has threatened to fail him if he misses another class. The other students groan at being given weekend work, but their hostile looks fall more heavily on Bobo than on their instructor. Devereaux reminds him that the threat is supposed to be carried out by Monday, and that by Tuesday he will no longer need the class’s advice. The deadline gives the exercise a practical urgency: the students are not considering an abstract question detached from the speaker, but advising someone who has publicly made a threat.

From Campus Dispute to Public Spectacle

The budget demand and the threatened killing become public news. At the Railton Campus of West Central Pennsylvania University, a reporter identifies Devereaux as chair of the English department and asks about a duck found hanging from a tree. Someone corrects the report: it was a goose. Devereaux declines to comment. The crowd treats his silence as incriminating, and a voice accuses him of having done it, but the exchange establishes suspicion rather than proof.

When asked whether there will be further killings, Devereaux answers by asking whether he will get his budget. The reply keeps the financial demand attached to the threat even as the public attention shifts toward the dead bird. The camera and the gathered crowd transform an absurd bargaining tactic into a matter of public accusation. The phrase is no longer confined to a dispute between an English department chair and the university: it is repeated as a slogan, and Devereaux is denounced as a murderer.

The Essays and Their Consequences

By the time Devereaux’s afternoon composition class meets, the students have heard of the campus goose’s death and of his morning interview. They believe he has acted before they have turned in the essays he requested, and they have heard his implied threat to continue unless the department gets its budget. Devereaux has sorted the papers into two unequal piles; the larger one supports killing a duck. He reads three essays from that pile anonymously, hoping that hearing their own reasoning aloud might make the writers doubt it.

The essays defend follow-through: because Devereaux threatened to kill a duck, the writers argue, he must do so or no one will take his threats seriously. They compare that logic to foreign policy, invoking military action and the danger of making threats without carrying them through. In the classroom, the threat’s comic premise has therefore acquired a serious argument behind it. The assignment exposes how easily the demand for credibility can be used to justify escalation, even when the action at stake is a needless killing.

Devereaux asks why Blair should have been surprised by the threat. The students do not answer, and the bell ends the silence. Devereaux then offers his own explanation: the threat was comic, the person making it wore a fake nose and glasses, and carrying out a comic threat with serious consequences makes no sense. Yet the explanation does not persuade the class. The lesson has begun in low comedy and ended in discomfort, and Devereaux acknowledges that the distinction he wants to make between comedy and tragedy may not hold even in his own experience.

Ethical Reversal and Afterlife

The last student to leave is Bobo. Rather than defending the threatened killing or disputing the assignment, he objects to what Devereaux has done to the goose. Devereaux recognizes the objection as a persuasive ethical position. The moment reverses the classroom’s earlier arrangement: the student who prompted the assignment supplies its clearest moral argument, while the instructor who designed the exercise cannot make his account of comic intent settle the question.

The story also escapes the classroom. Devereaux’s agent treats the episode as a possible source of celebrity and sees potential for a television movie. Her response shows that the same incident can be received as an ethical dispute, a public spectacle, or material for entertainment. The phrase’s force lies in that unstable passage between registers. It begins as an exaggerated way to demand a budget, but the dead goose and the students’ arguments prevent its consequences from remaining merely comic.