For two years I served as Delta State University’s liaison with our regional accreditation organization, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, abbreviated as S-A-C-S C-O-C, which I pronounced Sacks Cock. “Sacks Cock” was not nearly as funny as it might sound. I had so much SACS for two years it nearly killed me.
One day, my provost put a newspaper article on my desk about a SACS liaison at another Mississippi university, who, because of a bad review result, had been fired. I believe this was the provost’s idea of encouragement.
I want to offer you an analogy—a metaphor—for what the SACS process felt like for me. After my best friend in Mississippi, Dorothy, inherited a massive antique piano, she recruited me and 5 or 6 other men to move this piano off of a truck, through her too-narrow front door, and into her living room. The only way to get a good hold on the piano was by its legs—but we had to remove those so we could fit the mammoth thing through the door. I distinctly remember struggling in the doorway, trying to get the right angle to squeeze through, and thinking, “If any one of us loses his grip on this, it’s going to drop; it’s going to crush my feet; it’s going to be wrecked; and we’re never going to be able to pick it up again.” That’s how the SACS process felt.
Or to offer a simile, it was like Olympic downhill skiing. You have to go as fast as you possibly can, but you’re not sure exactly what the wipeout speed is. You have to go through every gate in order, all while screaming down an icy mountain on razor-thin edges at literal breakneck speed. When I say “screaming,” I don’t mean in the sense of “going very fast”; I mean “screeching in terror in the voice of a terrified little girl.”
In the end, we got the piano through the door. We got through all the gates. But it’s not like I can take credit. I’m convinced that my neck was saved not only by several supernatural interventions (That’s another story) but also by my wife—because Carolyn made fun of me. As I drove one van full of visiting evaluators around campus and Carolyn, behind me, drove a second one, I stopped for a minute at our university’s natatorium to call attention to its magnificence. I heard later that the chief SACS staffer in Carolyn’s van had gotten annoyed at the delay and complained, “Why are they stopped?” Carolyn helpfully explained, “Bill can’t drive and talk at the same time.” Her whole van cracked up, and the SACS man couldn’t wait to tell me what my satirical wife had said. When he did tell me, I laughed and said, “That’s true.”
At our exit report, a tense event, the head of the visiting team began by saying, “Everything and everyone here was really excellent … except Bill Spencer.” And then they all looked at me and laughed.
(My thanks to Wildacres Retreat, where this essay was written.)