“Oh Prin, how good to see you upright and among the living and the gambling!” Fr. Pat said.
“You too, Father Pat. And thank you for that note you sent when I was in the hospital,” Prin said.
“But tell me, was it better than Sister Contra Melanchthon’s famous shortbread? I hear you got a tin!” Fr. Pat said.
The priest tittered, waiting for Prin either to join him or leave. This was also his basic approach to governing the university. Prin smiled but stayed put. He needed to know why Fr. Pat had tried to duck him. Was he going to be assigned to the Inter-Departmental Curriculum Review Committee, again?
“So how’s campus these days?” Prin asked.
“Never mind that! How are you feeling? How goes the recovery? Good enough to gamble, I see!” Fr. Pat said.
“My Dad brought me with him. Actually, we were at the shrine earlier,” Prin said.
“I thought I saw your beautiful family there!” Fr. Pat said.
But then the priest’s toothy smile vanished. He dropped down to tie his other shoe. He was down there a long time. Prin finally dropped down to one knee as well.
Fr. Pat was wearing Velcro!
“Father Pat, is there something happening on campus? Can I help?” Prin asked.
“I’m afraid we all need to help, Prin. We all need some help,” he said.
Now, instead of tittering, he squinted his eyes and nodded slowly.
“Sorry, Father Pat, but could you be a little more specific?” Prin asked.
“I see. So you haven’t been reading my Metaphysical Therapist blog,” said Fr. Pat.
Prin checked his own shoes.
“Attention, Class of ’68!” one of the endless old ladies around them said. “Father Pat is waiting for us to join him in the rosary before we hit the tables.”
At that, dozens of titanium knees sprang and hinged into action. Groaning and supplications to Mary followed.
“Prin, can you hear me?” Fr. Pat asked.
“Yes, Father,” Prin said.
“Did you ever hear the one about the fat man who went to confession?” Fr. Pat asked.
“No,” Prin said.
“He says ‘Bless me Father, I have sinned.’ But he’s so fat, it comes out as ‘Bless me Father, I have thinned.’ And the priest peeks through the grate and says, ‘Not enough!’”
Prin waited. Fr. Pat stopped tittering and sighed.
“Okay, so jokes aside, our school is in a bit of trouble,” Fr. Pat said.
“Unless I join the Inter-Departmental Review Committee, again, right?” Prin said.
“No, not like that. But thank you for volunteering. I will let the dean know you are happy to serve—”
“Actually I’m not, Father Pat,” Prin said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Fr. Pat said.
“Of course it does! Academic freedom!” Prin said.
The priest said something under his breath. Prin couldn’t hear it for all the Hail Marys around them.
“I didn’t catch that, Father,” Prin said.
“Listen, son. For years and years I’ve been warning all of you about this, and now it’s true. We are facing a grave problem with our budget,” Fr. Pat said.
“What is it? Are you going to try to cut the interlibrary-loan service again?” Prin asked.
This was often the source of the Armageddon that took place at the annual spring all-faculty meeting.
“We’re almost out of money,” Fr. Pat said.
“So why don’t you just fundraise more?” Prin said.
“You have small children, right Prin?” Fr. Pat asked.
“Yes. Why?” Prin asked.
“Never mind. The university will close down at the end of this year unless we find a new source of funding. And no, son, the answer is not just more fundraising. There’s going to be a special all-faculty meeting in a couple of weeks. You should be there,” Fr. Pat said.
“Okay…” Prin said.
“And in the mean time, win big!” Fr. Pat said, standing back up, his big bright Irish grin nearly back in place as he roused his rosary circle to make for the slots.
Prin joined his father at the roulette table and mechanically followed his commands. They were up, they were down, they were really up, and then they were really, really, really up, and then they were banned from the table for ignoring the “Last Bets” rule one too many times. His plan working perfectly, Kingsley scooped up their winnings and made his way to another table staffed by another tubby, goateed dealer and they did it all again. This time a manager was called to warn Kingsley that one more infraction and he’d be banned from the casino for a month. Again.
“So, are we splitting the winnings?” Prin asked.
“Of course! Minus my staking you, and the cost of the flights, we split the winnings,” Kingsley said.
“Dad, I might need more than that,” Prin said.
“Why? What’s wrong? You’re cured. What’s wrong?” said Kingsley.
He couldn’t do it. Just then his father’s sharp brow and hard eyes went soft and slack and he was a worried old man standing in the middle of a big, dark barn, his hands fretting. The only thing—the only thing—Prin’s father understood about his becoming a professor was that it was a lifetime job. Molly understood more than that, if not why Prin was so passionately convinced that descriptions of marine creatures were fundamental to the meaning of modern Canadian literature. But she too, finally, abided all of the small, dramatic outrages that Prin brought home from work because, unlike her own, late father, who only ever came home from work grimy and looking for a cold beer, Prin would never be transferred, or laid off, or informed by a smiling twenty-five-year-old girl in funeral black that he’d been made redundant.
And yet Prin had just been informed that his entire university, a school that had existed for more than a century, might soon be redundant. His life was spared so he could lose his job? Their house? What kind of God did that to a man? What kind of work could he get? He was forty years old and trained to identify the little sea creatures swimming around in Canadian prairie poetry. What kind of work did God expect him to get?
But nothing was certain, yet. In addition to the all-faculty meeting that had been called to discuss the situation, Fr. Pat told him a consultant had been hired. He had said Prin shouldn’t worry yet, or worry his family yet, either.
“PRIN! I asked you, what’s wrong?” Kingsley said.
“I was just thinking it’d be nice to bring Molly along if we go to Sri Lanka,” Prin said.
Kingsley’s hands became fists. He punched his son on both shoulders. Chips fell out of his bulging pockets. “That’s my boy! If the cure works, why waste time?” Kingsley said. “Now pick up those chips and let’s go win your wife the trip of her lifetime!”
They lost everything at the next table.
8
The all-faculty meeting took place in a dark octagonal room covered in bright, bold signs.
BLESS UFU
WE ARE UFU
I LOVE UFU
GO UFU
GOD BLESS UFU
PARENT OF UFU
PARENTAL FIGURE OF UFU
UFU STANDS FOR UFU
Prin worked at a school that had been founded in Toronto in the middle of the nineteenth century by an order of Irish priests from Boston, one of whom was said to have heard John F. Kennedy’s lone confession while president. The priest died shortly thereafter. The school was originally called Holy Family College. By the middle of the twentieth century it was doing well enough to become the University of the Holy Family.
Professors and alumni eventually expressed concern that the school was becoming increasingly irrelevant and too Catholic-seeming, so they changed its name to the University of the Family Universal and went by U.F.U. In turn, members of the business s
chool pointed out the challenge of explaining the acronym. Now the school was simply UFU. It stood for UFU.
It also had an app.
In spite of all of this, the school was still in grave trouble. After hearing the news from Fr. Pat at the casino, Prin had read his blog that night and two weeks later—in slushy, barren-branched mid-March Toronto—he interrupted his medical leave to attend a meeting with his fellow professors. That morning, he’d told Molly he needed a book from his office. They hugged and kissed as brother and sister, and he left for campus.
Prin took a seat at a plastic board-room table in the middle of an octagonal room that had once been a mediaeval manuscript library and was now The Charles “Chipper” Sullivan and Family Memorial Multifunction Bookable Function Room 1b. Its peeling beige walls were pockmarked and shaded oaken brown in the outline of the bookcases that had once lined them. They were now covered in posters from the university’s latest marketing campaign.
Why was everyone in such good spirits? The platters of cheesecake bites could only explain so much. His being there explained even less. His colleagues were glad to see him but Prin wasn’t an especially prominent member of the faculty.
Despite a series of well-received regional emerging scholars’ association-sponsored conference presentations on the penis shaped like a sleeping seahorse that figures prominently in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Prin had yet to publish any major work on marine life in the Canadian literary landscape, but he taught assorted survey classes and accepted committee assignments without much complaint. Also, he had agreed to be the faculty advisor to the university’s Catholic students’ club, comprised of six Chinese communications majors who spoke little English. The occasional seventh member was a mature Filipino student who smiled a lot and cried uncontrollably whenever when she saw Prin’s daughters. She was on a scholarship that might have been connected to her working, years before, as a nanny for the university’s chief fundraiser.
“If I may call us to attention,” Fr. Pat said.
He then invited the oldest member of the faculty, an emeritus classics professor, to lead the group in an opening prayer. A priest pushed a walker up to the podium that had been set up at one end of the room, in the middle of the U-shaped table. A pierced and tattooed AV attendant adjusted the microphone radically down.
The old man smiled at everyone, whirred back at Fr. Pat to confirm he should start, and then took off his Red Sox cap and offered a wedding blessing in Biblical Greek.
“Thank you, Fr. O’Shaughnessy,” said Fr. Pat.
He waited for the old man to return to the corner of the table, where with some panache he twirled his walker around and sat down on its built-in bench. Everyone clapped, as usual; also as usual there was already someone standing behind him to stop his walker from careening backwards into the wall. The priest was pushed back to the table and nodded at the president, who smiled, sighed, and began.
“Friends, I have called this meeting so that, as a community, we can discuss the grave challenge before our beloved institution,” said Fr. Pat.
The room became very still. Prin looked around. The professors were sour-faced and whispering back and forth. None of them had read the blog! But then a hand shot up. It belonged to the leader of the faculty association, a bearded, denim-clad labour historian.
“Yes, Professor Bergermaster, I thought I’d hear from you, first,” said Fr. Pat.
“Listen, Father Pat, we work in a spirit of transparency and openness and collaboration. That said, if you think the university can get away with this, you’re very wrong,” said Professor Bergermaster.
“I’m sorry, Breen, but the Board Finance Committee has studied the situation extensively, and it is dire,” said Fr. Pat.
“But you say this every year! And every year, in the end, you figure out a way to pay for the interlibrary-loan service,” said Professor Bergermaster, to angry ayes.
Fr. Pat reached forward a little on the podium, his hands gripping its front and slipping. The university’s old crest—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph living in a house made of books—had been pried off long before. In its place was a bare, bright space.
“This has nothing to do with funding for the interlibrary-loan program,” Fr. Pat said.
The room filled with sighs of relief.
“None of you read his blog!” said Prin.
Everyone looked down at their cheesecake crumbs. The younger professors began searching for the blog on their phones. The older faculty tried to figure out the Wi-Fi.
“We are glad to see you again, Prin,” Fr. Pat said. “I’m only sorry we can’t welcome you back on happier terms. But if Prin is correct, then, my friends, I am even more disappointed. As you all know, for months now The Metaphysical Therapist has been my forward-looking way of engaging our community. It’s even available on our app, iTouchUFU. But if even the faculty of this university can’t be troubled to read it, then maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at our broader situation.
“Anyway, perhaps take a moment to read my latest post, and then, as a community committed to comity and unity and forging a way forward that is inclusive of everyone, we can reflect—”
“WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?”
Thirty minutes later, the meeting was called back to order. Other people had by now entered the room—a squat Chinese man with spiky hair and two phones going at once, and a tall, funereal-looking Arab man in a dark suit. In a back corner, studying documents, stood a third, a thin blonde woman in leather boots and metallic jewellery.
“Friends, let’s try again,” Fr. Pat said.
Sixty minutes later, he tried again. By this point, all the professors had had a chance to say something. None were interested in learning more about falling enrolments and rising pension costs, or about how fundraising fell apart after the head of the capital campaign, Seamus Michael O’Gorman, Class of ’66, made a joke about drag racing his Trans Am at a young alumni mixer.
They showed no sympathy about the latest pair of lawsuits the university was forced to settle related to a gender-rights case connected to its annual biathlon, and to its having invited students to read a novel by a young Indigenous author about corruption-fighting vampires who were Indigenous youth leaders. Following a dramatic online investigation, the novel turned out to have been written by a middle-aged Indigenous author.
Prin felt bad for Fr. Pat, who was turning tomato-red under his shock of white hair while the professors had at him. Prin didn’t join in, but he didn’t defend the president, either. If UFU was really going to close in a year, he was in the same situation as his colleagues. Many of them still had mortgages and children living at home. Beneath those prosperous, busy heavens, Toronto had a lot of crowded, dry ground.
“Maybe if we stopped with all the catered cheesecake, that would help. I mean, what are we, Minnesota Lutherans? You all know I’d happily bake shortbread for meetings,” said Sister Contra Melanchthon.
“Maybe we need a new website?” a professor asked.
“Or 3D printers? Aren’t they … something … now?” another professor asked.
“What about tuition? Can’t we raise it?” still another professor asked.
“We just don’t have enough students these days, as you all know,” Fr. Pat said.
“But we have some! And we owe it to them to keep this place open!” another professor said.
This sounded good. Everyone cared about the students and demanded the school stay open—for them, the students. Fr. Pat let them go on for a while and then pointed out that the students were all eligible to transfer to other schools and would do so without much trouble and, he lamented, without much complaint.
“Well, I thought the whole point of your selling all the buildings except this one was to pay for that kind of stuff! Can’t you just sell this one too, and pay us to teach online?” another of Prin’s colleagues asked.
&nbs
p; “It’s funny you should say that,” Fr. Pat said. “As you all know from reading my entire blog post concerning this matter”—again everyone looked down, scrolling furiously, Prin included—“and specifically after I quote at length from the Pope’s recent reflections on—”
“PLEASE JUST TELL US YOU HAVE A PLAN TO SAVE OUR JOBS!”
“He doesn’t, and that’s why he hired me,” said the woman standing in the shadows behind Fr. Pat.
He gratefully gave way as she took over the podium.
“Hello everyone. My name is Wende. Hello, Prin.”
He almost snapped his pencil.
9
His ex-girlfriend from graduate school told his colleagues her story, mentioning her connection to Prin only in passing—that they had gone to school together many years before. Everyone was so worried, she could have told them she and Prin used to run a factory where African orphans made earmuffs out of baby seals and they would still have asked her to get to the point. What was her plan to save UFU? And how had she remained this thin, for this long?
Prin couldn’t see a wedding ring. But yes, what was her plan to save UFU?
“I created my company after my job at a college in Montana was eliminated a few months ago. Believe me, I tried and tried to find another position. I even thought about teaching high school…”
They gasped.
“But then I decided that what I went through should never have to happen to another professor. Today I specialize in identifying financially viable options for under-performing academic institutions to continue delivering content,” Wende said.
Many hands went up.
“To answer the first question I get, every time: my approach ensures that all current staff continue on in their positions, at their current salaries,” Wende said.
All the hands went down. Then all the hands went up again.
“To answer the second question, it doesn’t necessarily have to involve teaching in the summer,” Wende said.
All the hands went down.
“So, in the case of UFU, I have identified two options that I think are worth exploring. With me today are representatives from two institutions interested in creating partnerships with your school that would allow it to stay open. Father Pat invited us here today to explain these opportunities. The plan would be for committees to be struck to consider each opportunity and present recommendations to the president and the board before September. I will offer my consulting services to both committees, and serve as liaison with our prospective partner institutions. How’s all of this sound, out of curiosity?” said Wende.
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