Dana, from the git-go, felt like she was above the rules. Her pronunciation was to not ask for permission, but ask for forgiveness. I found her ethics difficult to follow. I realized early-on that she was only at this university because her father was a well regarded polymer scientist. She was an intellectual shell. It had to be hard for her father and mother to discover that they had bred a child who was simply a shell of what this couple had hoped their daughter would be.

For them, fortunately, USM was not a place built on academic success. Shelby found a way to get his daughter into the system (through the cronies of Carolyn Reeves Kazelskis and Mark Richmond – whose own mediocrices would make them glaring examples of everything connected to what’s worse in academia)

OOH baby, this is going to be good.