Joseph Delaney: The Hole Truth

Illustration by Arthur George

Dean Connor’s office was like another world, and seemed awkwardly out of place with the rest of the campus. It was ornate, and pretentious, and it smelled musty, as though it meant to emulate the precincts of some enormously more prestigious Ivy League university.

Dr. Bryant, having been summarily summoned, entered it with enormous trepidation, with a feeling of foreboding, a portent of impending doom.

“Sit down,” Connor muttered, barely looking up from a crisp, new Wall Street Journal. From his right hand a felt marker dangled, and on a pad next to the phone Bryant noted what he took to be a broker’s number and a list of stock market symbols.

Some time passed, during which Bryant’s nerves continued to rasp away, but finally Connor put the paper down, capped the marker, and pushed both it and the pad to the side of his otherwise totally uncluttered desk.

“I think it’s time for you to tell me all about this test, Bryant.”

Bryant’s first impulse was to gasp, though he fortunately had retained the control needed to mask that. “How did you know about that?”

“I’ve gotten several complaints about it, Bryant. That’s how. Believe me, I don’t appreciate criticism from the parents of our students, especially when they’re on the alumni advisory board. You’ve been violating the first rule of academia, Bryant, I thought you had better sense.”

Bryant was completely baffled. “Complaints from parents—about a simple intelligence test? I don’t understand. It isn’t even a part of the curriculum, I’ve been developing it with my grant.”

“And using your students as guinea pigs. Just where do you think you are, Bryant? This isn’t Harvard, or some other school people are scared of getting thrown out of, this is Weybellowe College, the bottom of the barrel, the pits, the last resort of desperate wealthy parents and poor kids who can’t afford to go anyplace else.” He glared at Bryant, temper slowly building up in pitch and intensity.

Bryant was familiar with the process. So was everybody else on the faculty. With the advent of every crisis there were betting pools whose objective was to predict the exact time that Connor would stroke out.

Bryant reluctantly launched his defense. “I asked for volunteers to try it out,” he said. “It was a blind study of the comparative accuracy of my test and the old standbys. The results were strictly confidential—”

“—You weren’t quite careful enough then, Bryant, because you had a leak.”

“Who?”

“How should I know? The point is that because of your bungling I had to spend an hour on the phone apologizing to that insufferable oaf, Frederick Van Vogt.”

“I see. Well, his son was one of the volunteers, and he did miserably on all the tests, but—”

“—And his father endowed this college handsomely just so he could get in. Bryant, this family is important to Weybellowe—Vogt has three more sons, all of them as dumb as or dumber than this one. If you don’t care about anything else you should at least be cognizant of where the money comes from that pays your salary.”

Bryant was tempted—but only just—to tell Connor just how pitiful that salary was. Bryant wasn’t knocking down anywhere near what Connor got. Like most of the professors here, he used his credentials at Weybellowe to get at grant money, which was what he really lived on.

Bryant’s defensive posture stiffened at that thought, he was good at getting grants, and he had earned a solid reputation for delivering positive and useful results from his sideline research, so that with every successfully completed project he became a better risk and his personal academic stature grew in spite of his humble surroundings. That, he knew, was why Connor had called him in for this relatively cordial chat instead of just kicking him out.

“I don’t intend to let this institution slide back into its mediocre past,” Connor continued. “I’ve built it up to what it is today. Twenty years ago, when 1 came here all it was a normal school, cranking out elementary school teachers with no more imagination than sheep. Today we’re a four year institution, with chairs in all the liberal arts, and some of the sciences. That’s no small feat, Bryant, and I don’t mind telling you that I look on anything and anybody who impugns it with a very jaundiced eye.”

Now, Bryant was getting a little angry himself. “I didn’t do anything to the Vogt kid. He volunteered, and he took the tests like all the other volunteers. He was in the active group and he scored on the low end of the bell—”

“—In your new test?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“And did very much better in the others?”

“Again, yes, he did. But—the other tests are old tests, which have been around for generations. Most students take them several times before they even reach college, and do better every time they repeat. In fact, that’s the trouble with these old-fashioned tests, they don’t test elemental intelligence except maybe on the first try, after that, they’re basically memory tests. Besides, I know Vogt cheated.”

“What?!”

“He wasn’t the only one. Over half of each group cheated on the standard tests.”

“You allowed this?!”

“Of course. I couldn’t ask for a better control. Knowing this gave me a statistical spread, a small one, certainly, but its existence provided the equivalent of a third control group, because it’s impossible to cheat on my test.” Having established culpability on the part of the complaining student Bryant felt a little more secure.

“There’s still the matter of the leak.”

“Bradford and I graded the tests personally,” Bryant countered. “No scores were disclosed except to the student himself. The records were then encoded blind as a part of the project data. Even if somebody got into the data file there wouldn’t be any way for him to tell who scored what. No, Dean, the leak, if there was one, was a cooperative thing. The students must have compared their grades. I’d be interested to see who else you got complaints from. I’ll bet it’ll match my list of those who cheated.”

“I thought you said there weren’t any identifiers, Bryant.”

“I’m speaking of my recollections. My memory is pretty reliable.”

Connor produced a list from his desk drawer.

Bryant perused it, nodded, and replied, “Yes, I thought so.” He replaced the list on Connor’s desk.

“You can see these are all children of people important to this institution, Bryant. The loss of their financial support could seriously imperil its future, as well as yours.” He stared blankly at Bryant.

Bryant stared calmly back.

“You’re going to have to change those scores, Bryant.”

“You know I can’t do that, Dean. If I did a thing like that and anybody found out I’d never get another grant. And—would you want anybody on the faculty who would do that?” Connor was caught in his bluff. Now he had to squirm out of it. “Uh—what I meant, Bryant, was that since you know they cheated you also know your data is faulty. I’d think you’d want to retest all these people and set the record straight.”

“I see,” Bryant replied, now convinced the suggestion had been a trap for him. Just as he was determined not to fudge his results he was equally set against retesting, which would cast similar aspersions on it. And, there was no need to. “The trouble with that idea is that it won’t work, Dean. I know exactly what would happen, the scores on the old tests would improve by a predictable increment because of the past experience and the results of my test wouldn’t change one iota. As I said, it’s impossible to cheat on my test.”