Order of the Phoenix: Page 582

The utter meaninglessness of Educational Decrees, Hermione's risk analysis of the Hogwarts student body, Umbridge's life choices, and how teachers can abuse the House Point system.

Hello! This morning, we look at one of the more joyful pages in the series: things are going right, Umbridge is on retreat, and Harry is finally turning a corner; things seem to be looking up. Obviously that won’t last forever, but it’s fun while it happens. Enjoy! Subscribe!

Page 582 of Order of the Phoenix starts on a joyful note. Umbridge has just announced her newest Educational Decree, which will expel any student caught with The Quibbler. This makes Hermione very happy, and when Harry doesn’t understand why, she explains: “Oh Harry, don’t you see? If she could have done one thing to make absolutely sure that every single person in this school will read your interview, it was banning it!” 

It’s not a bad thought on Hermione’s part, but I want to go back earlier and look at the educational decrees themselves. We’ve talked about the absolute impotence of checks and balances within the wizarding government, and that applies here as well. What is the process for instituting a new educational decree? We don’t know, but it seems to vary widely. Earlier in this book, we learn that an earlier educational decree is how Umbridge ended up at Hogwarts in the first place. That one seems like it was voted on by the full Ministry, or at the very least, passed through ordinary legislative channels. That first one isn’t even that bad on its face: the Ministry may appoint a teacher if — and only if — the headmaster is unable to find one. Fine. Good. Obviously using it to appoint Umbridge is a bad use of it, but the law itself seems sensible, albeit easily abused.

But then we move on, and Educational Decrees are just popping up like mushrooms. Like this one: Umbridge, over the course of a day, has banned a gossip magazine. Did she really bring this before the Ministry for legislative consideration? “Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of Educational Decree number 27. ‘The Quibbler’ is a dangerous publication, and if it is not immediately banned, our youth will only continue being exposed to Crumple-Horned Snorkack propaganda.”

Umbridge is obviously quite powerful by now, but this doesn’t seem like the kind of thing she could achieve in a day. It also seems unlikely that she could pass another educational decree, banning all teams, groups, and clubs, in the brief period in which that decree happened. The decrees themselves also say that they’ve been enacted “by order of the high inquisitor of Hogwarts.” This is in contrast to the decrees that are posted when Umbridge replaces Dumbledore as headmaster, something that seems like it would require more legitimacy behind it: those say “by order of the Ministry of Magic.” So it seems that both Umbridge and the Ministry itself can issue decrees, with Umbridge taking care of trivial stuff and the Ministry issuing the decrees that are actually important. The subtext there, of course, is that decrees issued by the High Inquisitor rather than the Ministry don’t carry the force of law at all: they’re just statements about how Umbridge is going to do her job.

Think about it. Four decrees are signed by Fudge and issued by the Ministry: establishing the practice of the Ministry selecting teachers if the Headmaster can’t find anyone, promoting Umbridge to High Inquisitor, giving Umbridge the authority to override teachers on disciplinary matters, and making Umbridge herself headmaster. All the other decrees are just Umbridge making announcements. Sure, she decrees that clubs have to seek her permission to exist and that students can’t read The Quibbler, but she doesn’t have to. She can just expel anyone she wants. She’s in charge of discipline: she makes the rules and determines the punishments. Labeling them “educational decree,” I suppose, is a way to give her new rules more weight, but they would carry the same legal force if she posted normal, non-official flyers, or made an announcement at breakfast, or just walked around the school expelling random people. Umbridge does have this strange thirst for power, where she wants not just authority but the appearance of institutional support, so maybe that’s what this is. She doesn’t just want to be able to make statements and have them followed: she wants to be able to make statements on government paper.

Meanwhile, Hermione is happy about it. I understand her thought process, but I don’t think I’d be quite as giddy as she is. I might be more restrained, maybe waiting to see how things actually played out before celebrating. Hermione certainly knows the Hogwarts student body better than I do, and she seems to end up being right: it does appear that Umbridge banning The Quibbler leads to more people reading Harry’s interview. But I don’t think that would ever be my pre-data hypothesis. If I was forced to guess, looking at the situation at Hogwarts when Umbridge bans the magazine, I’d say my guess would look like this. Some people would be more likely to read the magazine after it was banned, because they thought that if it was banned it must be interesting and important and/or they just like being rebellious; some people would be less likely to read the magazine after it was banned, because they don’t want to get in trouble and/or they’re respectful and trusting of authority; some people wouldn’t be any more or less likely to read the magazine, because they know their own interests and the actions of school administrators have no impact on them. 

Obviously, these percentages aren’t fixed. Different variables — how trusted the school administration is, how much they’ve abused the student body, the salience of the issue being banned — will shift them one way or another, and they’re all definitely pointed in Harry and Hermione’s direction. Umbridge is highly distrusted and has been repressing the students since day one, meaning there’s a lot of rebellious energy just waiting to be let out. The fight between Harry and Voldemort, and whether Voldemort even exists, is an extremely timely issue. So on balance, it seems that Hermione is probably right: banning the article is likely to increase its readership. I’m just surprised that she’s so giddy right away: from Hermione, you usually expect something more like cautious, guarded optimism, tempered by common sense and watchfulness. She’s done something fantastic, though, and finally figured out how to get Harry’s story to the masses; she deserves a day to celebrate. 

And of course, she’s absolutely right: the article spreads around Hogwarts like Fiendfyre. People are whispering about it outside classes, discussing it at lunch and even in the back of lessons, and asking Hermione about it in the girls’ bathroom. Harry never actually sees The Quibbler, because it turns out Hogwarts students are pretty smart when they have to be. They’re hiding the magazine in all sorts of ways: they’re bewitching it to look like textbook pages if anyone but themselves reads it, or just magically wiping it blank once they’ve finished the article. Soon, it seems like everyone in school has read it — and not only that, they believe it. Harry’s story is finally gaining traction. Hermione’s eyes are shining as she reports this to Harry, and it’s not quite clear whether she’s just excited or she’s crying tears of joy. Maybe both.

This really has been a masterpiece of media market manipulation — try saying that five times fast — on Hermione’s part. She knows the entire school is going to read the article and talk about it, because no one wants to be left out of the hot gossip and people trust their friends not to turn them in to Umbridge, and she also knows that everyone is going to be deeply invested in pretending that they haven’t read the article, meaning that even those who disapprove of it can’t complain about it. I’m not sure Hermione is completely right on that last point — she’s particularly happy to see Draco looking upset about the article, because she says he can’t even complain about it, because that would mean admitting he read it — because Umbridge already knows who she likes and who she doesn’t like. If Draco or, say, Crabbe came to her and said that unfortunately, he read the article, but only because he was so upset that people were smearing his family’s good name that his curiosity got the better of him and he looked, but now he’s really upset and he didn’t mean to break the rules but it was really all Harry’s fault and he didn’t believe a word of the article, I have a feeling that Umbridge wouldn’t punish him too badly. But they don’t, it seems, so props to Hermione again.

Professor Umbridge, meanwhile, is “stalking the school, stopping students at random and demanding that they turn out their books and pockets.” Do you think that on days like this one, Umbridge started regretting the choices she’d made? “I could be sitting in the Minister’s office, subtly manipulating him on my way to the top,” she might be thinking to herself. “Instead, I’m wandering around a school in an angry daze, stopping students at random to see if they’re carrying a magazine they’re too smart to be caught carrying.” It’s not quite on the level of “Weasley fireworks day,” but it must be pretty close.

We also see that the teachers are absolutely thrilled with what Harry has done. They’re not allowed to talk about it, of course — that’s another one of those educational decrees that is really just an announcement of how Umbridge feels — but they express their happiness in other ways. Professor Sprout awards Gryffindor 20 points when Harry passes her a watering can; Professor Flitwick secretly hands Harry a box of squeaking sugar mice; Professor Trelawney recants her previous predictions about Harry’s premature death, although we don’t see the replacement predictions for those until the next page. That one is all the more daring because Trelawney is on probation, and Umbridge is sitting in her class watching as she makes her new pro-Harry prediction. 

This scene in particular makes me wonder: are there any systems in place to ensure that teachers and prefects don’t abuse the house point system? At a baseball game a few years ago, a friend raised a question to me: what would happen, he asked, if an umpire suddenly went crazy and just started awarding one team home runs? Can the other umpires somehow stop it, or does the entire system depend on everyone officiating the game ethically and in sound mind? In other words, if one authority figure goes rogue, can anyone else do anything about it?

It's a question that could just as well apply to Umbridge, but in this case I wonder about the teachers. Obviously, as cool as it is that Harry has done this interview, if teachers start giving him massive House Point awards for it, the other houses will be left in the dust through no fault of their own. Professor Sprout gives Harry 20 points for passing a watering can; what would happen if Professor Flitwick gave Harry 75 points for standing up to close the door? At some point, is there a review/certification process that’s triggered, or are house points all on the honor system?

One way to do it is just to have the faculty police themselves, so that if Professor Sinistra sees Professor Flitwick giving Harry unfair points, she can just deduct those points from Gryffindor herself. But that stops working when the faculty are all on the same side of an issue, and lose the incentive to police each other. What could happen, I suppose, is that even if one faction is big (almost all the teachers) and the other is small (basically just Umbridge), that small faction could still maintain some control by just keeping track of point totals over the course of a day and setting up huge deductions at the end of each day to make up for the gains that they think are unfair. But that’s just another version of the same question: if Umbridge can make huge deductions like that, then she could also make them even if Gryffindor wasn’t gaining a bunch of points beforehand. Bottom line: if the house point system is all based on the honor system, it's clearly going to run into problems when all these dishonorable people become point-giving teachers.

So, the page basically ends with Harry bathing in goodwill. I’m tempted to make another joke about “The Office” — “You ever notice that people only ever bathe in two things? Goodwill and their own blood.” Or something like that. Regardless, the page ends on a happy note, although obviously, that’s soon to come crashing down. It’s a rare page in Order of the Phoenix that doesn’t really have anything go wrong. Umbridge fails, The Quibbler thrives, and Educational Decrees don’t mean a damn thing.