The Cow glanced up. "I really don't think it would be wise to say," she stated firmly. This wasn't the first such enquiry she'd had. The grapevine was humming with speculation on the identity of Dr Shades - possibly even overtaking the speculation on the identity of Mr Timberland himself. The Cow felt some kind of ethical responsibility towards maintaining the anonymity of her subjects - well, probably some kind of archetypal fear of lawyers' letters. She didn't count Gwen Gill and Janie Allen as her role models.
Mr Timberland seemed motivated by more than prurience, however. When the Cow asked if he'd ever been hit on at the gym, he muttered that women didn't hit on men - an assertion so blatantly fallacious that even he couldn't pull it off with a straight face. He reluctantly admitted that he _had_ been hit on by women in his lifetime, but only when he was younger, more beautiful. He started to recount an incident, but thought better of it, and fled. Obviously worried about its blogability...
So, mused the Cow, academic maie hierarchies are not decided through rank, publication record or - for HODs - budget size, but rather through bog standard last-gasp-of-testosterone factors like the age and beauty of their girlfriends. She was quite amused, really - all these billions of years of natural selection, and we land up these relatively massive brains, the ability to wreak havoc on a global scale and possibly beyond, and what do we fall back on when it comes to hierarchy? A chemical compound that's been hanging around for millions of years! There was something reassuringly familiar about all that, despite its dressing up in layers of committees and policies and procedures.
Perhaps, she mused, it might also account for the continuing feminisation of the student body? Setting up competition for students among HODs - who were mostly male - was inevitably going to translate into seeing who could amass the biggest academic harem, wasn't it? And, after all, it was size that mattered....