Douglas Bass thinks "Pictures from an Institution" should be a movie (which compliment flattered "anon" when I passed it on). He's already at work on the casting.

If you are new to Critical Mass' ongoing unsigned serial academic fiction project, you can catch up on the first seven chapters here. Below, please find the eighth, "The Horror."

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Friday, December 28: Carol Mann sprawls face down on her hotel bed, trying to work up the energy to attend the Planckton Hall cocktail party that is being held in Chairman Stan's suite. She has spent all day in Chairman Stan's suite and does not want to return.

Today has been Carol Mann's induction into the mysteries of the academic hiring process. She has never served on a search committee before, and has never been to a job interview that was not her own. Today she has spent nine consecutive hours observing twelve consecutive interviews. What she has seen has exhausted her. She can't breathe with her nose crushed into her pillow, but neither can she move.

From ten in the morning till six at night, Chairman Stan's suite was a veritable assembly line of academic assessment. Although twelve different people interviewed for three separate jobs in three distinct fields, not one of them stood out as either a scholar or an individual. They looked the same--they wore short chic hair and dark new suits. They talked the same--they gave convoluted, overlong descriptions of something called "my work," and their speech was studded with words like "hegemonic," "political," "social construction," "institutionalization," "radical," and "interrogate." Not only did they talk the same, they sounded the same--behind the rhetoric, their voices were tentative, nervous, at once embarrassed, proud, and eager to please. They even sat the same--perched on the edge of the straightbacked chair set aside for them by Chairman Stan, rigid and clenched, trying not to move or take up space.

When Carol discovered, in the middle of the third interview, that she could not tell the candidates apart, she chided herself for letting her mind wander. But when close, dedicated attention yielded no better result, when even taking notes failed to differentiate them, Carol realized that what she was witnessing was not a gross lapse in her own concentration, but rather a disturbing feature of the hiring process itself. There were not really twelve candidates for three jobs, she realized. There was one candidate, multiplied by twelve. These interchangeable shades passing through Chairman Stan's suite at forty minute intervals were not people, but profiles. They were not scholars with unique perspectives and original ideas, but subtle variations on a closely circumscribed, familiar theme.

They came and they went and came and went and ran together as they came and went and when there were none left, the people who had watched them come and go all pretended to know who should be hired and why. They held a conversation that was premised on the thesis that the candidates were not only extraordinarily varied, but phenomenally well-qualified, and they spoke about them in terms that were every bit as generic as the candidates themselves.

Carol groans and squeezes her eyes shut as she remembers how they had decided who to hire.

Delbert Jett narrowed the new media studies candidates down to one by pointing out that the other three had all failed to consider what cyberspace might mean for the future of the book. "They were far too awed by their own subject matter," he argued. "They had no concept that the internet is inherently hostile to our field of study. People like them will be the death of English departments." And thus was the only remaining new media candidate elected, by unanimous default, to the job.

More discussion was needed to narrow down the candidates for the positions in women's literature and postcolonial performance studies.

"I did not feel," said Michiko Fry, "That the last candidate's position on the place of spectacle in postcolonial performance was adequately problematized." And the last candidate was eliminated.

"The first candidate did not have a properly inclusive understanding of women's literature," said Elinor Crisp. "I was troubled by the manner in which her dissertation, which focussed solely on white women writers, replicated the historical racism of the women's movement in the name of empowering all women." And the first candidate was crossed off the list.

"We should consider the politics of hiring a white South African for a postcolonialist position," commented Arabella Martineau. And the white South African candidate was crossed off the list.

And so the discussion went, until, by process of discrimination, only one candidate remained for each position. The chosen three would be offered jobs that evening at the Planckton Hall cocktail party, where they would be in attendance along with faculty, grad students, and the nine nearly identical candidates that had just been crossed off the list. Horatio Sample had suggested that this might not be the most sensitive course of action. But Chairman Stan was of a decidely different opinion.

"What could be more festive, my good friends," Chairman Stan had crowed, popping the cork off an anticipatory bottle of champagne and pouring toasts for all, "or more welcoming, than the announcement that we have made three stunning additions to our departmental family? I hereby toast ourselves, for our magnificent efforts and our unerring good taste. De gluteus!" he had cried, and drank.

Now, wincing into the airless privacy of her pillow, Carol thinks of the candidates gathering in Chairman Stan's suite, accepting glasses of white wine and making polite unsuspecting small talk with the people that have just decided their fates in such summary form. She pictures what will happen to their expressions when Chairman Stan makes his announcement, and she squirms face down in the dark.

to be continued