ABSTRACT
In the 1972–1973 academic year, I was acting dean of the School of Humanities at Fresno State College (as California State University, Fresno was then called). That spring, I asked my department chairs to submit to me their budget requests for the following year so I could prepare the School of Humanities budget, which I would then send to the vice president’s office. All the departments met my deadline—except for Art. “Typical,” I thought with frustration. By now I’d come to suspect the truth of the stereotype that artists were hopeless about doing practical things, yet such things had to be done to keep a college department running. When I received a phone call from the vice president’s office telling me that my school’s budget was overdue, I stormed over to the Art Department, furious that they were making me look bad. I confronted the Art Department chairman, who told me that he simply hadn’t had a chance to prepare the budget himself and that a few days earlier he’d assigned the preparation to one of his faculty members. The chairman offered to introduce me to that person, so I could be reassured that the budget was indeed being prepared. He led me into a studio room where, perched on a tall stool at a drafting table, was a young woman who looked like Eva Marie Saint. She was working calmly but assiduously at lists of figures that could only be the long-awaited budget. She graciously promised that I would have the budget in hand before the day was over—and I did. What she submitted to me was a model of clarity and good sense.
