Teddy Barnes’s removal as English department chair ended a six-year tenure shaped by political maneuvering beneath a polished surface of diplomacy. The episode exposed a gap between the department’s egalitarian rules and the power its chair could exercise when those rules were treated as appearances rather than obligations.

Causes and Background

The department’s operating paper set out rules that, taken literally, made the chair an egalitarian facilitator with little independent power. Teddy did not intend to obey those rules in practice; he intended to appear to obey them. His ability to sustain that performance for six years testified to his administrative skill, but his colleagues eventually recognized his conduct as an abuse of power.

The position also carried a concrete personal benefit: a reduced teaching load. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. identifies Teddy’s desire to keep the chairmanship and its lighter teaching responsibilities as part of the context for his resistance to the rules. His removal therefore arose not simply from a disagreement over procedure, but from the discovery that the chair had used a role defined as limited and egalitarian to preserve his own authority and advantage.

The Coalition and Removal

Gracie DuBois had been part of the coalition that brought Teddy down from the chairmanship. Her opposition was entangled with department politics: she was among Teddy’s political enemies, and her alliance had helped end his tenure. The account presents the fall as the consequence of a coalition’s accumulated judgment of his conduct, not as a sudden or purely personal rupture.

The political antagonism persisted after Teddy left the chair. During a later discussion of departmental candidates, William Henry Devereaux, Jr. makes an ostensibly innocent remark about whether the department already had a poet; Teddy and June Barnes look down at their hands, their smiles betraying their awareness of the jab. Gracie is described as near the top of their list of political enemies, linking the chairmanship’s fall to continuing factional resentments.

Consequences and Significance

Teddy’s removal became a precedent for how precarious departmental authority could be when colleagues judged that formal procedures had been manipulated. Later, during a university labor conflict, Herbert Schonberg tells William Henry Devereaux, Jr. that Teddy and June have aligned themselves with Paul Rourke and Finny. That later alliance does not undo the earlier conflict; it shows how the department’s political groupings could shift as new disputes and stakes arose.

The episode also provides a contrast for William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s own interim chairmanship. Colleagues regard him as administratively inept and expect little from his temporary appointment, while Teddy’s downfall is tied to skilled management of appearances and a determined hold on the position. The difference underscores the department’s larger tension: its democratic procedures can limit a chair’s authority, but the people who administer them—and the coalitions that enforce them—determine whether those limits have practical force.