By mid-afternoon nothing had changed. I'd had to tell my story or parts of it at least a dozen times more. A few people hadn't heard, a few more wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth, a few from the horse's ass, a few had follow-up questions, and a few just wanted to hear me tell it all over again. The grade change ignited new debate. Right or wrong? I was hardly sure myself. But on Tuesday morning the college vice president of customer satisfaction met me at my cubicle. Wyatt had shown up unexpectedly at his parents' home, they had called Dr. Provident, and he had spoken with Wyatt by phone.

"He's back on his medication," Dr. Provident told me. "He sounded normal."

"That's good."

"I told him that Mr. Skank had changed his grade to B."

"And?" I prompted.

"He said he wanted the B only if Mr. Skank honestly and sincerely believed he had earned it."

I laughed.

"I told him that you had reconsidered his grade and that that was in fact the case."

"Fine."

"Wyatt also asked me to thank you for reconsidering and to apologize to you for the way he behaved. I made it very clear to Wyatt that he had seriously messed up, that he had frightened a lot of good, decent, caring people, and that for the time being he was no longer welcome here on campus."

The two of us looked at each other. In spite of everything we had lost, and a lot had been lost, both of us were relieved. In the long aftermath, however, it was the vice president's phrase "for the time being" that emerged as the one detail most difficult to swallow. Several faculty believed Wyatt should be not in a mental institution but in jail and for a long long time. Even the liberals thought Wyatt should be expelled and permanently barred from the college. I certainly did. But our society had not devised an effective way of coping with the mentally ill. Perhaps none exists. Merely threatening to kill someone, I learned, was not a crime. The prohibition against the making of "terroristic threats," like the prohibition against stalking, did not come to pass until some years later; and though Wyatt could have been arrested for lesser crimes perhaps, he would not be charged, we learned, since as a man certifiably insane he could not aid in his own defense and thus could not be tried. Our hands, it seemed, were tied.

Okay. If the criminal justice system were unable to sanction Wyatt, then perhaps the college could. Several faculty demanded that Wyatt be denied admission to the college—ever—and circulated a petition to that effect and presented it to the college vice president of customer satisfaction. But even this action, which seemed to most instructors both simple and proper, proved to be impossibly complicated. The college was a public institution. Wyatt had been convicted of no crime. His expulsion and permanent exile were a violation of his civil rights. The college might be sued or so the story went. Who knew whether this combination of fiction, fact, and gossip was reliable? I had ninety new students to orient to four courses of study, likewise my colleagues on the faculty. Who had time now to make the sensitive, private, independent inquiries necessary to understand so complex a predicament? Not my colleagues and not I. Despite our angry suspicions and doubts, we had no other choice but to rely upon the organization for our information.

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INSANITY to be continued