As it was Cody and Jan weren’t quite done with fixing up the apartment when Susan returned from Spearfish Lake, but they were close enough that it didn’t matter much. There were a couple places where she had to be careful of the paint, and Cody was still picking up tools while Jan was cleaning up debris from the renovation work. Even after the long drive, Susan didn’t mind pitching in to clean up the loose ends; Cody and Jan returned the favor by helping her unload her car.

Fortunately it was Friday, so that gave Susan all weekend to unpack, get things organized and comfortable, and figure out what she needed to buy in order to get along for a while. She didn’t want to worry about those issues while she was trying to get her feet under her in her first days on the job.

Most of the furniture in the apartment was serviceable, though the couch had reached the point of having seen too many better days, and the mattress as Cody and Jan had warned wasn’t very good. What was worse, it was very soft. Susan preferred a firm one and figured she might as well be comfortable after the crappy mattress she and Theo had shared in Chengdu. That didn’t take long to solve, and Cody was happy to haul her new mattress and box springs with his pickup truck. Though the apartment still smelled of fresh paint, Susan slept comfortably in her new bed that Friday evening.

Saturday was more shopping, mostly for food and some items needed around the apartment. It appeared a couple of boxes had been misplaced, probably in the attic of Susan’s parents’ home in Spearfish Lake, so the kitchen needed some filling out. By Sunday morning things were mostly in order, though not quite finished. Even though the apartment was going to be a little Spartan compared to the way she and Mizuki had lived in this building, there was a great part of Susan’s mind that told her that she’d come home – her home, not her parents’ home. There was, of course, a sense of déjà vu since she had indeed been there before.

Sunday, Susan had things organized enough that she decided to not spend the day fiddling with the apartment – it was good enough for now. Instead, she spent most of the day on the new couch, with her new computer on her lap as she prowled the Southern Michigan University website, not just the public part but at least some of the parts open to administrators. She didn’t have the access codes for everything, and some things, especially involving student’s personal data, were tightly guarded. She hoped to get caught up on what had changed since she’d been gone and try to get a running start on what she would have to do on Monday.

Of particular interest were the plans for the orientation of incoming freshman, which bore directly on her job. She could find nothing for this year at all, although there was plenty from the previous year. She did find the current information packet for incoming freshmen – from the dates on the files it had to have been on the website for a while. Her immediate impression was that it reflected pretty well what she knew the reality of the place to be, but somehow it didn’t exactly strike her that the new freshmen were adequately warned about how hard they would be hit by their classes.

That had been a problem clear back when she’d come to Southern. Hardly anyone, including her, had been prepared for just how fast and how hard things would come at them. New freshmen had to hit the ground running or fall behind quickly. Fortunately, most of the new freshmen were serious about their career goals, so had basic knowledge that helped them over the hump, but there were always slackers who thought they could skate through the place, and they would either learn to adapt or be gone the next year, if not sooner.

The last chance the administration had to warn the new students of just how hard they would have it and how seriously they would have to work to keep up was the series of new student orientation sessions just before classes started. Susan remembered not taking them quite seriously enough, and then the shock of finding out just how wrong she’d been. There was no doubt in her mind that this hadn’t changed.

Still, it was curious that there were no plans on file, at least that she could get to, about orientation for this year’s new students. However, she had her suspicions about it, since in the past the orientation had been largely, though not totally, carried out by the Dean of Students’ office. If that was the case this year – and there was no reason to think differently – it seemed likely deRidder was the reason for the lack of visible planning. Could it be some of the empire building Dr. Thompson had warned her about? Or could it be that deRidder just didn’t understand the importance of the new student orientation? That was entirely possible, since like in many other areas, things were different at Southern Michigan University than they were elsewhere.

Just about the first thing she would have to do, she decided, was to figure out what was actually happening with that, and then take her suspicions to Dr. Thompson if they even looked close to being correct. She really didn’t want to start her time here by making waves, but damn it, this was important!

Bright and early on Monday morning she was back at Dr. Thompson’s office in T-Hall. Wonder of wonders, this time his secretary was actually there, Natalie Johnston, a woman Susan had never met. However, when Susan introduced herself, she was told that Dr. Thompson had been expecting her, and to go right in.

“Well, Susan,” he smiled when he saw her. “I take it you made it back all right and are ready to go to work.”

“It was kind of a quick trip, but I think I managed everything I had to do,” she replied, deciding immediately that she shouldn’t get into the orientation question until after she’d figured out what actually was going on. “Have you worked out where my office is going to be?”

“I’m afraid it’s going to have to be in the conference room for the time being,” Dr. Thompson smiled. “I’ve decided it would be best to have you downstairs in what used to be the Public Relations office, but we still have to move them up here, and I think maintenance will have to spruce the place up a bit before you move in. I doubt you’ll be in there before the end of the week, and that might even be pushing it. Go draw your laptop from Computer Support, and get yourself logged in and authorized. You’re to have level “A” access and should have it when your machine is configured. Then you might as well get yourself set up in the conference room next door and start work on defining your job.”

It took Susan close to an hour to draw her computer at the Computer Support office, located in the basement of the Community Services Center building. She knew where it was, of course; the building had been opened in her freshman year on campus. It dealt with a number of different computer services for the campus, most important of which was maintenance and operation of the campus-wide network and the servers that supported it. However, it also was responsible for the university-owned computers like Susan had to draw, and also provided emergency repairs for student computers at cost. That section was open twenty-four hours a day, because computers were critical for students the way the campus was organized, and a student could easily fall behind in their class work if their computers got sick on them.

Susan’s computer was brand new; it had been set up and loaded with the basic administrative software she would need, but configuring her machine and getting her the access she was supposed to have took some convincing of the network authorizations. That involved the help of one of the techs, who also helped her get the same access set up on the little notebook computer she’d bought a few days before. Finally, everything was up and running; Susan put her new university computer in its fitted carrying bag, slung it over her shoulder, and headed back to T-Hall.

From the moment she sat down at the antique table in the conference room – it had to date back to well before the end of Hawthorne College, fifty or sixty years anyway – she had plenty to do. Although the orientation issue was important, she’d spent much of her time on her drive up to Spearfish Lake and then back again thinking about the job descriptions of the various positions she’d been handed. After only a short mental review, she decided she’d better get her thoughts on those keyboarded, before other issues clouded some of the nuances of her thinking.

Partly from having been brought up in a newspaper family and working at the paper off and on from clear back into elementary school, Susan was a good typist and a good writer. She didn’t have to agonize over what she wrote; she could just go ahead and write it, a skill that had been of use to her from time to time over the years, especially when she had been a student here. In an hour she had a rough-cut for descriptions of all four jobs, though they were thin in places and there were issues that she noted would have to be clarified.

With that done, she turned to the plans for new student orientation. When looking at the plans the day before she’d had access to only what the public could see, so it seemed likely that the new plans were behind some firewall she hadn’t been able to get through. With her “A” access she figured they’d be easy to find.

But no. Even with her higher level of access, she couldn’t find anything but the old files she’d seen the day before. That seemed strange to her; this close to the orientation sessions they should have been available to the administrators involved with the process. It was possible, she supposed, that since deRidder was new to the university that he hadn’t handled the tagging and filing procedures properly, so she started to work with the server’s search engine to see if she could find any recent files that contained one of several keywords. After several minutes she still hadn’t found anything new.

She was concentrating at the screen, trying to figure out a strategy to find the file, when she heard Dr. Thompson’s friendly voice: “So, Susan, how’s it going?”

“I’m just getting started,” she told him. “But this is strange. I can find plenty of files for plans for last year’s new student orientation, but nothing for this year.”

“You’re right, that’s strange. I know I’ve talked to Charles several times about them. Since he’s new here, I told him to just take last year’s plan and tweak it a little as needed. The last time we talked about it, he said it was going fine.”

“I have no way of telling,” she replied. “I haven’t had to deal with new student orientation for several years now, but I would have thought that by this time the plans would have been nearly completed and disseminated to the departments involved.”

“You’re right,” he nodded. “It could be that Charles just doesn’t understand the procedures we have here, but then, he is still getting his feet under him. It’s not like those plans are any huge secret. They have to be open for review and comment. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I’ll have to look into it.”

“I’d appreciate it, Dr. … uh, Mark.” It was hard to think of Dr. Thompson by his first name, and she figured it was going to take a while to get used to it.

Dr. Thompson ignored the slip. “So how’s everything else going?”

“I have first drafts of my job descriptions,” she told him. “I’m afraid they’re just first cuts, and are going to need a lot of work to refine them.”

“Send me a copy of what you’ve done so far,” he told her. “I’ll take a glance at them and see if you’re somewhere near what I’m thinking.”

“I’ll be glad to have your input,” she replied. “I could be way off track and not realize it.”

“That’s why things have to be open for review and comment right from the beginning,” he said. “It’s like this orientation issue. If the plans are off on the wrong foot, the time to catch it is in the beginning. I’ll look into the question about the orientation plan and get back with you on it.”

It only took Susan a moment after Dr. Thompson left to send her rough drafts of the job descriptions to his e-mail. It was clear that there was no point in spending any more time worrying about the student orientation plan at the moment, so she turned to getting down some of her thoughts about how the University Ombudsman would have to operate. It would be considerably different than how she’d done it informally as a student, when other students had come to her mostly because she had a reputation for being able to get results on problems around campus.

She knew from that experience that even given great powers, there was a limit to what the ombudsman could do. Back in her days as a student, some of the questions that had been brought to her had been things like problems with parents, boyfriend-girlfriend problems, and other personal issues; while she could give advice and had in the past, such things would usually not be any of the university’s business. Perhaps some sort of a student personal affairs counselor would be a good idea, but it would take a little bit of experience to know for sure; somehow Susan thought the ombudsman shouldn’t be a “Dear Abby” handing out advice on personal issues.

Similarly, there obviously was a limit to what she could do on instructor-student issues. If a student thought their instructor – not necessarily a professor, since Southern employed many adjuncts – was being too hard on them, about the best Susan could do was to make sure that the student was receiving fair and equal treatment compared to others in the class. She knew very well it was not an uncommon complaint from students who found themselves more challenged than they expected. There was little fixing she could do, other than telling the student to get with the program and do the work required.

“You were smart enough to get accepted here – are you smart enough to keep up and stay in school here too?”

Such problems were better settled directly between the instructor and the student, but one of the problems Susan remembered was that the many adjuncts at the university had only limited office hours, and no offices. Even getting a student and an instructor together to work things out could be a problem. Dealing with that was something to be addressed creatively, but it was a long-standing problem and probably wasn’t going to go away soon.

On the other hand, the purpose of the ombudsman was to help the students make successes of themselves at Southern, and as far as she could see the real purpose of the job, from the university’s viewpoint, was to improve student retention rates. It was clear that the ombudsman would be poking into a lot of different issues, some of which she hardly could imagine.

She was typing along, exploring how she would have to approach some of those issues, when the computer chimed “New Mail.” She opened the e-mail, discovering it was from Dr. Thompson: Skim the attached file and let me know your opinion as quickly as possible.

Curious, she opened the attachment, which was titled 2011 Fall New Student Orientation. It had to be deRidder’s plan, and she was surprised to discover that it was only a couple of pages long, filled with banalities. It seemed to totally ignore the real message of the orientation: that the students were going to be facing a difficult and non-traditional learning experience, and that they were going to have to get with the program quickly or be left behind. In only a couple of minutes she shot an e-mail back to Dr. Thompson: This is totally inadequate. I see no indication that the 2010 plan was even consulted.

Within seconds she received a reply: Make sure the volume on your laptop is turned up to where you can hear it. This may take a few minutes. That was a curious response, she thought. She sat watching the computer screen for a moment, then went back to working on her thoughts about how to structure the ombudsman position.

It was ten or fifteen minutes before she saw the “IM” symbol flash up on her computer screen. “Good morning, Dr. Thompson,” deRidder’s voice came over the speaker. “How are you today?”

“Not too bad,” she heard Dr. Thompson reply. “How are you?” This is going to be interesting, she thought – Dr. Thompson was bugging this conversation for her benefit! She pulled up a fresh file on her word processor in case she felt she needed to take some notes.

“To be honest, I’m wondering if you have some problem with the plans for new student orientation I sent to you a few minutes ago.”

“I’m afraid I do,” Dr. Thompson said. “In fact, I have several problems with them, the first one being that I had to ask you to send them to me in the first place. Charles, I realize that you’re new here and may not understand that we do things a little differently than other places. Those plans should have been published for staff review, comment and consultation a month ago. New student orientation is very important around here, much more so than at other universities and we need to make sure we don’t miss anything. As it is, we are very, very far behind schedule, with the new student orientation coming up rapidly.”

“I was under the impression that the new student orientation was to be a function of my office.”

“Then I’m afraid you have the wrong impression. Several departments have a part in it, not just the Dean of Students’ office. Surely you saw that when you consulted the plan from last year.”

“I’m aware that there are other departments that have some involvement,” deRidder backpedaled. “I assumed they had their own plans.”

“But you don’t know for sure, and don’t know what they are, I take it? Charles, new student orientation is one of the most critical factors in a student making a success of himself here, so we have to take a great deal of care that they are not left with the wrong impression. That is why in the past there has been a coordinated effort to present the new students with the facts they need to know to survive here. This is not a liberal arts college where new students start out with simple, easy courses for the first year or more so they can slowly get used to college-level work. We don’t have that much time. Even the best students here are expected to be operating at a high level in their chosen fields from day one. In general we try to admit students we feel are capable of that level of work, but they need to be aware that they are not going to have it easy. This plan …” there was a brief silence “… gives no indication of that simple fact. It’s mostly a ‘feel-good, welcome to Southern, we want to try to make your stay here as easy and painless as possible’ plan. That is not the message we want to present at all.”

“The old plan seemed a little, well, harsh, to me,” deRidder replied. “New students on campus have many new things to face, and I felt that they should be more warmly welcomed.”

“Believe me, Charles, our experience here tells us otherwise. We try to make sure the students are prepared for what they’re going to be facing, and the truth is a cold, hard one. This is not the typical liberal arts school where students are prepared for careers in fast-food service. We are very technical and career oriented, and we want our students to make successes of themselves. Telling them that things are going to all be sweetness and light like this plan indicates is doing a major disservice to them.”

Boy, that’s telling him, Susan smiled to herself as she listened to deRidder say, “Well, I suppose I can take it back and work on it a little.”

“I think not,” Dr. Thompson replied. “Bluntly, Charles, we’re out of time on this one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not faulting you on this one. It just appears that you haven’t had the time to understand how this place works yet. That’s understandable, since you haven’t yet seen it working and how well it works compared to other institutions. In any case, now we’re going to have to play catch-up. What I’m going to do is to take this year’s new student orientation out of your hands and set up a special task force to get it going quickly. That task force will be made up of representatives from the various departments involved, including the Dean of Students’ office. The chairman of that task force will report directly to me and base their work on last year’s plan. There are a few changes that will have to be made, some additions and corrections, but last year’s plan will provide them a good place to start.”

“So you’re totally ignoring my work on this?”

“I’m afraid I have to. This is totally inadequate and obviously ignores the institutional experience reflected in last year’s plan. The chairman of the task force will be the new Student Relations Coordinator.” Oh, shit, Susan thought as Dr. Thompson went on. “I realize she’s young and new to the position, but she’s a graduate of this university, has experience with teaching elsewhere, and most importantly she understands how things are done here. I’ve worked with her in the past on several issues when she was a student, and I have confidence she’ll be able to handle this one.”

Oh, boy, Susan thought, shaking her head. I’ll bet he doesn’t like that one bit!

“It’s your call, I guess,” deRidder said. “But I’ll admit that since I heard about this new position being named that I was surprised it wasn’t placed in the Dean of Students’ office. Student Relations sounds like a function of my office.”

“It wasn’t my intent to touch off a turf battle,” Dr. Thompson replied. “The simple fact of the matter is that Student Relations is going to be only one of the functions Miss McMahon is going to be handling, and most of them probably won’t have much to do with the Dean of Students’ office. Two of the other functions actually fall under Institutional Development, and in some of them I want her reporting directly to me. Let me put it another way, Charles: Miss McMahon is going to be my personal utility infielder around here, and my intent is to have her available to deal with special problems as they come up. Many of those won’t involve your office, so there is no need for her reporting to you. As far as the Student Relations position goes, I’ve directed her to concentrate on the problems of new students adapting to this institution. Again, since she’s been through the mill here, she knows how things work.”

“I still think a function of that nature should be in my office. It takes such things out of my hands, and out of the normal channels. How am I supposed to know what her limits and mine are to be?”

“That’s something we have to work out,” Dr. Thompson replied. “Look, you have your hands full enough as it is with your regular functions, capped off by the fact that you still need to learn how we do things here. This arrangement for the new student orientation is temporary and intended to lighten your load a bit while we make sure all things are done as they need to be. When you stop to think about it, I’m sure you’ll be grateful it’s being done this way.”

“I don’t like it, but it’s your decision to make.”

“That it is, and I expect you to cooperate with her when she asks your assistance and not get into a hissy fit about it. I expect there will be a directive naming the members of the task force within the next few hours. You would be well advised to sit in on that task force, since you might learn something useful, but you won’t in charge of it. I’ll ask Miss McMahon to keep you in the loop.”

“If that’s what you want, I guess that’s how it’s going to have to be. Is that all you wanted?”

“For now, anyway. Like I said, look at this as an opportunity to lighten your load and learn how we do things at Southern.”

No shit, Susan thought as the speaker went dead. That was a lesson for me, too.

It was a couple minutes before an IM message flashed on her computer screen: Come on over here. Susan was in Dr. Thompson’s office within a minute. “I take it you heard all that,” he smiled. “It would save time if I didn’t have to repeat it.”

“Nothing like being in the middle of an office politics war on the first day on the job! Who was it that said, ‘War is an extension of politics?’”

“I’m hoping it won’t turn into that. Don’t step on his toes if you can help it, Susan. I hope the two of you will learn to work together rather than against each other.”

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