Julie Schumacher - Dear Committee Members

Sellebritta Online

C. R. Young, Communications Coordinator

Dear C. R. Young,

Ms. Tara Tappani knocked at my office door this morning and, with the air of a woman wearing diamonds and furs, entered the icy enclosure in which I work, perched at the edge of my red vinyl chair, and urged me to respond to your second e-mail request for a recommendation, as she dearly hopes to be hired as assistant editor of Sellebritta Online .

I demurred. Pressed, I reminded Ms. Tappani that, a year ago, I gave her a well-deserved F in my Intermediate Fiction class. She chuckled and put a manicured little paw on my forearm, as if the two of us were sharing a wonderful joke. “Don’t worry about that,” she assured me. “I just need a letter.”

So be it. Why did I give Ms. Tappani an F? For plagiarizing an entire short story, namely Irwin Shaw’s widely anthologized “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” It always startles me anew — though I have nabbed dozens of plagiarists — to realize that the student cheater is amazed at my powers of discernment, my uncanny ability to detect a difference in quality between his or her own work and, for example, Proust’s. I have caught students who faithfully reproduced (or cut and pasted, sometimes forgetting to remove the author’s name) the work of Hemingway, Cather, O’Connor (both Frank and Flannery), and Virginia Woolf. The Woolf copyist, wide-eyed with distress and admiration, told me she didn’t think I would catch her because Woolf, a European writer no longer among us, was “so obscure.”

Back to Ms. Tappani. There is a particular art to accusing a plagiarist, which necessitates first and foremost that I prop my office door open and keep a full box of tissues at hand. But in Ms. Tappani’s case the tissues weren’t needed. Having confronted her with the Irwin Shaw story prominently featured in several bound volumes on the flat of my desk, I sat back and waited. Visibly unperturbed, she sipped at the froth of a cappuccino. It seemed there was a reasonable explanation. She must have read Shaw’s story a few years before. Yes, that must have been it. She had read the story and clearly enjoyed it, to the extent that she had copied it, verbatim, into a notebook reserved for that purpose. Then, finding an assignment due for my class, she had paged through said notebook, stumbled across Shaw’s narrative, and forgotten that Shaw, rather than Tara Tappani, was its rightful author. A simple mix-up. She smiled.

I asked if she might show me the notebook into which she copied by hand the works of the masters. Ms. Tappani sighed. She wished that were possible, but only a week earlier she had lost an entire satchel full of journals — including the notebook of literary classics rendered in her own curlicued style — on a city bus. I told her I admired her bravado and gave her the F.

If Sellebritta Online is in need of an editor/copywriter who refuses to allow the demands of honesty or originality to delay her output, it will have found one in the unflappable Ms. Tara Tappani.

Guilelessly yours,

Jay Fitger

Professor-at-Law

Creative Writing/English, Payne University

Associate Vice Provost Samuel Millhouse

Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs

Lefferts Hall

Dear Associate VP Millhouse,

I write this letter in support of my colleague Karolyi Pazmentalyi in the Department of Slavic Languages, which your office has seen fit to eliminate in its most recent purge. (I am not the only member of the faculty to note that several equally obscure departments, perhaps relieved to have been spared the knife for now, have been gathered together in small ethnic clumps, presumably in preparation for future pogroms.)

Pazmentalyi unfortunately chose this difficult moment in the life of the university to publish the brilliant monograph on which he has been laboring, alone, for the better part of a decade, holed up in a corner of the library, his craggy profile visible in the fluorescent glare of the overheads when everyone else was uncorking a beverage at home. At any other time in the university’s history this pathbreaking and exhaustive work of scholarship would immediately elevate its author from the doldrums of associate professordom to the rank of full professor. But now that Slavic Languages is to be summarily flushed down the drainpipe of unprofitable programs and departments (what do we in the Midwest care about Russians, Poles, Serbs, Croatians, Bulgarians, and the denizens of other countries we can’t find on a globe or pronounce?), Pazmentalyi is suspended in limbo. He can’t be promoted within a department that’s being cut; therefore (the logic appears to be), why promote him at all? Why feature photos of bearded brontosauri on the university brag sheets when there are younger, more handsome whiz-bang faculty (perhaps … yes! in the Economics Department!) who will attract more financial interest, instead?

Pazmentalyi, it should be noted, has been reluctant to press or appeal his case. He is the sort of old-fashioned, self-effacing scholar accustomed to hours of painstaking archival research — and, lacking a background as a cage fighter, he will probably take your office’s rejection seriously and abide by your suggestion that, forgoing a well-deserved promotion and a minuscule raise, he should lumber off to the newly incorporated “Languages Unit” and soak his head.

But there are other faculty here on campus who are not disposed to see notable scholarship ignored; and let it be known that, in the darkened, blood-strewn caverns of our offices, we are hewing our textbooks and keyboards into spears.

To wit: What would you ask of Pazmentalyi? The reason for denial of his promotion was “narrow scope of research/limited field.” Good lord: he’s a scholar of Slavic languages — fluent in nearly a dozen — do you want him to coach the volleyball team?* Pazmentalyi is not versatile or charming. He doesn’t tell jokes during class. And he won’t fight your refusal of his promotion because — brace yourself — he isn’t suited for any other job, and he knows it. Very few people read his work; fewer comprehend it. Your office’s stated desire for greater “scope” and “accessibility” (would you have Stephen Hawking go back to the nine times table?) will end up turning scholars like Pazmentalyi into TV hosts, forced to incorporate online dating options into seminars previously dedicated to European linguistics.

Faculty acknowledge your need to save money: 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. To afford the amenities inextricably tied to their education, students need wealthy financial backers or a mountain of loans — and so many on- and off-campus jobs they barely have time to go to class.

Writing this letter has thoroughly depressed me, but it hasn’t made me less determined to see Pazmentalyi promoted. You want to sweep out his office and deport him to “Literature” or “Cultural Studies” or ask the Mortuary Science Department to find a place for him — so be it. But give him the measly sum he deserves and reward him for superbly performing the work he was hired to do.

Irritated and restless, but not as fractious as I can be,

Jay Fitger

Professor/Agitator/Slum Dweller

Willard Hall

* Admittedly, an absurd suggestion: I’m certain the volleyball coach earns three times the salary of a literature professor.

Aaron Young, Human Resources

Kompu-Metricka, Inc.