Teller’s Tale

Teller, simply, didn’t know what to do.

His life, it seemed, was at an impasse. Any way he turned seemed to be a dead end. Most days, he felt as if he were living a work of fiction: more specifically, as a character in a tepid novel written with little sense of direction or plot. Certainly, the ridiculous nature of his existence couldn’t be real. How, he often asked himself, could this possibly be my life?

Teller identified a lot with the character of Harold Crick in the recent movie Stranger Than Fiction: a person whose moments in life, the significant and mundane ones, were all but indistinguishable. Teller existed, in recent times, within a narrow range of experience from neutral to negative. If this were an actual life he was engaged in, surely it belonged to someone else.

Surely it must.

Because: here he was, this year, at Cascadia College, located in a little town in southern Cascadia. How did this happen? It was absurd, really. Yes, everything about his existence at this point was absurd. That plainly was the word for it.

Even the name of the college, Cascadia, was just too weird. This was what the campus in Bernard Malamud’s 1961 novel, A New Life, was called. In that story, a professor (Samuel Levin, steeped in the liberal arts) finds himself teaching at the fictional Cascadia, an agricultural college with traditions much different than he was accustomed to. Struggling to overcome past adversities, Levin relocates and takes the teaching job in a far-off place in an attempt to start his life over. It is a place so foreign, however, that Levin finds he must have been attracted to a mirage. His struggles, not unpredictably, continue on. You can run, as they say, but you cannot hide.

So, here he, Teller, was. He was trying mightily, after a couple of job losses, to put his life in order. Unlike Levin, though, he was not a teacher (any longer). He was now an academic administrator, and held the position of Dean of Faculty at the real-life Cascadia College. A small campus in an isolated, rural setting. A place so entirely different that his past experiences had ill-prepared him for what he found. Teller had earned his doctorate at a big-time Big Ten campus of over 35,000 students. And now, here he was, attempting to function in a place where the entire little city barely scratched the 20,000 mark, with no diversity to speak of at all. This was not a college town. The place felt stiflingly-small and claustrophobic. And amazingly conservative.

Further, the college was in a condition that he had not really appreciated.

From the start, he found his administrative peers friendly enough people. They weren’t really bad folks. But, too, Teller wasn’t sure they were the right ones to actually run a college. Teller found he did not fit so well with them. So he spent as much time as he could amongst his “own kind” … i.e., the faculty. Teller’s span of control was fairly wide-reaching on campus; he lived with the humanities folks (that’s where his office was located), but was in charge of all the liberal arts and sciences. These people were the ones who not only intellectually engaged him, but also shared their stories and lives with him.

Sure, Teller found that there were some good aspects to all that sharing. He was, after all, able to talk with them about a wide range of topics: reactions and replication; reading and reasoning; rocks and rhymes; language and logic; peace, prose and philosophy; equations and equality; literature and liberals; Iraq and irony; politics and pooh-bahs. But mostly what everyone talked about (at least with Teller) was how to cope: namely, how to manage their lives given the massive number of changes the college had undergone in the last few years, including several presidents, leadership styles, and unclear expectations.

The net effect of all that change, Teller discovered, was that most everyone was off-center most all the time. And there was little trust, might say none, between the faculty and administration. Teller, of course, as the Dean, lived his professional life at the intersection of faculty and administration and their issues. So, if the conflict on campus were the Gunfight at the OK Corral, then Teller was in the crossfire. It didn’t take long before he found himself gravely wounded.

Totally dismayed at the current state of the campus, and while expending inordinate amounts of energy to keep from being injured any further, Teller concluded that there simply was no way to live in between these two warring groups. Although he believed himself to be the consummate diplomat, none of the gunslingers involved in this fight seemed to be much interested in letting their weapons cool and engage in team- or trust-building.

Teller, simply, didn’t know what to do.