Dr. Elson Carpenter was a senior member of the English department. The reason is that she probably annoyed everybody else into finding work somewhere else. I never had any direct contact with Carpenter, but her presence in faculty meetings was all I needed to understand what she was all about. Carpenter was a firm believer in the philosophy of self-absorption. Carpenter believed she was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and there was no one capable of doing what she did. Whatever it was that she did, I was unaware of it, nor was anybody else familiar with it.

Carpenter possessed two glaring problems. The first is that she despised teaching general education courses. This is a perspective many professors have because the general population of the student body may not have the same dedication to classwork as students involved in their major. She felt this task was below her station and insisted on teaching only major requirement courses. It is a position to easily understand if Remus was an enormous learning institution, but it is not. The department graduated no more than five students a year, at most. She was basically saying that she wanted to teach about twenty students a semester or less. This was important because it gave her time to practice the second problem she had, being a bully to the other faculty.

Just like any other bully, Carpenter would intimidate faculty with her supposed intellect and skills. If she disagreed with a policy, she would audibly make pouting noises in the back of the room. In one department meeting, a fellow faculty member suggested modifying course distribution. Carpenter got so mad that she accused the faculty member had a personal vendetta against her and insisted that suggesting rotating course load responsibilities was perpetrating a hate crime. While the incident was quickly diffused, the incident was filed to the human resources department. It was later determined that the faculty member who proposed the change would have to take anger and sensitivity training. I think the administration reached the decision because if they ruled against Carpenter, she would have given all of them wedgies and then stole their lunch money for good measure.

Her ego was so big that it had its own zip code, and her delusions of grandeur were so profound that even Cicero would have sat at her feet to learn. Her audacious claims would often leave others in a state of paralysis. One of the crowning achievements of Remus was a collaboration course with Auctoritas University, another private college located in town. This school probably had its own issues, like making faculty sign a morality statement affirming that the new hire never even looked at an alcoholic beverage in their life. Still, the school was leagues ahead of Remus in terms of organization.

On one occasion where the collaboration faculty came together for a luncheon, one of Auctoritas’s English faculty members mentioned that they were having trouble getting students a comprehensive understanding of Russian literature. A daunting task, to be sure. Most Russian authors I have read are among the most tedious and dry reads I have experienced. I would rather have somebody run sandpaper across my eyes than read another story by Dostoevsky. Before the professor could finish their sentence, Carpenter bragged that she could present it all clearly and concisely. When Carpenter said all, she meant all of Russian literature. All one thousand years of it. She possessed the God-given ability to drill that boring drek into the lead-lined skulls of our students in a single semester. Not only would students understand it, but they would also master all the nuances in a single semester. Before the professor could respond to the audacious claim or even inquire about how impractical that may seem, Carpenter began to rattle off just how great she was and how the English department at Remus would wither and die without her.