I
Thornton lowered his voice. “You see, dearest, it’s been a sea-change since you abandoned the humanities and went off to that professional school. You wouldn’t believe the committees the chancellor puts me on! Of course my lips are sealed. Sealed, sealed, sealed. Ask no more, Peter. Don’t even try!”
“Thornton, this is not going to be your wicked and droll, is it?” Peter said.
“Moi? Everything I’m about to say is entirely fair Though not everything made it into my final report to the chancellor,” added Thornton.
II
“I have to start with the background. One of the first things the new chancellor did was to establish the All Campus Organizing Council. All-COC, which I regret to say it is not, has many mandates, but you need only know it fosters all manner of taskforces. I chaired what is called the interdisciplinary team, of whose acronym I also need say no more. It was milked for an interdisciplinary seminar in that department, a cross-disciplinary conference in another department, a trans-disciplinary workshop off campus.
“Now, from time to time it was my sore duty to attend the events we sponsor. Some did betray a whisper of humor, but most devolved into a discussion about ethics–you just know a field is going nowhere, when the only thing they end up discussing is ethics!
“Well, here I am at a seminar in the College of Agriculture, Resources and the Environment. That’s CARE to you. Peter, dear, you must remember it? CARE has produced the stay-soft (all-mush) peach, the BetterLife™ (Bet-her-life!) household insect sprays, and the workerless irrigation technologies (or WITless to its critics). If you believe the reports, a dollar of its research leads to a $2.50 return in agricultural productivity, blah blah market share blah blah.
“What this research actually means, of course, is the immiseration of farmworkers, the erasure of the family farm, and the concentration of productive wealth into multinationals. Yes, yes, the litany. However, small blessings being what they are, the press sniffed some of what was going on, the mediaship went into its brownian motion, the legislature rumbled, a court case was settled out of court, and, lo, CARE found itself more caring.
“One consequence was my team was asked to come through the front-door and sponsor the Dean’s Seminar Series, ‘What are natural resources?’ The idea was a simple one, as you might expect. Whatever, I find myself at a seminar titled ‘What are natural resources? The perspective of a humane biotechnologist.” No joke; the boredom was palpable. Four people in the room. Finally, I asked the most perfectly obvious question, absolutely no malice intended Peter, so I put forward, with the obligatory outsider preamble of not being a scientist, “What about agricultural biotechnology is natural?” I mean, it is thelr title! So the presenter looks at me, pauses for that longest moment, and says: “But, what’s more natural than a gene!”
“Well, let me tell you Peter you needn’t be a slave to history for one’s eyes to widen, I am feeling very good about myself these days, and just when I’m thinking about having myself cloned, these Mengeles-in-waiting are talking as if they’re ready to take away the very molecules that make me interesting. Well, I mean, really. I knew then these people needed watching.
III
“So, when out of nowhere, the chancellor asks me to chair the very hush-hush committee on the scandals involving the CARE’s new dean, I accepted with alacrity.
I now must introduce the College’s dean to you, Dean Trumplethinskin. You may have met him when you were there, Peter. He was just a senior faculty member then, one of those kinds of business school types you’re supposed to get used to. He has always had a deplorable reputation for being abrasive in social gatherings and lacking skills for polite company. ‘Grab ‘em by the pussy’ he’d say by way of motivating people.”
Peter snapped his fingers. “Of course! My God, not the Trumplethinskin?’ Thornton nodded grimly, adding for good measure: “He’s at a colleague’s party, she hands him his drink, he barely sips, his face goes sour, she asks what’s wrong, he says, ‘This drink is like screwing in a canoe–fuckin near water,’ and then turns away.”
Thornton continued, “Trumplethinskin was recruited to our campus’s league of nations as the first incumbent of the Walter P. Grapefruit Chair in Anti-Communist Political Economy. It turns out he also arrives just as the start of the CARE’s reorganization wars. The old dean tried to create a Department of Social Studies by merging the College’s Department of Agricultural Economics with College units on park and nutritional sociology. It was Trumplethinskin’s abrasiveness that saved their day. ‘You can’t do that!,’ he shouted. ‘They’re economists, for Christ’s sake, not social scientists! When was the last time any of them were published in Mathematica?’
“The reorganization wars left a bad taste. Trumplethinskin’s predecessor fast became the most reviled man in CARE. Muffled screams for ‘evolution, not revolution’ were heard. Faculty meetings would find social scientists hectoring insecticide faculty, ‘Well, at least our research doesn’t kill farmworkers.’ CARE was not a happy place. The old dean retreated to his office. He retired. ‘I leave for the best job in the world,’ he said at his going-away party: ‘I’m going to be a former dean!’
“During all this Trumplethinskin relished less and less the eyrie of his departmental chair. He had reached a stage where it was time to move on, do something to make more money, not more articles on the role of hotel schools in agriculture. What better, then, than the deanship?
IV
“The search for the new dean was speedy. The other candidates were a cultural historian, whose book, The Social Construction of Nature, was well-received by her two colleagues; a bioengineer, who didn’t own a biotech company and thus had no respect among his peers; and a well-known political scientist who always thought it best to conclude, rather than start, his publications with some variant of ‘We’re still not asking the right questions. . .’ Frankly Trumplethinskin could have crowned himself dean.
“The new Dean’s first task was to take ‘reorganization’ to new depths. He drove though the privatization of the CARE’s agricultural extension service into an online digital platform, weCARE2.edu. He hired a consultant from his own outside firm who recommends that, yes the new Department of Life Sciences should remain, but should be decentralized into autonomous divisions that ‘more matched the unique distribution of faculty expertise, core competencies and disciplinary fields,’ namely, the original private sector focus on insecticides, agricultural technology, industrial forestry, and farm management.
This de=reorganization is then implemented, which meant–of course!–the Dean’s office had also to become a profit center. Which–of course!–made Trumplethinskin far too reckless. Which in turn led to the scandals I ended up investigating. . .”
Thornton paused, took another sip, and actually looked forward to what came next.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 