The Faculty Council discussed the Expos proposal at seven different meetings from December to March. It invited a series of guest who know something about Expos to come to council meetings and discuss the proposal; Slingerland and Evans came twice to plug the proposal, and at one meeting in January, five Expos teachers and three freshmen generally criticized it. By February, the Faculty Council was becoming increasingly skeptical of the proposal, largely because most council members felt strongly that all freshmen should be required to take Expos.
By the second week of March, it had become clear to Slingerland that the council was going to reject the Expos proposal. On Friday, March 8, she got a letter from John B. Fox Jr. '57, secretary to the Faculty Council and Rosovsky's administrative assistant for council business. Fox asked to meet with Slingerland the following Monday to discuss the Expos proposal.
Monday at 3 p.m., Fox and Slingerland met, and Fox showed her figures on average Expos class sizes. The overcrowding of the classes was the main selling point of the exemption proposal; Slingerland had said all along that most Expos classes had well over 20 students, and had cited 15 as the ideal class size. So when Fox told her that he had calculated the average Expos class size to be about 17.5 students, he took a lot of the clout out of her argument.
"I'm terrible at arithmetic." Slingerland says. "Fox asked me if we had a calculator, and of course we didn't. Like a fool, I couldn't prove to him what was wrong with that 17.5. Because it's very complicated."
After she finished talking to Fox, Slingerland called up Dean Rosovsky's office and made an appointment for the next day.
On Tuesday, March 12, Dean Rosovsky had a full schedule--12 personal appointments. At 8:45 a.m., he met briefly with Fox, and then at 9 a.m. he spent an hour with Evans. Toward the middle of the day, Slingerland talked to Evans about his meeting with Rosovsky, and he told her there would be no exemptions in Expos next year. At 5:30 p.m., Slingerland had her meeting with Rosovsky. "He listened to what I had to say," she says, "and in the end, he told me there would be no exemptions. I told him that under these circumstances, I had to offer my resignation."
The next morning, Slingerland typed out her resignation and gave it to Evans, and that afternoon, the council met and accepted Rosovsky's recommendation that it reject the Expos proposal. Evans said, quietly, that he disapproved of the decision, and asked Slingerland not to reveal her resignation yet--so the next day, Thursday, she told a Crimson reporter that the council's decision was "the last straw," but that while she was thinking of resigning, she had not done it yet.
The next night, Slingerland was in Northampton listening to a performance of Bach's B-minor mass when she realized something. "After I'd made an ass of myself all that week, I saw that I, and it seems possible Fox and Rosovsky, had made a mistake on the averages," she says. "It turns out that lower-level Expos classes average about 19.6 and middle-level about 16.9."
That revelation did not do Slingerland much good. Two days later, the Standing Committee on Expository Writing accepted her resignation, effective July 1. She had not succeeded in changing the Expos program at all, but her crusade had annoyed council members and Expos instructors no end.
"All I did," she said last week, wearily drawing on a cigarette, "was shift some of my accountability to where it rests. But I was the fool. I blew it. The Dean knows more than I do."