The Boy's Club often went on retreat. At these meetings, held in luxurious surroundings, policies and plans were decided and everyone fell into line, or else. There were those among the faculty that believed that Sam Broadhurst demanded from the chairs, and took himself, an oath in blood. This was because they invariably backed each other up publicly even though privately, they didn't.
Henry knew that the dean was not happy with the way the Trenchant situation had been handled. The dean was royally pissed that Lyle had gone over his head to Mark and himself instead of keeping the matter in the medical school and dealing with it there. He was further incensed that they had decided to charge Diana and terminate her before he was even apprised that the situation existed. By the time he was brought into the process, it was to late for him to do anything but go along with it.
So Henry wasn't surprised when the dean made it quite clear that he was not consulted until the central administration had already decided to terminate Diana. This was so obvious that everyone in the room realized that he was just doing his job within the system but that didn't mean that he liked it.
Having thus vented his spleen about the way the affair had been handled, Dean Broadhurst clearly and forcibly added his opinion to that of Lyle's in almost a carbon copy of Lyle's relevant testimony. Clearly and succinctly without the wandering, self serving side trips taken by Lyle, the dean cast the party line with all the skill of the accomplished angler he was.
All right. Well done, thought Henry, with transparent relief. At least things were going all right thus far with this witness.
Esther took over the questioning and asked, "Would five or six SmurFF critiques out of around 200 have enough weight to influence your process of evaluating faculty performance in a course?"
The dean sidestepped, "The ones in question were pretty damning comments."
Esther persisted, "Have you seen the other evaluations? I mean the ones that are believed to be authentic student feedbacks?"
Here Dean Broadhurst intentionally contradicted Lyle's testimony. "No. The student comments are summarized by the department secretaries and I see the summaries. There is also a summary of the positive and negative comments and a summary of the numerical evaluation."
Jane looked at Henry to see his reaction. She remembered that Lyle had testified that all the SmurFFs were given to, and reviewed by, the dean.