Dear Committee Members

by Julie Schumacher

because the remaining two-thirds of the faculty, bearing the scars of disenfranchisement and long-term abuse, are busy tending to personal grudges like scraps of carrion on which they gnaw in the gloom of their offices.

the killing fields of administration,

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.

whether this diffuse approach indicates a wide range of interests or some sort of chemical imbalance or illness, I haven’t a clue.

I’ve been keeping a log of department meetings ranked according to level of trauma, with a 1 indicating mild contentiousness,

The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.

while the elder statesmen—I speak here for myself—may exact a more punishing revenge by refusing to retire.

appointed by the university’s warlords to rule our asylum until the inmates exhibit greater pliability and calm.

Seeking to bury the hatchet or at least dull its blade,

the ill-fitting window, which rattles in its Dickensian casement.

and he doesn’t appear to be addicted to illegal substances prior to 3:00 p.m.

Tyne has been pissing into old wine bottles, then (thank god for small favors) replacing the corks and arranging his collection in a foul gold ring around the perimeter of his office.

Her other advisory options, subtracting those who have entered phased retirement or sabbatical, those who always refuse student requests for assistance as a matter of course, and the clinically insane, were

circulating her CV like a blackjack dealer

but I remain generally unmoved by floating houses

we might be rehired to clean, perhaps with cotton swabs dipped in olive oil, the gold leaf surely to be installed in the brand-new fiefdom on the Econ floor?

the Chicago Tribune called Save Me for Later a “poor choice of subject, a sort of weird homage to the Stasi,”

What, after all, is a writer’s life without a dose of despair?

Malinda is an A student, a wide-eyed earnest individual who will undoubtedly benefit from a few months spent among the self-serving pontificates in the senator’s office.

I am confident you will be making, though perhaps not in the ways you might have intended, a remarkable contribution to her education.

our Economics faculty, who Must Be Kept Comfortable at All Times,

new incarnation of the book is effectively startling, especially the scene in which the protagonist devours and then remorsefully regurgitates her little brother.

Be reassured: the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express. His intellect can be put to broad use. The computer major, by contrast, is a technician—a plumber clutching a single, albeit shining, box of tools.

We who are senior and tenured are seated in the first car of a roller coaster with a broken track,

I want to proclaim here that I believe our mission and our way of life to have been admirable and lovely, steeped with purpose and worth defending. But we are nearly at the tipping point, I suspect, and will soon be a thing of the past.

By all means, yes, yes! I endorse her bid for the mentorship: may the bump in salary allow her to avoid scurvy by adding fruit to her diet once a week.

Despite a problem with modifiers, the story was genuinely disturbing,

Universalists eschewed pageantry and tradition so completely they might as well have met for worship at a rodeo. As

Literature has served me faithfully (no pun intended) as an ersatz religion, and I would wager that the pursuit of the ineffable via aesthetics in various forms has saved as many foundering souls as a belief in god.

they emit tweets

Please offer her something more lasting and substantial than guided breathing or twenty minutes with a golden retriever.

As chair, he will most likely fail—after which my colleagues and I will condemn him—but subsequent to a traditional three-year term, our condemnation and Boti’s failure will be seen to occur on more solid ground.

You want undergraduates who can write, think, and read? Stop pretending that writing can be taught across the curriculum by geologists and physicists who wouldn’t recognize a dependent clause if it bit them on the ass.

And yes, sociology has gone the way of poli-sci and econ, now firmly in the clutches of rabid number crunchers who have abandoned or forgotten the link between their abstruse theoretical musings and the presence of human beings on the planet’s surface;

we are like oxen accustomed to the yoke: our hides thick from insult and whippings, we have forgotten how to do anything other than trudge dully along.

Enfin: With mixed feelings (but what feelings aren’t mixed, when one is a professor of the humanities?),

Tolentino’s prose will be more palatable if you can get her to quit with the obsessive renditions of bodily functions;

you must allow him to self-nominate his way into a position of authority, please god let it be the faculty senate. There,

“Fitger behaves like more of an ass than he actually is.”

regardless. You and I are both in the business of believing in, and promoting, things that don’t yet exist.

start of the academic cycle: another chance for self-improvement, for putting into practice what one learned—or failed to learn—during the previous year.