I am not an elderly man. I am rather in the full flower of my academic career as an administrator of a public high school in one of Chicago's most prestigious suburbs. Indeed, my school has not gone unnoticed by a commission chaired by the First Lady of the United States. And in the days of which I shall come to speak, the name of the Hillthwart Community High School was included in that fragrant bouquet of elite North Shore schools, among which number the First Lady's alma mater. The nature of my vocation over the last twenty-five years has brought me into professional contact with a class of persons not heretofore celebrated in the annals of education. I mean the high-school disciplinary deans, who as a class of men and women offer some interesting studies in idiosyncrasies and ideologies that would make pedagogues of whatever ilk radiate a sympathetic resonance. But one of these gentle persons stands out from the rest for the singularity of his peculiarities, never mind the others whose lives are an open book. I speak of Mason the Dean, about whom the story herein related is the sum and total of what is known of that man, astonishing as that may seem in an age of background checks and full disclosure; all except for a vague rumor, which shall appear in its proper time and place.

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       Before painting for you a portrait of Dean Mason, as it were, from life, it is fitting that I describe myself, my colleagues, my ambient surroundings, my responsibilities, and my philosophical underpinnings, because a grasp of the milieu into which Mason was inserted is necessary to a grasp of the man himself. My motto is and always has been, “Live and let live,” or as the French say, “Laissez faire.” Shortly after embarking on my career at Hillthwart High School a quarter century prior to these events, I found myself elevated to the post of Associate Principal for Student Services, in which capacity I outlasted three principals and four superintendents. My immediate domain included two rooms squeezed between the nurse's office and the cashier's office: an outer room staffed by my secretary, a matron of considerable years and experience, who answers my telephone, keeps the keys to the building locked in a safe beside her desk, greets anyone who happens to wander in, and replaces the five-gallon bottle of water atop the water cooler when necessary, a skill I have never mastered, as my efforts are always attended by considerable slop and spillage; and an inner room furnished with my desk and chair, a single filing cabinet, and usually a box of donuts next to the coffee pot, which rests on top of the bookcase where I keep a number of volumes both philosophical and practical. Under my supervision are (1) the Director of Student Activities, a person whose responsibilities are keeping the deposits of clubs and organizations, filling the vending machines, and operating a fund which serves a number of purposes and keeps the machinery of student governance oiled, and for which the word slush is an ugly but useful appellative; and (2) the disciplinary deans, about whom I shall speak at length. In addition, I have the personal responsibility to prepare, in the springtime of the year, the master schedule, giving rooms to teachers, teachers to subjects, students to rooms.

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      Far at the other end of the school, at the end of a balcony overlooking a light-starved atrium, a sign hanging from the ceiling tiles proclaims THE OFFICE OF THE DEANS. At the time Mason appeared on the scene, I had only two deans and a secretary in my employ: first, Dean Prozac; second, Dean Winwin; and third, their shared secretary, Ten-Four. These names may strike you as weird. Each is in fact a nickname, chosen to express some facet of its owner's character. Dean Prozac was a woman of moderate years. During periods of relative quiescence in the student body, Prozac was the most organized and nonbelligerent of officers. The students over whom she held sway knew her to be stern but fair-minded, if overworked. She routinely commuted after-school detentions to lunchroom detentions, to be served during the school day rather than at times when most of the students who received them were working as clerks, baggers, stock boys, or receptionists at tanning spas, grocery or hardware stores, and fast-food emporiums about town. She was not above hugging distraught students with one arm, a shoulder grip parallel to the student, which seemed to say, "Go now, and be good.” She greeted colleagues in the hall with a wave and a smile as her short legs shot her across the path of oncoming student traffic, here into the Guidance Department, there into Officer Schmooz's office, now coming, now going, always on the move.

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       It was during periods of student unrest that the nature and character of Prozac were radically altered. During these periods, progress reports issued from Prozac's desk decrying the decline of the student body and proclaiming a state of siege. To read them, one would think that Hillthwart's students were the dregs of the inner city:

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Attention, teachers! The number of students we see every day has doubled every year since we started keeping records. Gang activity, gang signs, and gang dress are on the rise. The search for concealed weapons marches on!

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       Understand that these missives went out to an audience which was not wholly in disagreement with their warp and weave, though in truth our students save for a handful, perhaps twenty-five hard-core bad guys, by whom I mean those who spit tobacco juice in the halls, cut classes to take a walk on the roof of the school, or engage in sex in deserted hallways, are puppy dogs of the first order. But teachers and deans being what they are – a cross section of the public – they share a cross section of the public's perception of youth. The perceived threats are usually of the sartorial variety. That is to say, outerwear. The wearing of threatening outerwear is the single most offended-against rule at Hillthwart High. Indeed, Prozac once chaired the Garments Committee, which after outlawing outerwear begat the Borderline Garments Committee, whose charge was to define what was outerwear and what was not outerwear, and to devise punishments severe enough to discourage outerwear. Hooded sweatshirts were first banned, but when the wrestling team complained that they then could not wear their hooded sweats in school, the ban was amended to include only hooded sweatshirts with the hood up. A fine distinction, to be sure, as the ban on outerwear had been in response to the perception that students were bringing guns and knives into the school concealed in their clothes. The efforts of the Borderline Garment Committee did not cease until a frenetic field trip to a local mall, where Prozac, like a tour guide whisking through Europe in ten days, invaded every apparel shop, tried on every category of outerwear or suspected outerwear, and egged the committee into issuing its final report, a sartorial balance sheet, in twelve pages, which was duplicated and sent to each faculty member on blood red paper, the same rather expensive paper which Nurse LaFever uses at the beginning of each year for her vibrant "Blood-borne Pathogens” memo, which is always accompanied by a pair of plastic gloves of the kind used by doctors for pelvic and rectal examinations.

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       Not only in her dealings with teachers does Prozac go overboard from the educational tour boat. Her dealings with students are marked by some indiscreet slippage. It came to my attention one time that she had collared a boy who had sworn at a teacher—a clear-cut case of insubordination, the second-most-often violated rule, and a blanket infraction covering everything from elevating the middle finger to refusing to show a teacher a student identification card on demand. Prozac sat him in a chair and bent close to his face, close enough for him to feel her hot breath on his cheek. Her exact words were “Do you believe in Jesus? If you believed in Jesus and went to church, you wouldn't be getting into trouble all the time. Jesus, boy, Jesus is the answer!” The boy, unfortunately, was an atheist, and said so in rather uncompromising terms. I entered the case when his parents appealed the three-day suspension which Prozac had thrown at him, along with a thick book of infractions going back to his days as a freshman. I stepped into her office one day after school and said, “Prozac, we can't go about trying to convert them to Christianity.”

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       “How else are we going to beat the hell out of Satan?” was her reply. I decided to wait a few days until the storm subsided, but as my motto is “Live and let live,” the incident found its way to my back burner, where it simmered until one day it totally evaporated.

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       Winwin is a different case altogether. Winwin's philosophy is that everyone is a winner, no one a loser. Whenever a case of insubordination comes before Winwin, he calls in both student and teacher, sits them side by side in the uncomfortable office chairs opposite his desk, and says, “I don't know how you feel about this, but I feel that no one who comes into my office leaves a loser. You're both winners, and I want you to feel good about yourselves. Now, what exactly is the problem, Billy?”

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Student: “I used inappropriate language, Mr. Winwin."

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Teacher: “He called me a fucking son of a bitch.”

 

       Winwin: “Is that true, Billy? Well, how can we all be winners here? Billy, will you apologize to your teacher?”

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Student: “I guess.”

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       Winwin: “And Mr. Sorego, do you think maybe you overreacted in not taking into account Billy's home situation, his difficult childhood, and the fact that his high median income means that he is economically enhanced but culturally deprived?”

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Teacher: “No, I, well...”

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       Then Winwin will pull out his ruler and his pad of paper and draw a straight line across the pad, and begin writing on the line in a slow hand, each loop perfect. No one has ever seen the notes he writes. But the struggle to make a straight line and to labor over each letter is remarked upon by all witnesses. Watching it is excruciating. I have had to sit through it myself. One begins to think of the pain and suffering this man has endured, and of the difficulties faced by the learning impaired. Then he says, “When I was in Vietnam, I knew a lot of boys like Billy. Most of them didn't make it back. And those who did can't walk or can't talk or can't paddle a canoe. But they were all good kids.” And so it goes, on and on and on, until both parties are exhausted and concede to themselves, and then, reluctantly, to each other, that they cannot, in fact, win. The offshoot of all this is that Winwin's students never suffer any consequences for their behavior. Legion are the teacher complaints that I have fielded in Winwin's accommodations. But as I say, confronting the man is problematic, to say the least. One cannot simply say, “You have made a mistake, Winwin.” He won't let you. He starts talking about how all of us need to be a winner. And so it goes.

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       Third and last of all is Ten-Four. She is a woman of middling years; a secretary, but more than that. Ten-Four mans the radios which connect the Deans' Office to the troops in the field, the paraprofessionals, who are always looking for someone who has broken a rule. Indeed, one suspects that they are paid for piecework. The parapros exist to humiliate and harass the student body, to provoke them into unwise angry responses, to escort them to the scaffold, and to oversee the placement of the nails, the thrust of the spear, and the vinegar cocktail. Ten-Four has seen it all and done it all. She spends her days at the radio and the keyboard, turning the day's events into disciplinary reports, adjudications, and orders. At midday, she goes out to lunch and brings back for the deans a meal of Fatburgers from Fatty's, the fast-food emporium.

Now, the increase in enrollment and concurrent growth in delinquency which we experienced starting several years ago warranted an expansion of my office, specifically the hiring of a third dean to take up the excess. The opening was posted at the beginning of the year, when funding for the position was belatedly passed by a tax-revolt-wary Board of Education, and within a few days Mason appeared at my door, ramrod straight, firm-jawed, and clad in a Hillthwart wrestling sweatshirt (hood down) and sweatpants, looking for all the world like the coach that he was, and had been for his two years on the faculty.

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       After a brief interview, I put him at the top of my list, and after questioning the requisite “other” candidates who had indicated interest in the position, just to maintain the appearance of competition for the post which state law mandates, I engaged him. Immediately the position of wrestling coach opened up, and I braved the fierce glances of the chairman of the Physical Education Department, himself a colossus in short pants, for several weeks thereafter. I was glad to have among my stable of deans a man of so much authority in his bearing and his being, a man who I hoped would bring to the Deans' Office a firm hand in control, which might mitigate the evils begat by the seasonal whimsicality of Prozac and the soft hand of Winwin.

 

       I should have stated before that I had found money in the building fund the preceding summer to add a third office to the deans' suite by knocking out a wall and appropriating part of an English classroom, over the objections of the English Department chairman, who saw the reasonableness of the move only after I suggested that he transfer his own office into the abbreviated classroom, thus enlarging his own workspace in the process. Now, when one entered the Deans' Office from the dreary atrium balcony, one found oneself face to face with Ten-Four at her desk, her word processor ever radiating a blue light, her walkie-talkie crackling and spouting. She sat at the end of a short foyer or waiting room. The wall behind her was filled with cabinets where the forms and blank student passes were locked each night. To her flanks, the walls of the waiting room were intersected by the deans' doors, and each individual dean's office possessed a plate-glass interior window through which the deans could, by opening their window blinds, look out at the waiting miscreants and the miscreants could look in upon the human form of justice.

 

       On the left, by the entrance, was Winwin's office. His door was always open, and he could be seen through the slats of his Venetian blinds bending over a yellow pad of paper, his ruler in one hand and pen in the other, working unhurriedly, with light from outside filtering in over his left shoulder. On the right by the door was Prozac's closed chamber, into which one looked as into an aquarium where one might see her pacing back and forth with quick turns like an exotic fish, or resting uneasily with her feet up and crossed at the ankles, hands folded in prayer-like meditation, lit from above by a sometimes-blinking bank of fluorescent lights. Beyond Prozac's window was a wall of building blocks from floor to ceiling, and seven chairs all in a row where the students who had been collared by the parapros sat waiting to be summoned to judgment. And opposite the chairs, in the back corner, one looked into the office assigned to Dean Mason: a southern exposure, light, airy, painted a bright new yellow, with an exterior window looking out upon the peaceful suburban green which surrounds Hillthwart High School. From this vantage he might contemplate the lonely arc of a Frisbee on a spring afternoon or, looking down, monitor an intimate circle of vaguely menacing hacky-sackers, or peruse a peculiar congregation of inland seagulls and land roaming Canadian geese spread over the grassy lot, devouring the remains of lunch discarded by our well-socialized, happy students.

 

       At first, Mason held an extraordinary number of conferences with students who were called to his office for minor offenses, assigning Saturday detentions (Saturdays being a prerogative of the deans alone, for if teachers were allowed the power to assign Saturdays, the detention room would be crowded to overflowing and I would have to increase the Saturday staff). Saturdays were routinely given to offenders of the dress code, smoking violators, and the grossly insubordinate. He quickly grew familiar with all of the offenders in his third of the alphabet, filled a filing cabinet with dossiers on them, called their parents, and dealt with them firmly and fairly. He never backed down from a confrontation with a student, always supported the faculty, and made the parapros feel a little less like the minor demons of Hell that they are, and a little more like cherubim and seraphim and winged minions of the Lord. He always ate his lunch in his office, and frequently his dinner and breakfast, as he habitually was the first to arrive in the building, when the custodian opened the door, and the last to leave. As we walked to our cars, we could observe Mason working alone in his second-floor window, where the light shone like a beacon in the darkness of a winter evening.

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       On occasion, it is my responsibility to review a judgment made by my staff against a student when the parents raise objections to the disciplinary measures taken. I am the last resort before the lawyers grapple the school board. In such cases where, against my natural grain and tendency to leave well enough alone, I was called in to mediate a dispute between parents and deans, it had been my habit to confer privately with the dean in question, to get his or her side of the story before proceeding, to sound him or her out and gain some impression of where we might compromise and where we might stand firm. It was in the third week, I think, of Mason's service that I received a request from the parents of a boy who had been apprehended hiding in the cafeteria to avoid his physical education class, an offense which warranted a Saturday detention at most, and that only for a repeat offender such as the boy was. Mason had issued the student a three-day suspension from school, an overly sensitive reaction which I ascribed to Mason's previous association with the Physical Education Department and to his zeal to show that he was made of as tough a stuff as we all intuited him to be. I thought it might be a simple matter to speak to him in conciliatory terms and persuade him to commute the sentence to a simple full-Saturday detention, with all the boredom and time to think about the sin of repeated non-dress for P.E. and cutting class which attends four hours spent sitting in a dreary and silent cafeteria on a Saturday morning.

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       In this very frame of mind I did broach the subject with Mason in his office, he seated in his leather chair behind the spreading desk and I in a simple steel office chair reserved for the accused on the less imposing side of the desk. I rapidly sketched that perhaps, since the student's parents had called me and requested a meeting, I ought to be prepared to concede a point or two because it appeared that the boy had only committed a level-two offense, while suspensions were strictly reserved for level-five offenses, such as excessive display of pyrotechnics, third-time destruction of school property, and threats of violence to faculty or staff. After all, I said in a jocular reference to a past event, it's not like he brought roadkill into the halls. I was met by a wall of silence, and, thinking that I had perhaps stated the case in terms too strongly chiding, I urged Mason to show an excess of grace. Imagine my surprise when Mason, in a tone clear and commanding, replied, “I'll handle it my way.”

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       Stunned, I thought that perhaps an appeal to Mason's generosity of spirit had been misunderstood as a weakness on my part, rather than a thoughtfully considered policy decision. I said, “Mason, can't we go easy on the boy this time, if for nothing else, to avoid a row with the lawyers?”

 

       But in the clearest tone possible, he reiterated, “I'll handle it my way.”

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       “Handle it your way!” I retorted. “Mason, do you understand that we may have a lawsuit against the school pending here? I want you to do the right thing. A three-day suspension is an inappropriate punishment,” I concluded, rising to my feet.

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      “I'll handle it my way,” he said.

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       I tried to stare him down. His eyes were cold and blue, and his jaw jutted forward at an uncomfortable-looking angle as he slowly ground his teeth. Not a ripple of human understanding disturbed his countenance. I might as well have been talking to a Hindu god of extinction. I should have overridden him on the spot. But we live in disordered times. Beset by an anxious faculty, a self-aggrandizing principal, an internet-addicted community, and a school board of hinds up for re-election by wolves, I was clearly out on a limb in suggesting leniency for the student. The boy might as well have been selling crack cocaine as sitting out P.E. in the cafeteria. Had I detected the slightest hint of humane sentiment in Mason...but there was no shred of human kindness I could seize upon. As I had several other appointments that day, I let the matter rest. When I did meet with the parents, I persuaded them that suspension was in the boy's best interest and that three days at home would make him consider his truant behavior. I also promised that he would no longer have to shower with the boys, which it seems was his central complaint. Fortunately, the parents turned out to be as reasonable as the boy was shy, and the crisis, like a dark cloud, evaporated as quietly as it had condensed.

 

       A few days after this incident, I received a call from a member of the English Department whose members are, I must say in passing, as motley a collection of malcontents as ever convened, who stated that Mason had issued three-day suspensions to four of his students for stealing a walkie-talkie from one of the parapros. It seems the teacher had a casual relationship with his students, several of whom confided in him that they had a bet, or a sort of contest, to see who could be the first to steal a parapro's radio. By ill luck, at the moment the four boys and the teacher were enjoying the humor of the prank and listening to the paraprofessional staff’s enraged buzzing, Mason appeared at the classroom door. He strode into the room, picked up the radio, and barked out, “You, you, you, and you, come with me.” When the English teacher learned they had been suspended, he appealed to Mason, but receiving, he said, only a cold stare, he came to me pleading that the boys had only committed a practical joke. When I entered the Deans' Office, a congregation of parapros hovered around Ten-Four's desk.

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“Disgusting.”

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“What they need is discipline.”

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“It's not like the eighties.”

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“No respect.”

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“Where are their parents?”

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“I'm afraid to walk to my car at night.”

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“You're not safe in the halls anymore.”

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       These and similar statements issued from the small circle, but Mason, standing a head above the rest, remained silent.

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“Mason, I must talk to you,” I said.

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“What do you want?”

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       “These boys who stole the radio,” I said, “couldn't we treat this as a bad practical joke? I don't see that the boys should be suspended.”

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       Mason folded his arms and said, “I'll handle it my way,” then he turned and stepped into his office and shut the door, while the parapros, infused with new blood occasioned by my rebuff, charged off to their posts.

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       For a moment I was taken aback, all air gone out of my sails, and I stood staring after Mason. Then I marshaled my strength, opened his door, entered, and demanded a reason for his retributive conduct.

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“Why are you so set upon suspending them?”

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“I’ll handle it my way.”

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       Had it been any other dean, I would have overridden his ruling at once. But there was something about Mason that overmastered me completely in the wonderful way that the exercise of arbitrary power has of gaining acquiescence from those, like myself, less inclined to engage on the level of a barroom brawl. I tried reasoning with him.

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       “Mason, the boys meant no harm, it was merely a practical joke, they are all honor students, and they intended to return the radio.” Then I added, perhaps feebly, “Can't you see their humor and creativity?”

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       “I'll handle it my way,” he replied flatly. It seemed he had not heard a word I said. He appeared to conceive of himself as final among the powers of the universe; like electricity, gravity, or inertia, only less scrutable.

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       “You have made up your mind, then, as you say, to 'handle it your way' against all appeals to your better nature?”

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       He gave me to understand that the students were, in his words, “dead meat” and might receive no sympathy from him. I turned around, shaken to my very foundation, and reached out for support from my other colleagues, who had been standing outside the door discreetly listening.

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       “Prozac,” I said, lapsing into the vernacular, “what do you think of all this? Should the boys not be cut some slack?”

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“With all due respect, I think they need moral re-education.”

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“Winwin," I said, “what is your opinion?”

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“These boys have stepped over the line drawn in the sand, sir. They're not winners; they're bad seed.”

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“Ten-Four,” I said, hoping against reason for a token of support, “what do you think?”

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“I'd expel them,” she said with a grin.

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       There was no way to reply to this unanimity of vindictive impulses. I retreated from the Deans' Office. “Well, live and let live,” I mumbled to myself as I passed above the atrium. But I did not put the situation entirely out of my mind. In the days that followed, I observed Mason all the more closely, dropping in at various hours, hoping to understand how he had wrought the conversion of the entire staff to intransigence. I noted that while Prozac and Winwin frequently left to talk to counselors and psychologists, Mason appeared to take no counsel but his own and seldom left his office. Three times a day, during her breaks, Ten-Four would cross his threshold and without saying a word, he would pass her a five-dollar bill. She then would proceed to Fatty's, which was only a block from school, and return each time to deposit on his desk a bag containing two Fatburgers and a box of long, springy, deep-fried potato coils. He seemed to live on Fatburgers. Yet he remained trim and fit and rock-like. Nor was ill digestion an impediment to his willpower. He remained unfazed by his diet and as firm as ever in his dealings with students.

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       Nothing so irritates a person of moderate temperament as a bully. If the person bullied be not lacking in human sympathy, and the bully by the very bravura and brashness of his bullying reveal himself to be one of those pitiable individuals whose personal hell is to look into the mirror and see not his own face but that of a distorted and blameless angel, then the former will tend to soften criticism of the latter by an act of charitable imagination. Thus I regarded Mason. Poor devil! He meant no evil harm by his brusque bullying. Perhaps he was bullied as a child by parents whose own demons were exacting revenge for wrongs committed by their parents, who had in turn been the victims of their parents, and so on back to the first bullying act outside the guarded gates of Eden in the middle of a primal night lit only by the flaming swords. Thus, I resolved to play the good and forgiving parent to Mason, patiently indulging his excesses and teaching by example that a moderation in temperament brings rewards which vengeance envies. Yet occasionally a different mood would seize me, and I would be tempted to antagonize him, to elicit from him a burst of anger, and then watch him spew and fume. It was a simple matter. One winter morning the impish impulse prevailed and the following scene ensued.

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       I arrived at Mason's door clad in a wrestling-team sweatshirt, one of the hooded variety, during the first period of the first day of winter that we really noticed the cold. As always, the ever balky heating plant, which is controlled by telephone line from a thousand miles away in Atlanta, Georgia, where it was sunny and seventy degrees, was uncooperative, and the offices and classrooms were frigid. “Hello, Mason,” I said. “The heat's not on in here, is it? Well, then, I'm glad I'm dressed for the weather.” And so saying, I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head and disappeared inside it. All present understood that while staff were not subject to the dress code, teachers and administrators were expected to set a good example for the student body. My good example did not go unnoticed by the students who occupied the chairs along the wall. One shivering girl gasped, and a young man who was rubbing his hands together burst out with a “Cool!” that was visible as white vapor.

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       Mason didn't move a muscle but stood in the cold in his white shirtsleeves, khaki pants, and black wing tips, as solid as if he had been turned into a pillar of stone. He said, “In this office, we all follow the dress code. Put down your hood.”

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       “How noble of you,” I said. “Do you also punish yourselves when you are insubordinate?” I was met by a silence so thick I could have buttered toast with it. “What do you say, Winwin,” I said to the also-shirtsleeved phantom who was standing in the doorway to his office. “What is the punishment for insubordination?”

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       “I try to resolve the situation so everybody comes out a winner.”

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       “And Prozac,” I said, turning around, “what do you do when a student steps out of line? Suspend him for three days?”

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 She folded her hands and bowed her head.

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       “What would you do, Mason, if you were confronted with a clear-cut case of insubordination?”

 

       “I'd handle it my way,” he said, standing ramrod straight with his hairy arms at his side and looking as though he routinely ate people like me for sustenance.

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       “Very well, Mason,” I said, intoning my voice as if to say that he had condemned himself by his own words. I half believed he had, and I was half ready to execute the sentence: immediate dismissal. But a sudden consciousness of the earliness of the hour invaded my soul and made me think of my donuts and fresh pot of coffee, which I had started brewing before being struck by the impulse to confront Mason. Anyway, it was not the time of the day to fire anyone. And so I thought it best to pull down my hood and walk to my office, though my whole body was vibrating with rage and confusion at his impudence. I may as well admit it. The offshoot of the confrontation was that a certain rigid dean named Mason came to dominate the Deans' Office and his colleagues in it, so that his hard line prevailed over the students. He could not be dissuaded from the harshest and most unfair of punishments. He paid scant attention to the student handbook and the carefully articulated hierarchy of infractions, that frail lattice upon which the whole framework of student discipline rests.

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       As the weeks passed, I became uncomfortably accommodated to Mason. His steadfast devotion to order, which overshadowed his routine bending of the law, gained him crowds of supporters among the faculty. I daresay he grew to be the most celebrated individual in the building. Even I had to respect him for having initiated tremendous changes. People outside the school community, the local police chief, the leader of the tax watchdog group, and the editor of the newspaper began speaking of the positive change that had been wrought by the crackdown on the student body. Mason won the favor of the principal, a man who played community opinion like an angel plays his harp, in harmony with the great choir. The principal ordered a survey to be taken of the faculty; 40 percent of the teachers completed the survey. Of that number, 55 percent stated that they wanted to close down the halls to student traffic. “A clear majority," the principal declared. And so, on a cold day in November, hall passes became a thing of the past, and the halls became deserted while classes were in session. I was given cause to reflect that people who feel that they cannot control their own lives compensate by trying to control the lives of others around them, even to the extent of controlling their bowel movements, for passes to the rest room were forbidden, and afflicted students were told to retain their grief. So Mason and the others, afflicted by an ever increasing number of ever more hostile student violators, compensated by cracking down in ever more areas of student life. Now and then, when parents complained or threatened a lawsuit, as they did when Mason suspended a student who had written a letter to the editor that the school paper printed, in which the student took the deans to task in unflattering terms, I would confront Mason with the necessity of easing up, relaxing his grip on the school. His invariable response, “I'll handle it my way,” became like a mantra to me, something to be counted upon. I could be infuriated by his closed-mindedness, but I also could admire his success, and he was so successful that he seemed to lift the entire building and carry it upon his broad shoulders like the chained Atlas carried the disk of the world.

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       Here it must be said that the certified staff, by which I mean the faculty, and the classified staff, that is to say the secretaries, parapros, lunch ladies, and custodians, had been working since the beginning of the school year without a contract, and negotiations had made little headway by the third week of November, when they broke down completely over the issue of reductions in force. Specifically, three parapros were slated for immediate dismissal and at least ten teachers were to be dropped at the end of the year either through early retirement or by issuing pink slips to all untenured staff and rehiring a smaller number. Mason was not alone in judging both measures to be unacceptably draconian. But no one was more hostile than he; even the officials of the teachers' union marked his militancy in defense of his assistants. He made his view widely known, that to reduce the number of parapros threatened to undo the mighty work of discipline he had wrought.

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       The responsibility for making the cuts in my staff fell, of course, on my shoulders. However, I thought it not inappropriate to solicit from my three deans a list of names of the parapros with whom it was felt we could most comfortably part. Each dean was to submit one name. If there were duplications, the deans were to settle the issue among themselves and then present me the final list, which I would use as a guide in making the dismissals. I thought this a completely reasonable course to pursue, and I prepared a memo for the deans in which I deplored the necessity for RIFing their assistants and requested their nominations by the end of the following week.

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       Three days later, strike votes were taken by both unions and passed with overwhelming majorities. So it was that on a cold Monday morning I happened to walk into a frigid and empty school building. Administrators were required to spend the day at work, though there was little to do but drink coffee and partake of the pastries the superintendent's office had provided on a table in the main hallway. It was at this table that I ran into Mason, pouring himself a cup of hot coffee while holding two glazed donuts.

 

       “Well, Mason,” I said, “nothing is as relaxing as a day without students, eh?”

​

       He replied somewhat nervously that he had business to attend to and hurried off in the direction of the Deans' Office. As the quotient of his hostility seemed to be lower than in recent days, I resolved to approach Mason later, after he had digested his meal, on his own ground. After all, despite his injured feelings, we were playing on the same team. Mason could not help but be a backbone to the administration in this cold war, where staff and administrators stared at each other across the picket line. In a strike situation, Mason's way seemed the best: remain unmoved in the face of intimidation. Later in the day, I found myself on the balcony overlooking the darkened atrium by the Deans' Office, and I thought the time right to discuss with Mason my proposal for making the cuts in classified staff that had become so necessary. When I tried the outer door, I discovered it was locked. Luckily, I had my master key with me. But when I opened the door, I found the waiting room dark except for the light burning in Mason's office, which dimly emanated from the far corner. Mason was nowhere to be seen. I called out his name but received no answer. I looked around anxiously. I meant no offense; I sought to gratify no meddling curiosity. But Mason's office in a sense was mine, and I was within my prerogatives as Associate Principal for Student Services in making observations of his work space that might cast some light on his rather strangely distracted behavior that morning. So I tried Mason's door and, finding it ajar, I entered.

​

       At first I saw nothing remarkable. His desk was neatly ordered and clean. His trash can was filled to the top with wrappers, bags, and boxes from Fatty's, for the custodians had not made a final sweep of the building before walking out on Friday. His walkie-talkie lay on his desk in inanimate silence. His In box was empty. His chair was firmly pushed up against the lip of the desk. But leaning sideways against the wall under the window that looked out upon the front lawn was a hand-lettered sign. I inclined my head and read: ON STRIKE: Reductions In Force Undermine Order and Discipline. I now recalled Mason's outspoken opposition to cuts in his support staff. I remembered that he had been a teacher at Hillthwart before he had been a dean. I remembered his angry denunciations of the school board for mismanaging tax revenues and failing to keep an orderly account of expenditures. I remembered his barely controlled fits of rage directed at me and at students and faculty who crossed him.

​

      Turning all of this in my thoughts, and combining with it my discovery of the sign, a warning light flashed on in my mind. My first feelings for Mason had been to give scope to his anger, to let his game play itself out; but as leniency turns to contempt if met with contempt, so my awareness grew that I had given Mason the rope with which to play, but he had contemptuously tied the knot and slipped it over his own head. It is a terrible thing to see that up to a certain point benevolent negligence allows the individual full play of his creative faculties, but if his bent be for destruction, his efforts, in time, take on a repulsive character, and benevolence becomes its opposite. This proceeds from a certain hopelessness that any individual can or will reform himself, a sad awareness that free will has its moral limitations. What I saw that morning convinced me that the dean suffered from a flaw in his moral being that could not be rectified. While I might treat his impulses with massive doses of indulgence, I could not cure the affliction of his soul.

While immersed in these ruminations, I heard a key rattling in the outer door. I quickly stepped out of Mason's office and waited while he opened the door, flipped on the light switch, and then glanced at me with a look of irritated surprise. We stood for a moment looking at each other with unspoken understanding.

The next moment came. “Mason,” I said, gently calling to him. No reply.

​

       “Mason,” I said in a still gentler tone, “it may be none of my business, but have you considered the consequences of your action? It appears to me that you have nothing to gain and everything to lose by joining the staff on strike.”

​

       Mason noiselessly strode past me and into his little office. I followed him to the threshold. “Will you just tell me, Mason, why? If it is the firing of three parapros and a handful of teachers that you object to, can you not find a safer way to express your disappointment?”

​

       “I will handle it my way,” he said, grinding his teeth audibly, then picked up his sign and brushed past me.

​

      I called after him, “Mason!” But he did not stop. I stepped to his window and in a moment saw him making his way toward the head of the driveway and the crowd of teachers who walked there carrying their signs. Soon Mason, too, was walking the picket line, surrounded by a group of glad faculty patting him on the back and smiling with him as they paced up and down in the cold.

​

       I recognized in my condemnation of Mason's protest a certain Old Testament quality, Thou shalt not take thy employer in vain, and Thou shalt have no other allegiances before me. But soon I reflected that a new and more secular covenant had replaced the old, and the first of its new commandments was, Thou shalt not abridge a man's freedom of speech. I beat down my anger at the dean and strove to interpret his insubordination as an expression of the kind of pluralism I held in the highest esteem. “Live and let live,” I sighed, as I reflected that Mason's defection meant nothing in the great scheme of things; he was still one of us and would return to the fold when it all blew over, if not sooner.

​

       I tried to keep busy that afternoon. When Prozac and Winwin returned from their late lunch, I dropped in on them in their office. I half believed I would find Mason there, like the others, busy at his desk. There was Prozac, cleaning her desk drawer, sorting into piles her paper clips, detention slips, pens and pencils. And Winwin was seated at his desk, carefully forming the letters of an unseen word. But Mason's door stood open, his office stood empty, and a strange stillness reigned therein. From his window I could see the man at the end of the driveway, a head taller than the others, carrying his sign like a rifle on his shoulder, salient while the other sign bearers slowly beat a circular orbit into the ground. As I stood watching, Winwin quietly slipped into the office.

​

       “Excuse me,” he said, “but I think I know how I would handle this situation. You need to sit down with Mason and find a way that he can feel he's a winner and you're a winner, too.”

​

       “Thank you, Winwin,” I said, “but I'm afraid I'll have to handle it...well, I'll just have to deal with it, that's all.” I had recently taken to using the word handle involuntarily in all kinds of situations. What other changes my association with Mason might have brought into my language and thought, I dared not guess. This linguistic anarchy only contributed further to my decision to take the necessary measure to restore my department to order.

​

       As Winwin, looking defeated, was leaving, Prozac approached. “I've been thinking,” she said, “that Dean Mason might benefit from some kind of therapy, or perhaps medication is what he needs. He's such an angry person, something isn't right inside. I just can't get a handle on him.”

​

 “So you've taken to using the word, too,” I said, rather exhilarated.

​

 “Word? What word?”

​

 I spoke the word.

​

       “Oh, I hardly ever use it. But as I was saying, perhaps the crisis could best be handled by putting him on medical leave?”

​

“Prozac,” I said, “leave me.”

​

       As she was departing, Winwin came to the door and inquired as to the handling of a case against a girl who had been caught smoking marijuana under her science lab table. He used the word without irony. It was evident that it had slipped out unconsciously. I thought, what a disagreeable fellow to have polluted our words, which are the outward signs by which we know one another and ourselves. It only strengthened my resolve that should Mason not experience a change of heart and come in off the picket line, he would surely have to depart. But as time wore on, Mason never so much as showed his face in the office, though his word was with us.

​

       Several days passed, during which I had time to pick up and browse Aristotle's Ethics, Augustine's City of God, and Aquinas's Summa Theologica, which had been sitting on the bookshelf in my office since my college days; for although I had majored in educational administration, I had minored in philosophy. These books, considering the circumstances, had a beneficent effect. It dawned on me that Mason was following a higher authority than that of the school board, namely his own inner voice, which Providence has given us to be our guide through mazes of choice. I resolved not to press the issue with Mason, not to fire him, but to let him have free play of all his sensibilities and sensitivities. I would not play the role of Pilate in his sacrifice. Let the winds of change blow him where they may, he would be maker of his own destiny.

​

       I believe I would have continued in this philosophical frame of mind had it not been for the hostile comments of fellow administrators. The Director of Student Activities, he of the slush fund, could not let pass a single opportunity to comment upon Mason's defection and my acquiescence to it. Various department chairpersons let it be known that they found it extremely difficult to look their teachers in the eye when Mason was marching with them, and they would regard me with wolfish desperation. Thus it is that persons who stand on principle are suddenly upended and reversed by the constant erosion of their ground by persons of illiberal temperament. To be sure, it was not strange that they should react so violently against one of their number siding with the enemy. But it was when a reporter for the local newspaper walked into my office one morning with his head cocked to one side and squintingly inquired with a jerk of his thumb if that were not Mason the Dean standing on the picket line like a statue of bronze, that I resolved that for the good of the school district, Mason must go.

​

       But how? What should I do? I asked myself as I zipped my parka up to my neck. Had he not wandered astray on my watch? I could not, after allowing him to go along in his own way for so long, suddenly take it upon myself to fire him for the logical continuation of my policies. I had brought him up from the faculty, but it was not upon my head to set him back down; that would be up to the school board, and I feared they were not in a mood to humor him. Now with the press in it, all hell would break loose. Accordingly, I took a walk out to the end of the driveway and drew Mason aside and told him: “I'd be looking for a new job if I were you, Mason. That fellow from the paper spotted you, and you'll be headline news tomorrow. If there is anything I can do for you...of course I will give you a good reference.”

​

       He did not answer me, and I left him, as there was nothing more for me to say.

​

       It took the school board only a week to act. After a fiery meeting full of recrimination and anger, Mason was given his pink slip. As he had ceased to be a member of the union when he assumed an administrative position, the union could do nothing for him, though its members complained loudly. A letter was mailed to his home; it contained his modest severance pay along with the notification that his services would no longer be required.

​

       Still, every day, Mason appeared on the picket line and marched with the teachers, whose brows were furrowed and frowning even more than before, though to the observer in the window looking out over the school yard, it appeared they were less animated, less talkative.

​

      Mason's finished, I said to myself, finished at last. Gradually my mind turned to other matters, primarily next year's master schedule, which would have to be completely redrawn. But one day as I came into my office I was met by the principal. His scarecrow form loomed above me and in his unnaturally deep and shaking voice he said, "Why is he still out there? You've got to get rid of him, do you understand? Got to!” He placed both hands on my shoulders and bore down.

​

       I recoiled in shock at the vehemence of his assault. I assured him that it was none of my doing that Mason was still on the picket line, that it was not my responsibility to do anything about it. Trespassing did not fall into my jurisdiction.

​

       “Then whose is it?” he thundered.

​

       “I think it's yours,” I said, adding, “but if you will give me a few moments with him, I will try to talk him into leaving peacefully.”

​

       Going outside to the crowd by the street, I braved the boos of several teachers and took Mason aside.

“Mason,” I said, “are you aware that you are making considerable trouble for me by persisting in remaining on school property and taking part in the strike after your dismissal?”

​

 He did not answer.

​

       “Something's got to give. Either you must reconcile yourself to a change in employment and leave at once, or the police will be called to escort you away. Now, have you made any applications elsewhere? Would you like to remain in education?”

​

“I'll handle it my way.”

​

       “Would you like to remain in administration or return to teaching? The latter would be by far the easier placement, considering your recent actions against the administration.”

​

      “I don't want to go back to teaching; I'm very particular about that.”

​

“Have you thought of becoming an educational consultant? There's a market for it.”

​

“Consulting would take me away from students.”

​

“Away from students! Can you honestly say you enjoy working with students?”

​

“I would not like to be a consultant.”

​

“What about publishing? Educational publishing?”

​

“Not just anything will do. As I said, I am very particular, and I'll handle it...”

​

“Or you could sell textbooks, make a few calls a week; textbooks sell themselves.”

​

       “I see your concern, but I'll handle it my way.”

​

       “Mason,” I cried, losing my composure, “if you don't find something else you're going to starve; that paycheck is not going to come in every two weeks. It's high time you were out looking for a job and not wasting your time on this line. If I leave here without you, Mason, the principal is going to call the police and have you removed.”

​

 “I'll handle it my way when it comes to that.”

​