Competition was fierce among these institutes of higher learning and much was done to attract suitable candidates. Headhunting became a profitable business in academia.
For the last ten years, teaching had taken a back seat at Belmont. Crowded classrooms attested to the lack of adequate teaching space. Much of the space formerly assigned as classrooms had been rebuilt into laboratories. At the medical school, prospective recruits were lured by promises of plenty of laboratory space, unremitting stroking and very light teaching duties.
The reality was that once the entrant was hired, adulation ceased. For Randy, this was a problem. In addition, he hadn't even tried to clean up his act and Lyle did nothing except encourage him to be pond scum, thought Henry. Randy expected the medical students to worship him and instead they found him appalling because of his lack of expertise in the subject he taught and for his repeated, haughty demonstration of it.
Having his way with women took a beating too. Usually, he ignored any female who didn't fit his image of perfect enough for him to notice. However, if he needed something, he would approach these females in a sexual manner and was usually rebuffed.
Since Lyle had already established Trenchant as the whipping girl of the department, Randy readily fell in with this designation and laid all his problems at her door. When she refused to photograph the pictures in a radiology atlas, he was furious. He ran to Lyle and claimed that she was obstructing his efforts to modernize the course. He neglected to tell Lyle that she had said she would be willing to do it if the publisher gave written permission.
Lyle, of course, encouraged him to proceed with his innovations and just ignore her. Randy took this to mean that he had carte blanche and it led to his plagiarizing her laboratory manual as well as the published texts and atlas of other authors.
Henry brought his attention back to the hearing just as Jane was asking Randy to explain how he had found the 'suspicious' critiques.
He answered, leaning forward toward her in his eagerness and excitement, "In looking through the student critiques I found these that didn't seem to be right. That is, the comments were not expressed the way a medical student would.
"I also saw that the handwriting was different. Not the way students write but like the handwriting of old people. So then I went back and looked through other years for similar handwriting." He explained that he, Randy, had found all three SmurFFs which he had brought to Lyle and asked that they be sent to a document examiner because he thought these were written by Trenchant.
Responding to a very leading question from Anuse, Randy agreed, "Yes, these evaluations had been very harmful to me in that they tended to undermine my confidence in my ability to teach radiology and could affect my reappointment."