Julie Schumacher - Dear Committee Members

Why? Because, as a student of literature and creative writing, Ms. Newcome honed crucial traits that will be of use to you: imagination, patience, resourcefulness, and empathy. The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy — the insertion of oneself into the life of another.

I believe Ms. Newcome eminently capable of the work for which she has applied.

With good wishes for your tiny charges,

Jay Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English

Payne University

* By recent estimate I have penned more than 1,300 letters of recommendation, many of them enthusiastic, some a cry of despair.

Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs

Lefferts Hall

Attention: Associate VP Samuel Millhouse

Dear Associate Vice Provost Millhouse,

The purpose of this letter is to bolster the promotion and tenure case of Professor Martina Ali here at our esteemed institution of higher learning. I am not a member of Professor Ali’s Film Studies Program, but the Honorable Pooh-Bahs in your office have decreed that P&T dossiers be encumbered with no fewer than six missives of support, and Professor Ali is one of only three faculty members in her own modest department. Such is the wisdom that prevails at Payne.

I’ll get around to my evaluation of Professor Ali. But I have a few other things on my mind also, and it would be foolish of me, I think — it would be remiss — if I didn’t take this opportunity to address a few of them. After all, how often does a lowly professor of creative writing and English have the ear of the associate VP? Perhaps I should intercalate my own laundry list of items throughout my evaluation of Martina — she does stellar research — threading them into the fabric of this letter like stinging nettles. We’ll see how things go.

First — Professor Ali’s monograph on warfare in European film: While some members of her discipline have adopted an almost psychedelic approach to their choice of material, delivering conference papers and fashioning entire semester-long courses on the topic of toothpaste commercials or videos of tumbleweeds bounding along by the side of a road,* Professor Ali is invested in significance. Her work combines rigorous historical research, film scholarship, and psychoanalytic theory — and her goal is enlightenment, not obfuscation. She has justifiably won the Longfreth Prize (twice!), the panel of judges likening her scholarship to the work of Alperovitz and Harms, pioneers in the field.

Ali is publishing in some of her discipline’s top venues. Comparative Film and Culture in particular — a highly selective, peer-reviewed journal — is a scholarly coup.

Given her publications, her increasingly national reputation, and her teaching record (eleven advisees!), Ali is a shoo-in. We both know that. I hope her department chair musters the reams of paperwork needed to satisfy your army of bean counters in Lefferts Hall. A divagation here: Have you entered Willard Hall lately? In case, over there among the functional radiators and other amenities in Lefferts, you’ve forgotten that English faculty members are living in a construction zone, allow me to give you a virtual tour. The front and back doors of our building are blocked — sealed and crisscrossed with yellow tape as if to indicate a crime scene — so you must enter through the basement. But don’t use the elevator, a nightmarish herk-and-jerk contraption known to hijack its occupants and leave them stranded midfloor. You can’t access the second (Econ) floor in any case: a silken banner advises you to PARDON OUR MESS! — a euphemistic reference to the fact that workers equipped with respirators are spilling toxins onto our heads in the servants’ quarters, where, once you overlook the chipped and ancient linoleum and the cracks in the wallboard, you will find a sign that welcomes visitors, eloquently, to the Department of ENGLI_H.

Professor Ali’s teaching record is, without doubt, superb. The only smudge on it results from the fact that some clueless sadist assigned her an introductory lecture course during her first two semesters on campus (which would have been an occasion for spectacular failure for most junior faculty — but Professor Ali’s evaluations were well above par).

A note here — excuse the indelicacy — on the men’s room in Willard: a subtle but incessant dripping from a pipe in the ceiling (perhaps from the Jacuzzi or bidet being installed for our Economics colleagues) is gradually transforming this previously charming depot into a fetid cavern. The tile floor is often slick with liquids and, because desperate citizens have propped the door open, odors now regularly waft out into the hall. I might as well set my desk next to the urinals.

In sum, Ali’s is an open-and-shut case, yet another occasion for faculty members to set their work aside in order to cobble together encomiums and tributes like train cars chugging in an endless loop through campus. If faculty were able — even encouraged — to dedicate the same amount of time to our research and writing, we might stop sinking like a stone in the national rankings and have a chance to be a reasonably respectable school.

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 the 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.

I thoroughly endorse Professor Martina Ali’s bid for promotion to associate professor with tenure.

Cordially and with the usual succinctness,

Jay Fitger

* See Professor Jorg Masterson’s infamous class, Dis/guise and Dis/gust, to which students are invited to bring “rancid food and a costume or mask.”

Bentham Literary Residency Program

P.O. Box 1572

Bentham, ME 04976

Good Afternoon, Committee Members — with cc to Eleanor Acton, Director:

This is the third letter I have written on behalf of Mr. Darren Browles, who recently received from your office a computerized notice that, of his three required letters of recommendation, only two have been received. Why each application to Bentham necessitates three written LORs I leave to sages and philosophers to decipher. As for the letters in Mr. Browles’s case (your office has refused to identify their authors): let’s count them. Oneis mine, dated September 3 (with a follow-up/coda on October 5). Twois the letter from his foreign language advisor; I just wandered across the quad and spoke to Herr Zimmunt to secure his jawohl in regard to this endorsement. Letter # Three, Browles informs me, was originally to have come from Helena Stang, who led him on an e-mail goose chase for over a month until finally reporting, as if from her satin fainting couch, that she was “too busy.” He had no choice at that point but to turn to his administrative advisor, Martin Glenk, who (unbeknownst to poor Browles) wrests fleeting moments of joy from the opportunity to denigrate my students.

Armed with these bitter herbs of information, I undertook this morning the short but unhappy stroll past the men’s room (the toilets of which send their constant flushing sound through the vent in my office) to the literature wing of our department. Typically I am loath to poke about in that arm of the building, around the corner from the WELCOME TO ENGLI_H sign and the faded sofas on which, after hours, the undergraduates presumably enjoy one another’s favors. To be blunt: many of the literature faculty and I are no longer speaking, and a third of their number, due to a construction project in our hallowed hall, have moved their offices to remote outposts of campus, delighting in the knowledge that their colleagues will be unable to find them. Logically, one might suggest that I solicit the assistance of my department chair, but he is a professor of sociology, appointed by the university’s warlords to rule our asylum until the inmates exhibit greater pliability and calm.