William Henry Devereaux Jr. and Jacob Rose’s Friendship in the Fight for Department Resources

William Henry Devereaux Jr. and Jacob Rose’s Friendship in the Fight for Department Resources joins long familiarity to the precarious business of academic governance. William Henry Devereaux Jr. and Jacob Rose can needle one another as old friends, yet their conversations concern budgets, departmental review, hiring, and the promises an administrator can safely make. Their friendship operates not outside university politics but within it: it gives them unusual candor while exposing the limits of what personal loyalty can secure.

An Old Friendship in Administrative Company

Jacob Rose is a dean and a longtime friend of William Henry Devereaux Jr. Their history predates their present positions: they once played ball together and, as William Henry Devereaux Jr. recalls, were both denied tenure. That shared experience gives their exchanges a familiarity that cuts across their current difference in authority. William Henry Devereaux Jr. can challenge the dean directly; Jacob Rose can answer with mock exasperation rather than formal distance.

The ease is visible even in a conversation about an approaching departmental review. When Jacob Rose begins apologetically, William Henry Devereaux Jr. tells him not to add to his difficulties, and steals one of his fries. Jacob Rose then explains that the English department’s review has been moved forward: the internal stage is to begin in September and the external stage to follow in October. He advises William Henry Devereaux Jr. to call in favors at other institutions if he has them. The casual meal and the serious timetable occupy the same scene, making their friendship a channel through which unwelcome institutional news can be delivered plainly.

Advice, Disagreement, and Department Resources

The two friends do not simply agree. Jacob Rose says that few people believe bringing in an outsider will cure the English department’s problems; William Henry Devereaux Jr. reminds him that this had been his own position. Jacob Rose grins that William Henry Devereaux Jr. has finally got his way. The exchange registers both a policy disagreement and a continuing familiarity with each other’s positions: the point can be made as a joke because neither needs to pretend that the disagreement is new.

Their friendship also intersects with the chair search. Finny asks Jacob Rose for a procedural ruling that would keep William Henry Devereaux Jr. from conducting on-campus interviews, arguing that he had opposed an outside search and should not control it. Jacob Rose grants the request, while noting that there will be no on-campus interviews anyway. His decision lets Finny feel that he has prevailed without making the procedure consequential in the way Finny hopes. Jacob Rose’s account is candid about both the formal ruling and its limited practical effect; he discusses the matter with William Henry Devereaux Jr. as a friend who can understand the maneuver as well as the policy.

Questions of resources sharpen their banter into an argument. Jacob Rose says he cannot promise money that has not been appropriated and points out that the uncertainty recurs every year. William Henry Devereaux Jr. objects that familiarity with the routine does not make it a good one, and presses Jacob Rose to make an issue of it. He says that, with department stationery, he could make promises for which Jacob Rose would be responsible, even threatening to hire people and promise raises if Jacob Rose provokes him. Jacob Rose answers that this would be his last official act. The joke is pointed because it rests on a real constraint: departmental commitments depend on funding Jacob Rose cannot guarantee. Their friendship makes room for William Henry Devereaux Jr.’s moral pressure, but does not erase the administrative limits Jacob Rose describes.

Trust, Teasing, and the Possibility of Advancement

William Henry Devereaux Jr. tests what Jacob Rose knows by raising rumors and asking, hypothetically, whether an academic dean would share information with an old friend. Jacob Rose does not react to the initial trial balloon; he remarks instead that rumors are a staple of academic life. The scene presents their closeness as an invitation to candor, not a guarantee of disclosure. William Henry Devereaux Jr. can probe, but must still read Jacob Rose’s silences and decide what they mean.

Their teasing can turn personal without dissolving the underlying affection. William Henry Devereaux Jr. invokes Jacob Rose’s long-ended marriage to Jane, and Jacob Rose replies with an insult. Later, when William Henry Devereaux Jr. guesses that Jacob Rose may be offered another job, Jacob Rose responds by putting a finger to his lips. He says that, if he gets it, he will take William Henry Devereaux Jr. with him. The offer remains conditional, but it makes their friendship legible as more than shared history: Jacob Rose imagines carrying the association into a new professional setting. William Henry Devereaux Jr. declines, saying that he is having too much fun where he is.

Before leaving town, Jacob Rose tells William Henry Devereaux Jr. that he is in charge and advises him not to do anything. The instruction combines a temporary delegation of responsibility with a familiar warning against his friend’s impulses. Their last exchange in the scene is rendered as physical comedy: at the railway crossing, Jacob Rose drives beneath the descending barriers, and the passing freight train separates them after he gives William Henry Devereaux Jr. the finger. The gesture sustains the friendship’s irreverent register even as the train briefly makes separation literal.

Changing Roles and Institutional Consequences

The friendship later sits within a larger struggle over university labor and budgets. During an appeal for support for the faculty union, Herbert Schonberg tells William Henry Devereaux Jr. that the English department has more votes than any other department and could serve as a rallying force. He also says that faculty members who have rarely aligned with Paul Rourke and Finny have already done so. This is not evidence that Jacob Rose has joined a faction against his friend; rather, it shows the increasingly political environment in which William Henry Devereaux Jr.’s friendships and departmental loyalties are being interpreted. Neutrality itself is presented as risky, even as the evidence leaves Jacob Rose’s position in that appeal unstated.

By the later university crisis, Jacob Rose has become chief executive officer. After Dickie Pope is fired and the faculty learns that Jacob Rose will take the position, the faculty votes overwhelmingly against a strike, rejecting the union’s recommendation. The account links the change in leadership to a decisive institutional outcome, though it does not report a private conversation between the two friends about the vote. Their relationship therefore acquires a new asymmetry: the man once sharing ball games and denied tenure with William Henry Devereaux Jr. now occupies the university’s top executive role.

That shift gives the friendship its distinctive tension. Its history permits familiarity, teasing, and direct challenges over appropriations; it also places an old friend inside an administration whose decisions affect the department. The available scenes do not resolve that tension into either unqualified loyalty or a permanent breach. Instead, they show friendship persisting through procedural disputes, withheld information, resource constraints, and changed rank—close enough to make disagreement frank, but not powerful enough to make institutional conflict disappear.