Sometimes we teachers just need to put things in perspective and smile. To that purpose: snippets from a new academic satire (Dear
Committee Members by Julie Schumacher, Doubleday, 2014) that is presented as a series of letters of recommendations written by a beleaguered English
professor. (If you have favorite academic novels to recommend, please share the titles.)
From a letter
to his department chair:
By the
by: I noticed in your departmental
plan...that you intend to schedule two faculty meetings this year for the
purpose of revising the department constitution. …Fair warning: As a body we tried, in a plenary/horror
session when Sarah Lempert was chair, to revise the momentous founding document
on which our department depends. We argued for weeks about the existence and
then the location of a particular semicolon, two senior members of the
faculty--true, one of them retired and left for rehab that same
semester--abandoning the penultimate meeting in tears. (If you'd like to see
it, I've been keeping a log of department meetings ranked according to level of
trauma, with a 1 indicating mild contentiousness, a 3 indicating uncontrolled
shouting, and a 5 leading to at least one nervous breakdown and/or immediate
referral to the crisis center run by the Office of Mental Health.) (p. 35-36)
From a letter
to the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs:
... Finally,
as for your recent memo on financial prudence:
Good lord, man. We know about the funding crunch, we aren't idiots; but
we also know that your fiscal fix is being applied selectively. For those in the sciences and social
sciences, sacrifice will come in the form of fewer varieties of pâté on their
lunch trays. For English: seven defections/retirements in three years and not
one replaced; two graduate programs no longer permitted to accept new students;
and a Captain Queeg-like sociologist at the helm. The junior faculty in our
department will surely abandon their posts at the first opportunity, while the
elder statesmen--I speak here for myself--may exact a more punishing revenge by
refusing to retire. (p. 43)
From a letter
to the HR director of an IT company to which one of the computer techs at the
university has applied:
I am a
professor in an English department whose members consult Tech Help…only in
moments of desperation. For example, let us imagine that a computer screen, on
the penultimate page of a lengthy document, winks coyly, twice, and before the
"save" button can be deployed adopts a Stygian facade. In such a circumstance one's only recourse--unpalatable
though it may be--is to plead for assistance from a yawning adolescent who will
roll his eyes at the prospect of one's limited capabilities and helpless
despair. I often imagine that in olden days people like myself would crawl to
the doorway of Tech Help on our knees, bearing baskets of food, offerings of
the harvest, the inner organs of neighbors and friends--all in exchange for a
tenuous promises from these careless and inattentive gods that the thoughts we
entrusted to our computers will be restored unharmed. (p. 109-10)
From a letter
to his dean:
I have been
tapped, once again and for reasons that defy human understanding, to write a
letter--during the final crisis-ridden week of the semester--on behalf of my
colleague Franklin Kentrell, who has nominated himself for chair of the
university curriculum committee. Given
your own recent, crucial work on the selection of dirges for the all-campus
picnic, you may not have had time to grasp or appreciate the nature of
Kentrell's contributions. He is, to put
it mildly, insane. If you must allow him
to self-nominate his way into a position of authority, please god let it be the
faculty senate. There, his
eccentricities, though they may thrive and increase, will at least be harmless.
The faculty senate, our own Tower of Babel, has not reached a decision of any import
for a dozen years. (p. 164)
