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Elf Academy Part Deux  by Fiondil

3: Trouble Looming

Late July:

Glorfindel looked up at the knock on his door and smiled. "Marian. What can I do for you?"

Marian Goodfellow, once the head administrator of Elf Academy, now acting as Glorfindel’s liaison with the governing board of directors of the Northern Lights Community College, entered the Elf-lord’s office and took a seat. She was a tall woman, with ash blond hair held in a tight bun and ice-blue eyes.

"We may have a problem," she said without preamble.

"And that being?"

"As you are probably aware, Northern Lights Community College is accredited through the Alaska Commission on Colleges and Universities or the ACCU as it is generally called." Glorfindel nodded. "Yes, well. While the college is accredited, Elf Academy is not."

Glorfindel frowned. "What do you mean? It is part of the college. Would not the college’s accreditation cover the Academy as well?"

"Yes, it would and it will but at the moment it only has a preliminary accreditation. When a college or university creates a new school — and as whimsical as ‘Elf Academy’ sounds it’s legal name is the School of Tourism — there is a two-year probation before the ACCU comes in to check on the new school to see that it conforms with the criteria for formal accreditation. Well, that two-year grace period is up for us and members of the ACCU will be coming to Wiseman over the course of a couple of weeks or so to check up on us."

"And you think that may cause a problem."

"It may. I am not entirely sure. When we set up the Academy we filed a form with the ACCU that outlines the purpose of the Academy, its administrative structure, the nature of the courses, the types of teachers we were hiring and their qualifications to teach the courses we would be offering and other pertinent information. Almost like a... a flight-plan to let the ACCU know in which direction we were heading." She gave him a mirthless smile. "Well, to continue the analogy, we’ve veered off-course a tad and the air traffic controllers will not be happy about it."

Glorfindel raised an eyebrow but did not immediately reply. Instead, he gazed out the window of his office, a window that looked out onto the Brooks Mountain Range. Finally, he turned back to Marian sitting patiently, waiting for his response. "And you were going to tell me all this when?"

"I think I just did."

"I mean, it never occurred to you to tell me this when we began restructuring the curriculum and changing the focus of this Academy?"

"To tell you the truth, I didn’t think about it," she said ruefully. She gave him a small smile. "I think I was in a continual state of shock for most of last year. Too much change all at once and I was trying to adapt."

"And you’ve done so beautifully," Glorfindel assured her. "And I apologize. My question was uncalled-for. You and the others have done a great job in helping us. Daeron is probably the only one who’s had actual experience in working within a college setting."

"You never went to college?" Marian couldn’t help asking with a sly grin.

Glorfindel laughed. "Not in the way you mean," he replied. "The last time I formally attended any type of higher education was in Paris." He gave her a winning smile. "I was rather fascinated by the teachings of a certain young Dominican friar by the name of Thomas."

Marian blinked. "Er... you don’t mean... um... Thomas Aquinas?"

Glorfindel nodded, his eyes bright with amusement.

"Oh," was all Marian could think to say. Then she blushed under Glorfindel’s regard. "It’s so easy sometimes to forget that you’re old... I mean...."

"It’s all right, Marian," Glorfindel said sympathetically. "Immortality does have its drawbacks. But getting back to the accreditation, what precisely are we looking at? How thorough are they? What happens if they don’t grant us accreditation?"

"Well we don’t stop functioning, if that’s what you’re afraid of. Accreditation is merely a means by which the public is told that a particular institution abides by certain standards with regard to teaching and administration. A prospective student looks and sees that the school meets these standards of excellence and is recognized by the state as being a legitimate institution of higher education and not a fly-by-night operation whose diploma isn’t worth the paper it’s written on."

"And you think that Elf Academy might be in danger of not receiving this accreditation."

"There is that possibility. I’m not saying it’s a done deal, only that we must tread carefully. Thanks to you and your friends, our mandate has changed."

"Perhaps, but really, we haven’t changed it that much, yet," Glorfindel pointed out. "This school still is in the business of training people for the tourist industry. Specifically, to be tour guides during the winter season. Not everyone who comes here will stay or will be aware of what is actually happening. They will leave here with the ability to act as a tour guide in almost any situation if they desire to remain in the tourism industry."

"Our original purpose was to train people specifically for this region and for the winter season, though some of the safari companies and resorts are seeing increased activity during other times of the year. It had always been my goal, once Elf Academy was firmly established, to expand the curriculum to a one-year degree program and add courses in tourism administration, training people not only to be tour guides, but to be able to act as tourist agents and managers of tourist companies, that sort of thing. Rather than awarding our students with a certificate of completion at the end of it all, we would be able to award them an associates degree in tourism administration."

"That is certainly a worthy goal and I think eventually we can do that," Glorfindel said. "At the moment, though, we need to assure that we are granted accreditation so you can implement your plan."

Marian frowned. "You have no objections ? I thought you didn’t want to expand the Academy’s curriculum."

"And I do not, at least not at this time. In a sense, we need to be a bit clandestine about all this. On the surface, we need to keep up the image of this Academy as training people to be tour guides and that will not change any time soon, believe me. At the same time, select people from each class will be made aware of what is really going on and these people, along with the townspeople and others will be the beginning of the Army of Light."

Marian raised an eyebrow. "An army? That’s a bit premature, isn’t it?"

Glorfindel shook his head. "No. The Valar are determined that Mortals have a vital role to play in the coming war and it is coming, make no mistake about it. It may not come in your lifetime, Marian, or even in the lifetime of the child born yesterday, but when it does, we Elves will be ready and with us will be the Mortals we train right here in Wiseman, even if they are your great-grandchildren yet to be born."

Silence fell between them and then Marian stirred. "We seem to be getting off point again. I really just wanted to let you know that the Commission will be sending people here sometime in the next few weeks. There is some preliminary paperwork that needs to be gotten through in the meantime and I will have it ready for you shortly to review. It’s a rather exhaustive questionnaire."

"Do what you need to, Marian, and just let me know how I or anyone else can help."

"It would probably be a good idea to have the staff come together for a meeting so I can explain what this is all about and how we should conduct ourselves during the period of review."

"Sounds good. Set it up for Saturday afternoon at Edhellond. I think it best we not meet here on campus for this."

Marian nodded and rose. "I’ll send everyone an email to let them know. Two o’clock okay?"

Glorfindel nodded and Marian let herself out. For several minutes Glorfindel just sat there, staring at nothing in particular, twiddling with the pen in his hand.

"Pui-en-orch!" he suddenly snarled, hurling the pen to the desk. He leaned back with a sigh, running his hands through his hair. "Just what we need."

****

Saturday afternoon saw everyone involved in Elf Academy meeting at the Elves’ headquarters. Some of the Mortals had grumbled about having to change their Saturday afternoon schedules, but no one refused the summons. By two o’clock, all were seated in the conference room and Glorfindel handed the meeting over to Marian who gave them a brief run-down of what to expect from the accreditation committee. For the sake of clarity, this meeting was conducted in English rather than in Sindarin.

"Where do you see a problem?" Paul Pettingill asked once she was finished.

"There are two areas of concern," Marian answered. "The first is our curriculum and the second is faculty. As those of you who were in on this from the beginning know, the various resorts and safari companies came to the college asking for help in designing a program to train people to be tour guides specifically for the winter holidays, which is where they were seeing a substantial amount of business. Because of the specialized nature of their tour packages for the holiday season, they wanted people who knew what they were doing and were willing to act as ‘elves’" — here she raised her hands and crooked her fingers to indicate quotation marks — "rather than just having regular tour guides lead the tours. To that end, we designed Elf Academy, deciding what skills the students needed to have based on the criteria given to us and how best to teach them and who should teach it. Deirdre and I essentially designed the entire course syllabus and then went to you Rangers to see if you would help with the winter survival courses while Roland handled the employment aspects."

"And I still don’t see the problem," Paul said.

"The problem is that we now have other people teaching courses for which the Academy was not originally designed. Elf Etiquette was just a fancy way of teaching industry ethics and codes of behavior rather than having the students actually learn Sindarin."

"We still teach ethics, but we’ve incorporated it into the On Being a Tour Guide class," Glorfindel pointed out.

"And that’s fine, as far as it goes," Marian acknowledged, "but now we are having our students learn Sindarin rather than learning how to speak forsoothly, as someone put it. And then there is the question of qualified people teaching."

"We’re all qualified to teach Sindarin, Marian," Barahir said with a laugh. He was one of the Sindar who taught the language course and went by the Mortal name of Barry. "It’s our native language after all."

Marian gave him a cold smile. "A language that is not recognized by the State of Alaska as a legitimate language. The people from the ACCU will assume that it is entirely made up and has no actual legitimacy. They will, and quite rightly, ask about its relevance for a student who is studying to be a tour guide. They are more likely to ask why, if we are teaching a foreign language at all, we are not teaching basic Spanish, French or even Russian, as it’s a possibility that some of the tourists will not be native English speakers. Do you understand my point? I have no objections to the Sindarin, but unless we let the ACCU in on our little secret, they are going to question the need for it."

There was a pause as people digested this information.

"Is the language course your only concern?" Glorfindel asked after a moment.

Marian shook her head. "We have the problem of our physical education requirements. The college requires all students with certain exceptions to take so many hours of physical education classes and there is a broad range of classes from which to choose. However, we’ve limited the choices to essentially two or three and have made them mandatory rather than optional. So a student has to take archery whether they like it or not. Again, the relevance is lacking, at least it will seem so to the ACCU. The physical education requirement in and of itself is not a problem. It’s purpose is to ensure that the students enjoy an active life beyond the classrooms and the only thing we did was insist on a running/walking class for conditioning purposes in addition to any other sports activities the students wished to take. The ACCU is going to ask what relevance does archery, martial arts and fencing really have for the Academy when we should only be stressing general physical fitness."

There was a collective sigh among many as the implications of what Marian was telling them became apparent. "Yet, neither you nor anyone else from the college raised any objections to the changes that we’ve made or alerted us to the implications of those changes," Elladan said.

"And in that I was at fault," Marian admitted. "Glorfindel called me on that issue when I spoke to him earlier about this and I told him that I had completely forgotten about the ACCU and the upcoming accreditation."

"And I told you I do not hold you to blame, Marian," Glorfindel interjected. "You and everyone else were still coming to grips with what was happening. Your entire worldview was altered and it’s taken time for you to accept the new order of things. I’m not surprised you forgot about the ACCU but now that we know what is coming we can prepare for it."

"By my counsel, I would not rush to change anything," Daeron spoke then. "First, it will just confuse our students, and second, it will force people to lie or at least not be entirely truthful and I hesitate to place anyone in such an awkward position. What I do propose is this: Barry, you and the other Sindarin teachers should focus for a bit on diction and presentation. I know you tend to work on that later in the course, but let’s switch things around a bit. Continue teaching Sindarin by all means, and when the ACCU asks we will simply tell them that forcing the students to learn a ‘made up’ language is a teaching technique to help them to think outside of their normal frame of reference as English speakers."

Barry nodded. "And that is what I told the students in the last class when some of them questioned the need for it. I won’t do it immediately though. Do we know when we will have our visitation?" He looked to Marian as he asked the question.

"The exact date is yet to be determined but I suspect they will be here around the third week of term," Marian replied. "The accreditation procedure will take about a week or so."

"That doesn’t give us much time, but we’ll do what we can to make this process as painless as possible for everyone," Glorfindel said. "To that end, we will break up into small groups to address specific concerns. Marian, you and I are going to go over that questionnaire you mentioned with a fine-tooth comb and highlight any problematic areas and then I will assign various people to come up with solutions for them. Essentially, what we need to do is hide in plain sight so the ACCU committee sees only what we want them to see and they go away happy."

"And we can do it, if we remain calm," Daeron added. "As I understand it, once we are granted full accreditation, then we will be under the college’s umbrella, so to speak, and the next accreditation review will not focus only on us but on the college as a whole. That will make it easier for us, but we need to get that accreditation now for all our sakes. Elf Academy is too vital to the plans of the Valar for us to fail."

"And we will not," Nimrodel said decisively, and the other Elves nodded though some of the Mortals, especially the younger ones, appeared doubtful.

"Well, if that is all for the moment, then I believe we can be on our way," Glorfindel said, rising and the others joined him. He gave them all an encouraging smile. "We’ll get through this, people. Enjoy the rest of the weekend."

With those words, the Mortals began shuffling out, some lingering for a word or two with one of the Elves, none of whom made a move to leave. Eventually, all the Mortals were gone, at which point Glorfindel resumed his seat and the other Elves did the same with those who normally did not sit at the conference table joining them. For a moment no one spoke, each lost in his or her own thoughts. Finally Glorfindel stirred and addressed the ellon seated on his right who went by the mortal name of Ryan McKinley.

"Tell us about Alex Grant," he said.

****

Pui-en-orch!: (Sindarin) Orc-spit. Glorfindel’s favorite swear word.

Notes:

1. There is no Alaska Commission on Colleges and Universities, however, the ACCU is loosely based on the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU) which covers accreditation in Alaska and six other states. I have borrowed and adapted some of their accreditation criteria for plot purposes.

2. Thomas Aquinas taught at the University of Paris between 1256-59.





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