Orshee

Orshee, a young and untenured member of the English faculty, is a comic study in the collision between academic principle and private uncertainty. He presents himself as a critic of racism and sexism, yet worries about tenure, home ownership, and how colleagues will interpret his words; amid the department’s bitter struggle over layoffs and leadership, even his proposal that faculty try to be friends cannot win a second. His story is less a settled portrait than a series of uneasy reversals, observed by William Henry Devereaux, Jr., whose dry account often distinguishes what Orshee says from what he may want.

Identity and Academic Life

Orshee occupies one of the English department floor’s least desirable offices, overlooking the parking lot. Its sparse collection of books contrasts with shelves of videotapes, each containing recorded episodes of old sitcoms. He keeps a small television and built-in VCR running through the workday, even during student consultations; when William Henry Devereaux, Jr. visits, Orshee is studying an episode of Diff’rent Strokes. The scene makes his scholarly life visibly unlike the conventional image of a professor surrounded by books, but Orshee treats his subject as intellectually serious rather than as an embarrassment.

His published research concerns the same television programs. He places his essays in electronic magazines, a choice he presents as environmentally considerate and which also spares the work the familiar complaint that it is not worth the paper it is printed on. His proposed special-topics course would compare episodes of Diff’rent Strokes with Huckleberry Finn. He reads the sitcom as a conservative white fantasy of affectionate, nonthreatening Black boys and caring older white men, and proposes that the comparison reveal the persistence of white racial attitudes. June Barnes, he says, approves of the course idea. His work thus joins an unconventional object of study to an explicitly critical argument about American culture.

Orshee’s appearance also invites comparison with the former campus-radical style of Jacob Rose and William Henry Devereaux, Jr. He wears jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt, and a thrift-store sport coat; the resemblance, in the narrator’s view, stops at clothing. Orshee’s office and manner make him seem less like a powerful radical than someone who has found a protected niche at the university. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. imagines that Orshee may once have been vulnerable to the sort of high-school bullying represented by Guido’s question about how much money the professor made from his book. That is the narrator’s conjecture, not a disclosed fact about Orshee’s past.

Tenure, Home, and Moral Uncertainty

Orshee’s position at the university is precarious. With tenure still pending the following year, he worries that a layoff policy of last hired, first fired could make his employment vulnerable. The same uncertainty enters his domestic plans: he and June are considering a house in Allegheny Wells, and their realtor argues that current buyer’s-market conditions make the moment attractive. Orshee asks William Henry Devereaux, Jr. to tell him if he hears anything about the layoffs, linking career security directly to the decision to buy a home.

His anxiety becomes more complicated after a personnel-committee meeting. Orshee had urged the department to disqualify all male candidates from its search and to vote against him when his own tenure case came up, arguing that a white man might not deserve tenure. He later worries that the position has been misunderstood as personal dissatisfaction or a genuine wish to forgo tenure. The contradiction is not simply that he wants what he had publicly proposed to reject: he understands his statement as a principled gesture against sexism, but also wants a secure career and is contemplating a major financial commitment. June, he learns, had taken his words as a possible sign that he did not want tenure. When he revisits the matter with the chair, he admits that he does want it and asks how he can make future plans amid department rancor. His lament that morality is difficult captures the gap between a position taken in principle and the consequences of living by it.

William Henry Devereaux, Jr. tells Orshee that he believes he will receive tenure and eventually become chair, and advises him to listen to the realtor. The reassurance is the narrator’s own judgment, not a reported decision by the university. Orshee gives no sign that he recognizes any insult in the prediction. His future remains unresolved in the evidence: the story shows his anxiety and the advice he receives, but not the outcome of his tenure case or house plans.

June Barnes and the Department’s Factions

Orshee’s connection with June Barnes is threaded through the narrator’s awareness of rumor and projection. Hearing June’s name from Orshee reminds William Henry Devereaux, Jr. of gossip linking the younger professor with Teddy Barnes’s wife. Later, he watches June and Orshee standing together at a window and imagines a physical intimacy between them. He explicitly recognizes that this may be his own projection, especially because he has just entertained a similar fantasy about Meg Quigley. The scene therefore establishes the narrator’s suspicion, not an objective account of an affair.

A more direct sign of strain comes through Paul Rourke, who tells William Henry Devereaux, Jr. that June called Orshee a hypocritical little putz and shouted at him in the hallway. Teddy Barnes had hidden in his office, while Orshee had retreated into his own. The quarrel gives the rumor a sharper interpersonal edge but does not explain its cause. At a later departmental meeting, Orshee proposes that everyone try to be friends. His motion receives no second and dies in silence; June mutters that he should grow up. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. takes her words and the room’s response as evidence that something may indeed have passed between her and Orshee. The conclusion remains his inference, supported by the awkwardness but never confirmed in a direct account from either of them.

Department Politics and Failed Collegiality

Orshee’s private insecurities unfold against a larger contest over labor, layoffs, and departmental power. Herbert Schonberg appeals to William Henry Devereaux, Jr. to side with the faculty union, arguing that the department’s large number of votes could help the cause and suggesting that Teddy and June have aligned with Paul Rourke and Finny. That appeal frames Orshee’s department as politically divided, although it does not establish Orshee’s own position in the union dispute. His concern is less a clearly stated factional allegiance than the cost of every choice: he fears that whichever way he votes at the meeting, he will make enemies, and he knows June believes the same.

His proposal for friendship is consequently both modest and exposed. It is made in a department where William Henry Devereaux, Jr. has endured years of meetings and where even consensus is described as unnatural. The motion’s failure turns the language of reconciliation into another procedural dead end. Orshee’s attempt does not resolve the conflict or demonstrate that the colleagues are ready to forgive one another; instead, the silence and June’s rebuke reveal how little authority a general appeal to collegiality has in a room organized by old grievances.

The larger labor crisis continues beyond that meeting. Herbert Schonberg calls for a strike vote late in the term, explaining that preventing seniors from graduating is one of the few forms of leverage available to the faculty. Later, after Dickie Pope is removed and Jacob Rose becomes chief executive, the faculty vote overwhelmingly against striking, defeating the union’s position and affecting those who will face budget cuts the next year. The account does not specify how Orshee voted. That unresolved detail matters: his story repeatedly emphasizes the pressure to take a side without supplying a neat record of his eventual choices.

Character and Narrative Significance

Orshee’s defining tension is not hypocrisy alone, though the accusation of hypocrisy becomes explicit in June’s hallway outburst. His public arguments about race and gender coexist with material hopes—tenure, a house, a future at the university—that make principled positions costly and difficult to sustain. His sitcom research also offers a compact image of the character: he takes seriously a medium and subject that others might dismiss, while the narrator punctures his self-presentation with observations about his office, clothing, and vulnerability. The portrayal neither simply endorses Orshee’s academic claims nor reduces him to them.

As a figure in the department’s political comedy, Orshee occupies the unstable space between conviction and self-protection. He is willing to make a provocative statement about tenure and gender equality, then becomes alarmed that others may act on it; he sees moral stakes in a departmental vote, yet cannot identify a choice that will leave him without enemies; and he offers friendship where the group can manage only silence. The story does not provide a definitive resolution for his career, house plans, or relationship with June. That incompletion preserves the central uncertainty of his portrait: Orshee can articulate principles and imagine a future, but neither guarantees what the institution or the people around him will make of him.