Our leader

Bright as a little button, huge head perched on a wiry little girl’s body. Slightly wall-eyed. Unfailingly chipper. Can’t help but like her, want to pat her on the head.

But she is one of those kiwis enraptured with the intricacies of form. Utter indifference to substance; for her, the university is a dazzling maze of arcana, a series of secrets penetrable only by druids. To have a prosperous academic career means purely and simply to be initiated into the code. Success bears no relation to good deeds; hers is the fundamentalism of academic ideologies. One learns to decipher the kabbala, progressing through promotion not by doing promotable things but by reciting the magical words in the correct order – by getting the form filled out just so. But the catch is that one cannot know how to fill out the form. No one can know but the initiated, that is, those with access to the Faculty of Arts committees. Hence her reason for being. Whatever she suggests, we must needs follow, because only she among us knows how to utter the charms correctly. She possesses the magic. She crossed out all of my “second semester” and replaced them with “semester 2.” She diligently changed my lower case names of department (history department, politics department) to upper case. Not a single change of substance, not one. And yet my copy was black with her little changes.

Cute as a gamine. But look more closely and suddenly you realize that she is coiled up inside tight as an old fashioned alarms clock ready to snap and unwind, lightning fast, reverse reverse. If she started spinning she would never stop, but go careening into the ethersphere. She must control the crossing of every t, the dotting of every i that she touches; her hold on sanity depends upon it.

(Can you imagine her putting her feet up with a beer in her hands?)

She is the quintessential teachers’ pet, perky little brown-noser, the ultimate goody-goody, the administration’s little toady. She breathes utter submission, devotion, to her higher cause, the bright shining beacon of the Faculty of Arts. She worships at that altar. And therefore as a leader she is an embarrassment, one who cringes rather than advocates. A sad little quisling, a ludicrous little party member. She would be Hitler’s secretary, the Pope’s housekeeper, Cody Jarrett’s mother. Top of the world, Ma.