Ralph Durbin

Ralph Durbin is the deuteragonist of the currently revived NBC sitcom A.P. Bio. He is the principal of Whitlock High School.

Personality
Ralph Durbin is indubitably a pushover principal. The problem with Ralph is that he can be too nice and patient with everybody around him, including his own staff. And as Ralph is too cowardly to stand up to anyone, he finds himself often caught between two warring factions unable to pick a side unless he can tell which side is the most intimidiating towards his career and reputation as a school principal.

All in all, Ralph Durbin is the highest measure of morality and ethical purity on the show A.P. Bio. He helps maintain justice and order throughout the high school and without him, the school would most likely would have foreclosed due to a lack of funding and recognition from the school board.

Ralph has a recurring run-in with Jack Griffin, the AP Biology teacher who dislikes his job and doesn't even teach his students any biology. Ralph protests that Jack doesn't respect him whatsoever. Jack futilely tries to deny any wrongdoing, thus forcing Ralph to punish him by a 2-day unpaid suspension for leaving the classroom just to go to the lounge and eat chips during class hours.

Mishaps

 * He once got turned into a scapegoat for the broken school sign that Jack destroyed by driving his car into it in the beginning of the pilot episode, and since Jack refused to pay for it, Ralph had no choice but to cut off funding for lab equipment to A.P. Biology for the entire semester.
 * He was conned out of his money by a third party market into buying mechanical test baby dolls that won't stop crying no matter what because of a malfunction in their design that got them recalled and rejected from being on the market.
 * When the Dean came for a visit, almost all his teachers wanted to show-off baking soda volcanoes instead of anything that's informational or creative, disappointing the Dean and nearly hurting his chances of being nominated Principal of the Year. However, Jack did save his skin by presenting a superb pig dissection and (falsely) crediting Durbin for giving such freedom to choose a variety of sizes of pigs for experiments.

Trivia

 * Out of all teachers at Whitlock, the one who is friendliest to him at least on-screen would be Mary Wagner, the Korean art teacher.
 * Ralph attempted to adopt the motto "Never compromise" but he couldn't keep true to it and just let everybody walk all over him.