Read Online Tim Connor Hits Trouble by Frank Lankaster - Free Book Online

re-structured, at least that’s what they call it since it got university status. They ran Social Sciences at Ridgewell but it got closed down. Lack of numbers, I’m not surprised. Rachel Steir treated the students like they were school kids. Everything was regimented and over-organised. She’s trying to do the same thing at our site. Over my dead body! Erica Botham is more open-minded but she usually goes along with Steir. In the end the students votedwith their feet. Some of them decamped to our place. Steir says that the drop in numbers was because they’d exhausted local demand. I think that’s BS.’
    By now Tim was uneasy at Henry’s vehement and no doubt biased account of departmental politics.
    ‘You guys don’t seem to get along that well,’ he said hoping Henry would change tack.
    Undeterred Henry carried on in the same vein for several minutes. Tim couldn’t tell whether he was genuinely threatened or paranoid. He was an odd mixture of vulnerability and belligerence. He’d wait and see. He attempted to nudge Henry onto less emotive ground.
    ‘What about the rest of the department? How many more full-timers are there?’
    Henry took a moment to shift gears. ‘Oh, sorry. I should have said. Just one apart from Aisha Khan that is - Toby Woods. But he’s on an exchange this year. Normally you would be sharing an office with him. You’ll like him when you meet him. He used to be in Human Resources but got out when it became more about resources and less about human beings. He was our only full-time psychologist. You take over part of his timetable in addition to your sociology. Toby’s exchange is Brad Purfect, an American from the mid-West. I’ve only met him a couple of times. He talks a lot, seems a bit opinionated. He’s says he’s a Marxist but his thinking seems to stop with Lenin; a bit rigid maybe. Early days though, he’ll probably loosen up.’
    ‘Quite a small core staff, then?’
    ‘Yeah, Swankie does a lecture a week, probably more to keep an eye on the rest of us than because he really wants to do any teaching. We’ve got several part-timers or ‘visiting lecturers’ as they’re now called. The management seems to think a fancy name compensates for low salaries. Not their own salaries of course. They find reasons to keep increasing them.’
    ‘Aren’t you management?’ Tim wanted to shift Henry from his attack-dog comfort zone.
    ‘Management? There’s management and ‘management’. If you can call what I do management. I try to mitigate the damage done by the bloody bureaucracy. At my level I can still treat people as human beings. It’s possible, easy for me to communicate with people individually. I actually know the people I’m dealing with.’
    Henry tailed off and looked across at Tim. ‘I hope to Christ you’re not one of these new managerial types. I’m shafted if you are. That’s not how you came across. And I read one of your articles. All that stuff about grass-roots democracy is right up my street.’
    Tim felt more comfortable now the conversation had moved away from the personal stuff. ‘No, you haven’t misread me, at least not in that respect. I’m no managerialist. Definitely one of us not one of them.’
    Henry’s face lit up like a Hogmanay pumpkin.
    ‘Let’s drink to that, my round.’
    Tim gazed thoughtfully at Henry as the old academic weaved an unsteady path to the bar. It was difficult to know what to make of him. He came across as a man of conviction yet also as a clapped out, gossipy old gonzo. Whatever else, he was clearly an alcoholic or so close that the distinction wasn’t worth making. Good judgement and reliability were unlikely to be among his salient qualities. Regardless, Tim found him perversely likeable.
    Returning to his seat, Henry changed tack, revealing a still embattled intellectual behind the surface shambles. Abseiling on an alcohol-fuelled surge of inspiration, he talked with drunken fluency for the best part of an