Meeting Her Part 2: Starting Affairs
by LolaPaul49
Chapter 0. Preview.
Alec Braxton was a hired gun, he was not looking for love. But he was not a monk either. His past meetings with the two women were occasional and unconventional (oral and anal). Also, anal sex may be fine in a shower, but it is not a good idea in a faculty office.
When fishing it often helps to have several lines in the water at once. Here, on the small campus luck strikes - twice - in a short period.
I am nominating this as "Erotic Couplings" as most of the activity involves a guy and, separately, two women who are figuring some things out. The story follows from Part 1, reading that might be useful. Some critical facts that were cloaked there are exposed below.
The tags used here follow for most parts of the story.
For those who want to go right to the action, in Chapter 2, the new hired gun scores a significant breakthrough with Nancy. Chapters 6 and 8 feature Isabel opening up some new places. Most of the other chapters advance Isabel's story of woe and salvation, which is rather complicated as her marriage has been poisoned and she is pregnant.
Note: the word "chair" has 2 distinct meanings in academia.
A Department Chair is the administrator of a department, he thinks he is the boss in a discipline like English or Chemistry because he has the biggest office. But actually he is a overworked paper pusher since he can't hire or fire or change the pay of any faculty member. In fact, the department chair really has only one power: scheduling. However, since the objective is to impart knowledge to all the precious darlings (students) this is more a case of co-ordinating the desires, skills and preferences of the individual faculty, the number of students anticipated for each course, and the rooms each department is allocated. Put, say, a tax guy in a systems course and everybody loses.
An Endowed Chair is an honor and a pay supplement for a faculty position in an area where the regular salary is simply not enough. The endowment funds are contributed by somebody with too much money, then invested to generate the extra salary and other monies needed. These are usually used to recruit and keep VIP faculty the university could not otherwise afford. Universities are shameless in soliciting rick folks to obtain these funds.
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Chapter 1. Discovering A Name
Late August
In August Dr. Dryden and I were having a friendly discussion of a joint publication we were considering. I had 2 pubs of my own accepted from my dissertation and a couple more with co-authors in advanced stages, but they were not sure things. Some things that didn't work out had turned into paper presentations. The lead time and the hit rate is such that a guy on a schedule like me must always plan ahead.
The research idea was solid. We knew that anything with Dryden's name on it would get published, the issue was how big the project would be. It was given that I would do most of the research and writing, credit would be shared equally, and our names would be listed in alphabetical order. (My name is Alec Braxton.) That is how things were done.
The question was, how much would including Dryden slow down the process (it was inevitable) versus the chance of placing it in a better journal, increasing my future value, with him as a co-author (also inevitable). We had already written one presentation together, it went quickly, but an article would take a lot more from both of us. (Dryden was sharp enough, he would contribute, so it was a genuine joint effort that would help us both.)
I noticed that Dryden's computer had the icon for the university's building entry system, and I asked about it. When anybody entered or left a secure building their RF-chipped ID card chirped and data was recorded. I was surprised to see access to this entire system on his computer, but I guessed it was an "all or nothing" system. I asked why he had it and I didn't.
"Yes, it's there," he replied, "access is available to all administrators, department chairs and higher. Plus anybody in Buildings and Grounds or Security... others. Silly thing, I don't use it."
One thing I get frustrated about is when folks don't answer the question asked. With Dr. Dryden I had to be a bit diplomatic. "But why do you have it? You aren't some foul administrator, are you."
"Oh... that. Well, I confess I am. They just installed it when I got the computer. I was not consulted by the tech minions. Technically I am the Director for the Finance and Accounting Institute. It is worthwhile it just to keep it out of Ober-Chair Bumblurs's grasping hands." (We agreed our chairman was an ass-kissing idiot - his own ass mostly so he was always falling down.) "A Director is deemed equivalent to a Chair, even one with a trivial budget, so I get access to endless worthless details. Hell of a way to run a university, filling computers with useless data. You can be the Director when you get tenure." That would never happen because they could not afford me, there is always more green waiting at the next school. We found ourselves moving on to a pleasant topic, the tall skinny blond work-study coed who could not do her own buttons...
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Faculty are organized in Departments, each with a Chairperson. Usually Accounting and Finance are different departments, but for some reason this school combined them plus they added in Law, Real Estate and Insurance to make one jumbo department. Because it was so large we called our department chairman the Ober-Chair. (This was not a intended as a compliment.) The other departments in Business were Marketing, Economics (which also did statistics) and Management (which really could be 3 departments: Quant, Behavior and HR).
Related departments make up a College or School of Business managed by our venerable Dean, he really is old, but very wise and well respected. A University is made up of one or more Colleges; in addition to the Business College we have Liberal Studies, Communication (including theater), STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and Education for our other colleges. There is also the Athletics super-department/mini-college which does not fit into a box. Unlike anybody else, they make real money selling football tickets. Our Athletic Director is considered both a Chair and a Dean with double the paperwork.
All the Deans make up the Academic Council headed by the Provost. The Provost, along with VP for Administration, report to the President.
Unlike a boss at a real job, the Chair and Dean have little power. For instance, pay raises are set using a matrix drawn by the Faculty Senate. Hiring, promotion and firing is done by tenured faculty. Academic matters are the province of each department's tenured faculty committee. The pay for a faculty member is negotiated when they are hired, after that raises follow the matrix - the "bosses" have no power there. Chairs do not even assign offices, that is a tradition based on tenure. Basically, Chairs just do paperwork, attend meetings and answer phone calls.
Note: pay has NOTHING to do with how many students a faculty member sees or how well they teach their students. This is because teaching quality is simply too complex to measure. Such is the nature of "higher education."
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A week after our talk I had to use Dryden's computer to transfer some files. He gets lost easily in any file structure. As long as I was there I looked at the building logs, it was pure curiosity to see how they were organized. I picked the Faculty Athletic Center during a July night.
I am usually ethical and honest, but relative to the average I would have to say my greatest outlier trait - which some academics share - is that I am curious. It is something my high school guidance advisors noted in my confidential file which I wasn't supposed to see.
I was also more resourceful than they expected, so I saw.
On the building log for that night I saw my name with about a dozen others. Next I discovered I could print out the names with times. Once I eliminated who couldn't be in the shower, I was left with one very unexpected female name: campus royalty Dr. Isabel Victor-Brumhuld PhD. She was the right age (low thirties). Her pictures fit the empirical parameters of size and build. The daughter of the campus president, she was also the wife of the greatest campus sports hero (fullback) from around 15 years ago.
The lady wore a lot of hats. She was the building manager for the field house, the acting athletic director, acting head of buildings & grounds, acting campus security supervisor, and university social director. The first two were academic positions, while the others were administrative. Normally, like Ghostbusters, you don't cross the streams; it was something I had never seen for anybody under the age of 60. That probably had to do with her father being the boss.
Her husband was on the faculty. Dr. Jorge Victor, PhD was a Professor of Climate Change with an endowed chair funded by somebody afflicted with too much money and ego. Jorge's super-salary was almost 80% of my pay this year. My future annual raises will be 20% to 30% each year. He will get 4% or thereabouts.
Jorge and his Department of Climate Change was in the School of Communication, not STEM. It is not considered a science. The story was that in 1975 the folks who trained students to read tomorrow's bad guess of a weather report started to add classes about predicting the weather in the distant future. Unlike TV weathermen, who were accountable, if they were wrong about the distant future, who would remember? The courses attracted faculty and students who were not pretty enough to read the weather reports on the radio, so they created a new department of professionally dreary scolds for society. The department tried to leave Communication and join STEM where the average faculty pay is higher, but real science folks were not having it.
