Soon after I arrived at the Ohio State University, I taught linear algebra. The person assigned to be my mentor, whom I've elsewhere called Nick Machiavell, had taught the course a lot, so before the term started I asked him for advice. Nick advised me to give the final exam on the last day of class, rather than in exam period. He said the students prefer it. Since Nick was an experienced instructor for that course, and he was my mentor, I dutifully took his advice. I wouldn't have done it had I known it was against the rules.
Three of us who were teaching different sections of the same course at the same time arranged to give the same exam on the last day of class. I was the one who got in trouble for it.
The Vice Chair for teaching who hated me (see my tribute to John Hsia), called me into his office and berated me for scheduling the final exam on the last day of classes, rather than during finals period. If the Vice Chair had told me that a student had complained, I'd have been happy to find a solution that worked for the student. But the Vice Chair refused to tell me whether a student had complained, or he had simply found a syllabus on the floor and he wanted to give me a hard time about it. He brought in his sidekick, Joe Cool, the department bouncer whose job seemed to include intimidating women, so they could do a "good cop, bad cop" routine on me.
They accused me of scheduling the exam so that I could go on vacation during exam period. I told them it wasn't true and I would be in town working for the whole exam period.
When I pointed out that two of my colleagues were doing the same thing, and asked why they weren't treating my colleagues the same way they were treating me, they asked me for my colleagues' names. Their hostility, and the way they angrily badgered me to name names, smelled sufficiently like McCarthyism that as a matter of principle I refused to divulge the names. Perhaps I was over-reacting, but I didn't want to rat out my colleagues and get them in trouble.
The Vice Chair insisted that I give the exam in the final exam period. He didn't care that some students had already bought plane tickets to leave town before then. I thought this solution at that late date was unfair to the students, so I went to the department chair to ask for a better resolution. We weren't able to agree on a better one.
The Acting Dean seemed nice---we had bowled together at the welcome picnic for new faculty---so I thought he might be a reasonable person to turn to. I phoned his office to make an appointment. His secretary told me, "He can't see you on Tuesdays, since that's the day he has his John Birch Society meetings." This felt like an odd thing to say, since I hadn't asked to see him on a Tuesday.
After we hung up, I told the story to a colleague and asked him, "What's the John Birch Society?" He explained it to me.
We couldn't figure out why the secretary had brought up the John Birch Society. Was she trying to tell me that the Acting Dean was not sympathetic to working women, and wouldn't rule in my favor?
The Acting Dean's advice was to label the exam on the last class day as a "midterm," and give a dummy exam in finals period, worth zero points. That would follow the letter of the law (while being a waste of time). I politely told him that I thought it was absurd.
But at least he was trying to be helpful, unlike the Vice Chair. I don't remember what I did about the exam, but I do remember that the students, the Acting Dean, and the Department Chair thought that my solution was fair.
Nick, my "mentor", told me that my mistake was that I had followed the rules by announcing the exam date during the first week of class and listing it on the syllabus.
On the bright side, finding out about the John Birch Society turned out to be good preparation for living in Orange County, California, currently a hotbed of anti-mask pandemic activism.