Float On

The waving hands and smiling faces that rode on the back of the luxury convertible around the football field before the game prompted the two wavers and smilers to chuckle. Armisen Linser did not wave or laugh. He was in his office scrambling.

“Arms, we had a good run,” Kelida Kommen reassured him.

“But they’re taking everything from me. They’re burning it all down to the ground. Scorched earth.”

Kalinda sighed. “We have the trust.”

“No, we don’t. That’s been taken, too.”

“The Trust?”

“Yes.”

“Goddamn,” she said.

“They’re revamping the entire thing. The new president will be installed next July, a week before the students enter these buildings. And I’m chopped. You’re chopped. We’re a couple of invalids,” he muttered.

“I’m not going to let you talk us down like that. We’re still capable. If the private sector wants to take our jobs, so be it. We can be in government. We can—”

“Be in parks services or sanitation. That’s what we’ll amount to then. I had power. Real power. Those donations from alumni propelled my agenda forward. They said I was worth something. The government funds were easy. We just got those. But the alumni? They were committed. Now with this whole do over of the colleges and universities, we’re approaching a completely different set of rules. Ugly rules.”

Kelinda tapped her keypad on her tablet.

“I know,” she said. “We can petition the governors of the states. They most likely went to the schools where the funds will be taken out, including this one. They should listen to us. If anybody, it should be us. We’ve been doing this for thirty years.”

“Yes, I know,” he said quietly.

“We’ll just have to get them to reverse the decision. This will be like desegregation. Once we open the gates then trans kids and non binaries can rush the gates.”

Linser sighed and then grunted. “It was a sure thing. Government money and on top of that donations. We had a sure thing going on here. We both knew that we had to keep this thing going and then…” he made a sign of his fingers exploding in midair.

“We don’t have to go down knowing we can tussle…in the courts. New Sweden is lucky to be in a state with chancery courts. They’ll be generous in their way. They’ll know that we’ll be on a chow line if we don’t get our next job.”

“Next job? I’m retiring to Fenwick. There’s too much cod out there for me not to snap up in my boat.”

“Be serious, Arms. We have to plan for the long run. If we float on the wind to any breeze we could end up like a wastrel.”

“They stopped the money and expect us to go on with the meager amount of misfits who just want to act like radicals and extremists. The alumni that were giving money did it happily, willfully. Now, it is a complete shambles. One alumnus talked to another and they drained us. Like blood seeping from a dying body, we just soaked. In the worst way.”

Kalinda kept looking for solutions, knowing there was none. She kept tapping, nervously on her tablet.

“I know what we can do,” she beamed.

“We can create our own University. Shit, all you need is a .edu and you just fill out some forms. We can name it Linser and Kommen College. We can worry about accreditation later down the line. But this is something. To hell with the government! To hell with alumni! We can have subscribers like it’s a goddamn Internet video.”

Linser perked up a bit. “Say, that’s something. We can just charge a fee like a streaming service and give out degrees like STIs and make sure the idea is just as spreadable. Goddamn, Kalinda. It’s brilliant!”