Carpetlayers moved through our department, replacing the threadbare dirty green covering with a strange purple-brown flecked carpet. The whole floor had a chemical smell, and staff who had been skulking in their offices for years were forced to open their doors to air out their rooms. Everyone felt exposed. Discussion in the staffroom began to ask whether the laying of new carpet boded well for the department. Some saw it as a vote of confidence; others of a more cynical nature regarded it as a sign that we were all to be replaced. I wasn’t sure what to think. I wanted to believe we were going to be all right, but the smell and colour of the new carpet struck me as toxic.

At night I lay awake trying to work out where I sat on the scale from ‘indispensable’ to ‘dispensable’. I’d been at the university for longer than many people in the department and was employed full time as a senior lecturer. But I wasn’t an associate professor or a professor, and had never been head of department. I had a great teaching record but my rise through the ranks hadn’t been as quick as that of some of my male colleagues. My publishing record was good but not as prolific or successful as that of two of my closest colleagues: Professor Archer Hall and Associate Professor Jerome Roy.

Archer was older than me, and a real scholar. He was an expert in Early American first-person encounter narratives, those of explorers, missionaries or traders, but he also had an encyclopaedic knowledge and could have lectured on any subject from history through to religion and literature. Archer represented the institutional memory of the department, and his presence was a constant reminder of how much more valuable and flexible a well-read human brain was than a computer search engine. Jerome was younger, a career academic. He’d had great success in getting funding, and as a result had been able to buy out his teaching to further his research and publication record. As Archer once joked, Jerome was the type of guy who picked out all the dried fruit from the muesli packet. I could see Archer’s point but, apart from the odd thoughtless remark, Jerome had been respectful and discreet in his dealings with me. On the other hand, I’d never posed much of a threat to him. Anyway, he was the go-to guy for twentieth-century American literature and could talk for hours about his favourite authors, James Salter and Truman Capote, a strange mixture that somehow worked. Whereas Archer served the old-fashioned concept of academic scholarship and Jerome served twenty-first century academic careerism, I fitted somewhere in the middle, serving students.