(Professor Greg was an old hand at departmental politics, but he was also a great scholar. About to die, Greg decided to play a splendid little joke on the "academic community." The story, which carries a subtle overtone of Shavian irony, took place at a fictional university, but the characters are familiar: the smooth and politic department chairman, the impressive "Great Ideas" lecturer with little scholarship in his background, the pale, imitative young instructor. Perhaps the tale is not entirely uninteresting to officers and students of Harvard University...

I

Emeritus Professor Homer Greg was eighty-five, and so far as he or his doctor could tell, he might live to be one hundred and five. He was the despair of the business manager of the University, who month after month for twenty years, had mailed him a retirement check. The business manager himself was sixty-four, and, although he never allowed himself to say so, his having to make out checks for Professor Greg was a piece of unfinished business that he would like to see settled before he himself retired. The gray-haired woman who stamped the cards at the circulation desk in the library held similar sentiments. Three times a week Professor Greg came in with his green cloth book bag, the kind that had been carried by schoolboys in Boston, and took it away bulging with books. Professor Greg, she knew, was a world-famous scholar, but she couldn't understand why he was not content to rest on his laurels. He had several honorary degrees, and if he lived he probably would get even more. What did he want? He couldn't really hope to learn much more, and certainly there were enough young scholars coming along who should be allowed to carry on. When she put his books on the desk for him she used her professional smile in return for his polite bow. She liked the touch of the cosmopolite in his manner, but she did wish he would retire, really retire.

Graduate students in his field knew him. Sitting in cafeterias that bordered the campus or standing in one of the book-stores, they saw him go by, carrying the bag tightly under his right arm.... They knew he was a widower, and that he did his own cooking and his own housework. Occasionally one of the students rang his doorbell late in the afternoon and asked if Professor Greg was free to help him with a research problem on which he was working. Invariably he was invited in and given tea and macaroons, and from some invisible card file in his head Professor Greg listed all of the authorities who might prove useful....

Professor Greg was very thin, and his white skull seemed to be almost visible through the thin layer of skin. In looking at him, one might entertain the fancy that he was a life-like statue. Once a student had said that during his visit with Professor Greg he had somehow felt like posterity itself being able to talk with the living past. He had also said that listening to Professor Greg was like being inland and lying in bed at night listening to the subdued roar of the ocean. This latter remark had reference to the reputation Professor Greg had had as a controversialist. Many years earlier a local reviewer, after interviewing him on the eve of the publication of one of his books, had called him a minotaur who, with his book finished, was wearing his plumed pen gracefully behind his ear. This was journalistic excess, but it was true that Professor Greg had been a formidable antagonist. He was a gentleman, but where fact or a logical inference was concerned, he insisted on the exact truth.

Professor Greg's former department still drew students on the strength of his reputation. In the Graduate Study Room there was an oil painting of him. The face was stern, and one could study it without seeing in the eyes and in the set of the face a great devotion to duty. Beneath the portrait was a shelf of Professor Greg's books.

II

There was a departmental squabble behind the painting and hanging of the portrait and setting up the shelf of books. Both the portrait and the books had been there about ten years. The then, and still, chairman, Allen Briggs, was what is sometimes called an administrator rather than a scholar. Briggs was a dapper man, with a neat dark mustache. One would not have been surprised to learn he was a vice-president of a stocks and bonds company. For the public, or in addressing incoming graduate students, he stressed scholarly achievement; but in the in-fighting, some of it done in deadly silence, he was for what he called compromise, by which he meant giving promotions and substantial raises to the undeserving, so that everyone could attend each other's cocktail parties in the most amicable mood. He was a friendly man, and he wanted everyone to be happy and satisfied. Visiting on another campus or at a national meeting, he smilingly acknowledged the eminence of Professor Greg, but when, ten years earlier, two young assistant professors, admirers of Professor Greg, had suggested a subscription for the portrait and the shelf, he had privately deplored their lack of worldly mindedness.

The two men, John Hall and Charles Ford, were new appointees with brand new Ph.D.'s and with serious plans for their own scholarly achievements. Both men were tall and thin, and both were blond. If a colleague in another department did not know them very well, he might even have mistaken one for the other. During a department meeting, Hall had got up and made a brief but rather passionate speech about Professor Greg, saying he was world-renowned, how proud he was to be teaching a course that Greg had once taught, and how indebted to him everyone in their profession was. He had moved that the members of the department subscribe the necessary funds for a portrait and the shelf. Then he had put his hand through his thin hair and sat down; Ford got up next, made a similar but even briefer speech, seconded the motion, smiled at Hall, and sat down. It was evident they had planned the motion and seconding. A murmur had gone through the twenty-five members of the department, a part of it tense and whispered. Briggs, an old hand at such meetings, sensed a difficult situation. There were full professors present who would not have been full professors if Greg had remained on the staff, and Briggs knew the depth of their dislike and resentment; and they in turn, by innuendo and gesture, had communicated their sentiments to certain younger members of the department. Briggs knew it would not do to allow a discussion, or, above all, a vote. Smiling blandly, he asked Hall and Ford if they would allow him to appoint a committee to study their proposal. His actual words were, "a committee to adjudicate and possibly to implement your proposal." They readily agreed, and Briggs asked for and got a motion for adjournment.

Then there was a meeting of the seven full professors. Again, Briggs was on top of the situation. First he listened patiently to several reasons why the proposal did not make sense.... Brockberg, a stout and voluble man who lectured to large sophomore groups because he generalized easily and had a dramatic manner, said he had heard of a dissertation done at the University of Chicago which seriously questioned the thesis behind one of Greg's best known books. And Coombs, a dour and melancholy man who got his final promotion on the strength of a book he never managed to finish, said bluntly that it was just a sentimental gesture on the part of two overly earnest young men. After a silence, Dickinson, who had once been a student of Greg, spoke. He said quite wistfully that he wished he had been able to emulate Greg. Then with some acidity he added that there could be no question of denying Greg the honor. No one else asked to speak. Professor Briggs, after surveying the group, sighed, then breathed in deeply. "Gentlemen," he said, "I agree with Dickinson. Nor would it do if either the administration or the students learned that Professor Greg's former colleagues declined to pay him this homage. I trust that when the matter comes to a vote you will support it."

When the motion was reintroduced, it passed unanimously.... Walking back to his office, Briggs felt mildly elated. Perhaps Hall and Ford had had a good idea after all. Certainly it did the department no harm for the administration and even the public to know they wished to honor one to whom honor was due.

The ceremony was everything that Professor Briggs could have wished. The chancellor, all of the deans, all the members of the department, many from related departments, and eight visiting notables were present, all of them wearing their caps and gowns and brightly lined doctoral hoods. Three photographers were there flashing pictures. There were several speeches. When the portrait was unveiled, a delighted ripple arose from the group, and then there was prolonged clapping.... Tea and punch were served, Professor Greg was congratulated from all sides, and each of his former colleagues left feeling he had seen the end of an era.

III

Professor Greg did not entirely disappear from the consciousness of...Brockberg, Coombs, or Briggs, but they felt somehow more at ease about him. During one of his lectures, Brockberg found himself telling his sophomores that as cultivated citizens they should know the eminent men their University had produced, and, his tongue faster than his powers of restraint, he included Greg. The following semester he was more careful; his list included no professional scholars.

As the next few years went by, Professors Hall and Ford could be said to have become more knowledgeable.... During the next summer vacation, Ford sent Hall a long letter, saying he had been reading Shaw's Saint Joan. In the epilogue, Shaw had made it clear that the world was pleased enough to have the young lady in legend and in history, but it had no desire to have her or her kind live among them. Ford ended by saying he guessed the saint and the true scholar shared the same fate.