Charles Tavis's administration: E.T.A. by the numbers and the doctrine of "Total Worry"

pivotal · 9 Nov YDAU

• When: dawn, 9 Nov YDAU (the morning after I.-Day / the Eschaton debacle)
• What: The institutional portrait of the academy under Headmaster Charles Tavis. E.T.A. has "an accredited capacity of 148 junior players" (80 to be male) but an actual Fall YDAU population of 136 (95 paying, 41 scholarship), 72 of them female — so Tavis and Co. want to fill the twelve open spots with males and would not mind losing "a half dozen or so of the better girls" before graduation, because housing more than 68 girls forces coed dorms and licensing/parent problems. The administrator's day is matriculations, gender quotas, recruiting, financial aid, room-assignments, rankings, class-vs-drill schedules, prorector-hiring — a "tree-diagram of worry" that gets Tavis out of bed at an ungodly hour to stand at the Headmaster's House window in Total Worry. The scene sets Tavis explicitly against E.T.A.'s founder: "Charles Tavis knows what James Incandenza could not have cared about less: the key to the successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry." This is the academy's governing temperament after the founder's death — administration as anxious triage rather than vision. See the Charles Tavis timeline (headmastership), the JOI timeline (founding).