Dear Committee Members

by Julie Schumacher

I’ve known Ms. deRueda for eleven minutes, ten of which were spent in a fruitless attempt to explain to her that I write letters of recommendation only for students who have signed up for and completed one of my classes.

And to begin this recommendation on the proper footing: no, I will not fill out the inane computerized form that is intended to precede or supplant this letter; ranking a student according to his or her placement among the “top 10 percent,”

There’s no changing the past; we can only stumble haphazardly forward. I appreciate any particular attention you can devote to Darren Browles.

he has held together the tattered scraps of the literature and writing programs, which the faceless gremlins in your office have condemned to indigence and ruin.

Campiello Award, associated with a modest financial settlement and a plaque on which the administration does its best to spell the awardee’s name correctly,

Those of you in the superior ranks of the Land of Red Tape would do well to watch your backs:

recommend Ms. Zelles to you with all the usual accolades these letters are expected to provide.

I wonder, during a time of fiscal, curricular, and architectural crisis, whether our top priority should be the pointless updating of a document no one will read;

Ted, faculty in Hutchinson Hall are decorating their million-dollar labs with hadron colliders, while we’re told there’s no money for a functioning chalkboard and a table and chairs.

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 the lunch trays.

an introductory course designed by the university to function as part academic lecture, part flash mob, because of the unrestricted and steadily rising numbers of enrolled students, 10 percent of whom failed due to ennui or inebriation

Last year at the banquet honoring the installation of our new provost, I made the mistake (yes, it was my error, I admit it) of consuming a modest portion of tilapia from the groaning board; I was ill for three days. Substances I would never knowingly introduce to my body had apparently proliferated within it and were then rapidly expelled in unspeakable gouts.

Not being paid an administrator’s exalted salary, I have no intention of violating the sanctum of his uriniferous lair in order to do anything corrective, and it occurs to me that this particular duty might appropriately fall to a sociologist

have been working somewhat halfheartedly on a new novel, the early chapters of which my agent greeted with all the enthusiasm of a farmer presented with a bucket of dung.

Given her aptitude for research (unlike most undergraduates, she has moved beyond Wikipedia),

You could prop him up in a broom closet in his apartment, poke him with the butt end of a mop when you need him to cough up a lecture on Caribbean fiction or the passive voice, and then charge your students a thousand dollars each to correct the essays their classmates have downloaded from a website.

Such is the future of education.

like most universities, Payne is rapidly pricing itself into oblivion, not by giving modest raises to nationally respected scholars, but by starving some departments while building heated yoga studios and indoor climbing walls in others.