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scu
well, to  make an ugly story short... the spring course at scu was
to be a pilot for two courses, one in the eecs dept and one in the humanities
school. both were lisp-based; both were to use local nets of micros
... i'll stick a short description of the eecs course on the end of this note.
anyway, there are two deans in this  story: dean A in the engineering school,
and dean B in the humanities. "A" got asked to resign because of a certain
professional lacking, but remains in power until they find a replacement. 
Last January it came to pass that Dean B wanted a proposal for a literacy
course, so rising to the bait, i built a two-layered scheme for them
(a) a summer workshop for the humanities faculty to design a course that
they could teach and (b) an undergraduate offering to be given this fall.
Knowing the basic rudiments of the power structure at this basition of
truth, the proposal when "through channels" including dean A, til in 
late Feb. it reached dean B. He thought it was really swell, and would
take care of things. Dummy me, believed him and went off to build the courses.
late april, when nothing was apparently happening  i went to investigate.
well, he'd decided to dump the summer workshop and just go with the 
fall class... ok, but i'd rather have gotten the faculty involved.
"but everyone's for it, including the president of the university and dean A".

now that got me worried because i'd been getting a lot of rumors back that
dean A was upset about the eecs version i'd been teaching. (dean A has
a reputation for being rather creative in dealing with facts --i think
it's called "lying"-- but the word around scu is "everyone knows it,  don't
mess with him") further proding of dean B  spelled doom: he reported
that the humanities course was to be given in the engineering school
and dean A knew it and would be helpful in getting equipment.
--bull-fucking-shit-- but i digress. I asked dean A about the status of the
course; he claimed to be "playing the political angles" to get the course
approved in the dean's meeting, but said the course "was not computer
science --perhaps philosophy, but on cs". in fact, the word from the
dean's meeting was "there's no way that course will be taught in MY school!"

the effect was to table my proposal til a committee can study the issue
this fall: five month work down the drain.  so no course next fall
for the humanities program. ah, but i'm still teaching graduate courses
part-time: functional programming and ai. but wait, what's this? 
a letter! gee, it's a letter from dean A to the dept. chairman.
it says the political cost of j. allen teaching at scu is too great.
chairman looks at student evaluations: 3.7 out of 5 in graduate
program: too low; fire him.