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Pullman, Washington

B ryan is blowing up again at Professor Snyder.

Only two days ago, it had seemed as though Bryan might have eked out a Hail Mary.

The plan that told him to be more respectful to women—his professors, his peers, and his students.

“While not perfect, we agreed that there was progress,” Dr. Neuilly wrote to Bryan, yet the committee still decided it had to terminate him.

Because now, just two days after that promising meeting, Bryan is losing it—for the second time this semester—with Snyder in the professor’s office.

When Ben and Bryan’s cohort hear about this, they are mystified about how anyone could rub the affable, easygoing professor the wrong way.

“To use very coarse language for a second,” Ben said, “if you fuck up badly enough that you wind up on a PIP, a performance improvement plan, as a graduate student, you have done something terribly, dreadfully, miserably wrong.”

But Bryan cannot control himself in front of Snyder, apparently.

The rest of the class has seen what happens to Bryan when he’s angry. He goes bright red and clenches his fists so hard that his knuckles turn white.

Chief Jenkins heard that one of the thorny issues under discussion is the allegation by a woman student that Bryan followed her to her car.

But the discussion spins out of control, way beyond civility, into something angry.

Two days later, on December 11, Dr. Neuilly wrote to Bryan requesting a meeting—at which he must have known she would fire him. And he would lose his funding.

She later wrote in her termination letter of December 19 that she’d requested the meeting because, during his “altercation” with Professor Snyder, “it became apparent that you had not made progress regarding professionalism.”

Bryan will receive this letter when he’s back home, in Pennsylvania, so the rest of the cohort is in the dark as to what happened.

As far as they know, he’ll come back in January. But they aren’t giving much thought to him and his difficulties.

Top of mind for them is the troubling fact that there have been these horrific murders in Moscow, and the police seem to have no clue who did it.

So everyone just wants to get the heck out of Dodge for the holidays.