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scientists.)
    “As you know, Kate,” Frogmore went blissfully on, “the University, which used to be a collection of baronies, has got to start operating as a whole if it’s not to be part of the state system in ten years. There are certain changes we all agree on: it would take three million dollars to make our Dental School adequate; ten million to make it outstanding. Do we really need a Dental School? No, we do not. But, you see, restructuring is aconvenient excuse for carrying out long-planned hanky-panky. I take it you are familiar with Professor Jeremiah Cudlipp?” Kate, who knew a rhetorical question when she heard one, did not trouble either to nod or object. “He, of course, and his associate, Bob O’Toole, have decided that this time of restructuring is just the moment to bounce the University College off the campus altogether.”
    “Bounce it?”
    “Demolish it, phase it out, declare it null and void, give it the ax.”
    “But Cudlipp is only Chairman of the College English Department,” Kate said.
    “There is no ‘only’ about it, I’m afraid,” Castleman said. “For reasons we do not wholly understand, he is determined that the University College must go. It gives a bachelor’s degree that Cudlipp claims dilutes the prestige of the degree given by
The
College, as they so maddeningly call it. He has lots of other arguments. The point is, since he is in the English Department, we felt we needed someone in addition to Professor Cartier to help us in what is, I’m afraid, a fight for survival.”
    “The College feels,” Luther Hankster whispered, “like someone with valuable suburban property whose neighbor threatens to sell to a black.”
    “Does Bob O’Toole go along with this? I have always thought of him as a follower of Clemance.”
    “So he is,” Castleman said. “But, as perhaps you have noticed, he possesses arrogance and ambition in about equally large proportions, which puts him squarely on Cudlipp’s side.”
    “Where does Clemance stand?”
    “Oh,” McQuire said, “he’s with the College; always has been. He suggests, in his marvelously reasonable way, that we are simply not ‘excellent’ enough. Which is nonsense; we are the most excellent college for adults in the country.”
    “Have you had much to do with the College, Professor Fansler?” Herbert Klein asked.
    “Enough to know they are in danger of giving arrogance a bad name,” Kate lightly said.
    “Exactly,” Frogmore exclaimed, clapping his hands together. “Well put, Kate.”
    “O.K.,” Kate said. “You want someone from the English Department—which you gather, correctly, is fed up with Cudlipp’s throwing all that weight around.” She hoped Frogmore would consider that well put too.
    “And,” Castleman said, “we need general sort of help so that when the Administrative Council next meets they will confirm the future of the University College in no uncertain terms. Needless to say, Cudlipp will do all he can to prevent that.”
    “Right,” Kate said. “I see, or think I do. But why me? I don’t even like teaching undergraduates.”
    “You are more decorative than our other colleagues,” Cartier said.
    “We did a lot of research, Kate,” Frogmore said, “and we ran into very little flak when it came to you.” (My God, Kate thought, he
is
smart; smart enough to know the we-chose-you-for-your-womanly-charms bit wouldn’t work; good for him.) “From all sides we heard of your sympathy with students—your willingness, long before the roof fell in, to give them time. We also heard that you are opposed to the publish-or-perishracket, and to professors who have no time for anything but their own professional careers.”
    “All exaggerated, I assure you. I have no recent experience in undergraduate teaching and, to be brutally frank, not much desire for it. I like graduate students because they’re self-selected.” She winked at Bill McQuire.
    “Why do you dislike teaching