"One Coffee With" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maron Margaret)

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FEW institutions of higher learning are content that their faculties do nothing but teach. In the name of 'academic community', Administration arranges committees, faculty-student teas, receptions to meet the newest trustee, and interdisciplinary seminars. Departments that submit to this nonsense unquestioningly are rewarded with buildings of their own or, at the very least, whole floors of contiguous classrooms and well-furnished offices.

In every college, though, there is always one department that doesn't give a damn for academic community, that adopts a laissez-faire attitude toward Administration's extracurricular entanglements and subsequently finds itself jammed higgledy-piggledy into the college's leftover spaces. The Art Department at Vanderlyn College was so thoroughly a case in point that when rumors of murder first spread across campus that spring morning, the other less flamboyant disciplines sat back in smugc onviction that such a calamity could never happen in their orderly domains. Psychology alluded darkly to the dangers of indulging Freudian aggressions. Chemistry proclaimed itself appalled that lethal substances had been treated with such casual negligence, while Home Ec. polished its elegant china tea service and managed to imply that that's what came of drinking cafeteria coffee from a Styrofoam cup.