Dan tried to make it up to Linda for his neglect during the week by spending the entire weekend with her. On Saturday they went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the city and spent the better part of the day there, including lunch at their very nice café. Then they walked South on Fifth Avenue along Central Park to the start of the park, stopping along the way to enjoy the Frick Museum and finally the Lladró Museum and Collector’s Society on West 57th Street before going into Central Park for a long, leisurely stroll. On their way home by subway (Dan hated driving in the city—a feeling that would only grow over time due to the ever-increasing perpetual gridlock and the ubiquitous traffic cameras whose primary purpose is collecting millions in fines for the city to squander along with its revenues from exorbitant sales taxes, income taxes, and real estate taxes), they got off at the Steinway Street stop on the G line and took a long stroll on one of Linda’s favorite shopping areas in Queens, ending up at what was then their favorite full-service Italian restaurant, Villa Gaudio, and is now just a pizzeria. They had a wonderful meal—Veal Parmesan for Dan and Lasagna for Linda with Asti Spumante, Linda’s favorite bubbly--and then took a cab to her home, a five-minute cab ride away.
Sunday, they spent the day at Dan’s apartment lounging around as Dan prepared a meal for them and for their friends the Morells whom they invited for dinner. As always, the four of them enjoyed lively conversation, good food (Dan’s own version of cazuela de mariscos en salsa verde), good wine and the insuperable pleasure of spending time together with friends who know each other so well that they transcend the bonds of friendship and of blood.
The relaxing weekend behind him, Dan readied himself to face what he knew would be another long week. Monday and Tuesday he and Marvin visited four different nursing homes and a small hospital, trying to convince the administrators to allow their students to do practicums there supervised by their teacher. Although one might mistakenly believe that these health care institutions would welcome what amounts to free help, in fact they generally do not as a class of students can result in a significant disruption to what are always busy workplaces under the best of circumstances. Moreover, they pose serious insurance risks for the sponsoring institutions. To put it bluntly, nursing assistant students are a lot more trouble than they’re worth. As a consequence, keeping existing relationships going requires significant time and effort, and securing new relationships when for any reason old ones are broken off is even more challenging. But Dan understood that it was a critically important task for him and for Marvin to be involved with in service of their students.
By Wednesday, Dan had begun to receive a number of applications both from RNs for the nursing assistant teaching position and from individuals seeking the computer-related teaching position. At first, he was impressed by the good response to the ads. That lasted until he began to actually open and read envelopes and review their content. Some of the applications went right into the round file unread—two handwritten resumes, one cover letter with apparent food stains, one with clear wine stains, and many after just a brief scanning due to glaring errors in grammar, punctuation, or formatting. He was astounded at the general incompetence and unprofessionalism of more than a third of the applicants. These people want to teach? He remembered the applicant who simply showed up and insisted on being interviewed. Her resume had also been hand written and gone into the wastepaper basket unread. Dan was anything but a snob and were he recruiting for unskilled labor he would patiently have read all resumes—including the handwritten nearly illegible ones with spelling and grammatical errors—without giving it a second thought. But professionals with a minimum of a baccalaureate degree (a master’s degree was preferred but not required in the qualifications cited in the advertisement for the position) and prior teaching experience who would send in handwritten resumes or food- and wine-stained cover letters? He would not have believed that outside of a bad television comedy—Screwy U or some such.
The remaining pile of applications were as a group unimpressive. Many lacked the bare minimum of a cover letter and a simple one-page chronological or functional resume. He wondered what the applications for his position had been like and shook the thought off. He did not want to know. But he did eventually find six reasonable candidates that he could interview—three of them (two for the nursing position and one for the computer software teaching position) were actually very promising. So, he called all six and scheduled interviews for the following Monday, hoping to make offers and have acceptances before the end of that week.
On Friday, he was pleased that all six candidates actually showed up at their appointed times, and also pleasantly surprised that he had two strong candidates and two backups that he could actually hire once all were interviewed. He invited his two top choices for the positions in question back for a second interview Wednesday—and, with Marvin’s approval, he made them employment offers—the computer processing instructor was told that she would be coming in at first as a stand-by candidate to cover classes when needed as a substitute for colleagues who had to miss work and also to teach the dBase III portion of the new program. Dan also mentioned that at least one additional section of the course was likely to be added in the near future and that at that time there was a possibility of the position becoming full-time with benefits, something that appealed to the applicant. The nursing instructor, a young man who had earned his RN just three years ago but had relevant teaching experience at a competing proprietary business school, was likewise offered the job and accepted.
Ms. Abigay Brown, the new computer processing instructor, was a thin, regal woman of perhaps 30 years of age with a charming Jamaican accent and genteel manner, whom he immediately liked. She had experience teaching an introduction to computer processing class at La Guardia Community College in Long Island City, and also working at a competing proprietary school in Brooklyn, where she lived. She was open to working full time at PEMTI and abandoning her part time position at the closer business school in Brooklyn. Dan thought himself lucky to be able to snap her up before his counterpart at the Brooklyn school could offer her a full-time position.
The RN candidate, Mongo Okonkwo, was a very reserved, thin, and short African American young man, probably in his late 20s who showed up at the interview impeccably dressed in a dark pinstriped suit looking much more like a corporate lawyer than a nurse. His answers were short and to the point and he carried himself with an air of aloofness that Dan hoped was simply self-consciousness and nerves rather than arrogance. He conducted himself perfectly during both interviews and Dan was pleased to welcome him onboard, offering him the position, with Marvin’s blessing, after his second interview.
Both candidates were able to start work on the following Monday, so Dan was pleased that the new class would be able to begin as originally scheduled. The maximum number of applicants that could be enrolled at any one time given the limitations of their sole PC lab was 20, and that number was reached quickly the week after the media advertisements had. The same was true, according to Marvin, at all the sister schools. The program was expected to be a huge success.
After the shakeup that occurred in the week following the approval of Dan’s new program, several deans had lost their positions either through resignations or termination, including the “senior dean” at the flagship school and two of the six directors. Dan had been awarded the unofficial title of “senior dean” without the seniority and without any increased compensation. With it came the responsibility of training and mentoring the newly appointed deans and serving as a resource for the ones who had managed to keep their jobs. He had made it clear to Marvin—again he had not been contacted directly by either Melamed to “communicate” his ascension in rank—that he was willing to take on the role for the good his colleagues and of their students, but that he had absolutely no intention of ever traveling to the other schools to do any mentoring, program reviews or anything else related to helping with or evaluating the other school’s programs. They would need to travel to him for training and any other type of support required, but he would make himself available by phone at any time to help them in any way he could beyond any initial one or two days mentoring as had been done for him by Howard Green his first day at the Manhattan school. That was quickly agreed to, and Dan became the go-to person for the other deans, initially for an orientation to the popular new program, for all newly hired deans, and then as a general resource. He grew to like all of his PEMTI academic dean colleagues, two of whom, hired after the reorganization he had unintentionally caused, were his own age or younger.
Two months after starting at PEMTI, he had been lionized, pissed off to the point of nearly quitting, “promoted” without additional compensation to a new role as senior dean with additional responsibilities extending beyond his own school, and beginning to once again have some real satisfaction from his job, though serious issues about what he viewed as an obsession with the bottom line and lackadaisical concern for the quality of the education provided to students was still grating on him and he knew that there was little he could do about it other than lead by example and support his own faculty and his peers at the other schools to the best of his ability, or leave.
The week that the new program finally became a reality, and the first class began their three-month program, Marvin called Dan to his office telling him there was something he wanted to discuss. It was unusual for Marvin to summon him as he usually simply stopped by Dan’s office just as Dan went to see him as needed, seldom checking to see if he was available or asking for an appointment. If he went by and Marvin had someone in the office, which was rare, he’d just leave and return at another time. They had an excellent working relationship and respected one another which was very important to Dan who for the rest of his career refused to long serve under leadership he lost respect for or whose policies he could not work to change when they represented too much of a departure from what he considered reasonable—seeds planted during his days at PEMTI.
