the locker room; Big Buddies
requested to keep the prorectors generally informed about who among their charges seems shaky […] but at the same time wanting to remain a trustworthy confidential shoulder and wing for their Little Buddies’ most private and delicate issues
Context
The uncle-administrator's surveillance apparatus, marketed as care. "Charles Tavis instituted the practice and calls it the Big Buddy System" — pitched to parents so they can feel their child "isn't getting lost in the institutional shuffle," and built, underneath, as an informant network. The Big Buddy is caught in exactly the double bind the family runs on: he must "keep the prorectors generally informed" about which little kids seem "shaky" so C.T. can "forecast probable burnouts" and plan admissions, while simultaneously being the trusted "confidential shoulder" the kids confess to. It is surveillance dressed as intimacy, reporting dressed as loyalty — the same structure as Avril's trust-performance, scaled up into an institution by the same brother-in-law who inherited the school. The family's information-control pathology isn't confined to the family; the usurper-uncle has wired it into the walls of the whole Academy.