I should be editing

but instead I'm going out with several friends who have all recently told the department to shove it. The one thing that truly bothers me about all of this is that my department, which is lead by The Blind, administered by The Incompetent, and supported by The Just Plain Mean, will assume that the students are solely to blame for this. The Blind will shake its head and wonder why the selection committee couldn't see that these students were duds. The Just Plain Mean will whisper just loudly enough for everyone to hear, that these students were dead weight. And nothing will change for The Incompetent, who will proceed to screw up our paychecks yet again. In a department with less than twenty graduate students, the loss of three of them who are smarter and more diligent that I could ever be, who have done everything that should be done: presented papers, been published, received straight "A+"'s, and all of whom are at different stages in their graduate careers would be a cause for alarm. But it won't be. There will be no exit interviews. There will be no reflection on causes for these students' departure beyond "they weren't cut out for it." And meanwhile, the rest of us, who are either able to distance ourselves from the department (by never going there), are studying with The Just Plain Mean (The Blind has lost three of its students in the past year and is on the verge of losing another), or can fool themselves, feel just a bit more demoralized and anaemic because we just lost a good bit a blood when these students walked down the stairs and out the door and no one has a tourniquet.