The Old Administration Building is the university’s administrative center and, under Dickie Pope’s leadership, the campus’s Vatican: a place where supplicants wait, budgets remain uncertain, and the language of efficiency makes potential losses sound like institutional progress. William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s visits there turn the building into a setting for both comic humiliation and consequential negotiations over the university’s future.

Identity and Name

The building is referred to as the Old Administration Building and, more casually, as the Administration Building. Since Dickie Pope became chief executive officer four years earlier, Devereaux explains, it has also acquired the nickname Vatican. The name turns an ordinary administrative office into a secular site of confession and judgment: those who come to see Dickie are treated as penitents or supplicants, waiting without reading matter while contemplating their sins and desires.

The nickname is more than a joke about bureaucratic authority. The building concentrates decisions whose causes lie well beyond its walls: the campus executive officer’s budget depends on Jacob Rose’s allocation, which depends on Dickie’s own, and ultimately on the chancellor and a legislature delaying its decision. The offices are a local face for a system of power that Devereaux can approach but cannot control.

The Waiting Room and Its Rituals

Devereaux walks across campus to Administration Row after telling Rachel that he is going to the Vatican. On a later visit, he arrives ten minutes late for an appointment with Dickie, courtesy of Billy Quigley, and consequently waits fifteen minutes rather than the twenty-five he expects he would have waited had he been on time. The room offers no reading material; its walls are upholstered in turquoise fabric. Devereaux makes his own entertainment with a peach, tossing it toward the acoustic ceiling tiles until he lunges to catch it and brushes a lamp.

The office door opens as Devereaux catches the lamp by its shade and the peach drops onto the rug. Dickie and two other men emerge to find him beside the disturbed lamp and fallen fruit. The small mishap gives the administrative setting a physical comedy that offsets its solemn nickname: Devereaux is at once a department chair seeking institutional support and a man caught playing with a peach in an executive waiting room.

Budget Politics and the Twenty-Percent Plan

Dickie tells Devereaux that he wants to apologize and assure him that his budget will arrive soon. The delay, he explains, travels up the administrative chain: Jacob Rose lacks a budget because Dickie lacks one, and Dickie’s allocation depends on the chancellor, whose own budget is stalled in the legislature. The chancellor expects a budget early the following week, with Dickie’s to follow by the end of that week. Devereaux answers the reassurance with a dark calculation: under his threat to kill one duck a day, the delay would require only four or five ducks, out of a campus population of nearly thirty.

Dickie presents the larger institutional situation as a mandate rather than a choice. Every campus executive officer must draw up a plan to reduce staff and costs across the curriculum by twenty percent; Dickie stresses that the plan may never have to be implemented, but it must be prepared. He frames the coming decade as a test of institutional survival, arguing that colleges will have to become lean and efficient as the baby-boom generation passes through the system. Devereaux’s skeptical response—questioning whether efficiency can be reconciled with education—sets the building’s managerial language against the university’s academic purpose.

Dickie also offers Devereaux a politically convenient role. If cuts go forward, the administration will take the blame because the mandate comes from above, while Devereaux may avoid being seen as the villain. He suggests that the institution, students, and taxpayers could all benefit if what he calls deadwood is removed. Devereaux recognizes the bargain’s appeal: the chair might have influence over who is protected and who is exposed, even as the cuts would be imposed on the department. The executive offices thus become the site where a broad austerity directive is translated into the prospect of personal alliances and professional losses.

Institutional Image and Narrative Function

The building’s Vatican identity gives campus administration a comic ceremonial atmosphere, but the negotiations inside are not merely farce. Its waiting room makes visitors enact dependence before they reach the decision-maker; Dickie’s assurance about delayed budgets then reveals how that dependence is produced by a chain of unsettled allocations. The contrast between the peach incident and the proposed twenty-percent reduction keeps personal absurdity alongside institutional consequence.

Devereaux leaves the encounter with a weekend to consider Dickie’s proposal and discuss it with his wife, Lily. Dickie twice uses the wrong name for her, a small lapse that undercuts his effort to present the meeting as confidential and personally attentive. In the Old Administration Building, promises of discretion, efficiency, and institutional benefit coexist with misremembered details and uncertain money: the office’s authority is real, but its control over events is limited.