As promised, here is anon.'s portrait of Chairman Stan, the not-so-lovable, not-so-bright administrator in Critical Mass' ongoing unsigned serial academic fiction project:

Chairman Stan insisted that everyone call him Chairman Stan. Whenever anyone addressed him more formally, as Dr. or Professor Drain, he always said, "Let's not stand on ceremony. Call me Chairman Stan. My friends always call me Chairman Stan." Everyone Chairman Stan met was, by virtue of having met him, a friend.

Chairman Stan was the embodiment of cordiality. He always shook the hands and punched the arms of his male colleagues. He always embraced his women colleagues and kissed them on their cheeks.

So cordial was Chairman Stan that he created a party atmosphere wherever he went. He served heady champagne at faculty meetings, kept a dish of nuts on his desk and a well-stocked minibar behind it, and peppered his memos with spirited congenial phrases playfully culled from a range of festive languages: Vamos! Alors! Aloha! Chairman Stan just loved meetings and memos.

But meetings and memos were not enough for a chairman who saw the department as a great ongoing cocktail party and saw himself as its host. During his time as chairman, Chairman Stan had launched several initiatives to enhance departmental culture. There was a weekly happy hour on Thursday afternoon (it had originally been slated for Fridays, but had to be moved since no one, including himself, came to campus on Fridays). There was a fortnightly wine and cheese lecture colloquium designed to display the brilliance of Planckton Hall's prolific faculty to itself and to whatever admiring, awestruck graduate students chose to attend. And once a month there was a dinner party for the faculty and its significant others--Chairman Stan had drawn up a detailed rotating schedule for these dinners, so that one could see at a glance who would be cooking dinner for the department when, and so that one could see when one would oneself be expected to feed the full complement of one's departmental colleagues.

As with any edifice, however, there were certain cracks in Chairman Stan's cordiality. Drinks from his office minibar were only offered to deans and to those endowed chairs whose cooperation could smooth the course of his chairmanship. His handshake was disconcertingly limp; his lips strangely cold. He botched the festive phrases in his festive memos: Basto! he would write at the end of a long memo; Bon journo, he would write at a memo's beginning. He made frequent reference to zeitguest and to tutti frutti, which he seemed to regard not as a flavor, but as a synonym for "asap": "Let's get on this tutti frutti," he would exhort.

These cracks were disturbingly unrevealing, however. Though they exposed some hard truths about Chairman Stan's languid physique and linguistic limitations, they told the observer nothing about his motives, opinions, abilities, or beliefs. They were cracks to nowhere, fissures in a facade so substantial that nothing, not even the sharpest most skeptical scrutiny, could penetrate it.

Chairman Stan was certainly sincere, but no one was sure what he was sincere about. He was definitely in earnest, but about what--besides being earnest--it was hard to say. As such, Chairman Stan was maddening to even his most bureaucratically adept colleagues. He was always around and yet never fully present; he was totally available to meet but unable or unwilling to focus once there. People would have been more comfortable with him if he was simply, clearly false.

No one knew if Chairman Stan was good at his job or bad at it. He acquired the job because no one else wanted it and he kept it because he was willing to keep doing it. What they did know was that whether or not he was capable or competent, he wielded cheer as others would wield a weapon.

Chairman Stan's special administrative genius was to use congeniality not to create a truly warm, welcoming departmental atmosphere, but as an instrument of repression. Complaint and criticism were impossible under his merry regime. The rule of bright smiles and kissy faces made it more than impossible to identify either a lack of leadership or a flagging morale--the rule of bright smiles and kissy faces made it impossible to imagine that such things even existed.

UPDATE 2/10/04: Douglas Bass agrees about Phil Hartmann, and offers further thoughts on casting and genre. Stay tuned for further installments.