Jay
P.S.: At the upcoming Assembly of Department Chairs meeting I hope you will raise the issue of hires for English and the defunding of our creative writing MA. The idea of graduate writing being defunded because of expense … 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. If Donna Lovejoy is up to it (I understand she went home yesterday with a work-related lung infection), you may want to bring her to the meeting with you: she witnessed last year’s auto-da-fé and, given the recent sprinkler system malfunction in her office, will probably bring to the proceedings a sharpened perspective.
November 3, 2009
Anna Huston, Director
Annie’s Nannies Child and Play Center
370 Shadow Pond Way
Cortland, MO 63459
Dear Ms. Huston,
I apologize for the delay in sending this recommendation. For more than two decades I have maintained an orderly record-keeping system regarding each and every one of my students, but I apparently misfiled the information on Shayla Newcome and had to get out the dowsing rod to find her. In response to your query: Ms. Newcome was my student six years ago. Having located the appropriate slim green record book in the lower left drawer of my desk, I note that she received a B in my Intermediate Fiction Writing class, having completed, if I am deciphering my own handwritten notes correctly, a short story intended to be a fictionalization of the pope’s childhood. Whether this indicates that Ms. Newcome is or is not to be entrusted with the precious lives of small children, I have no idea. At least she did not—as many of my undergraduates seem to enjoy doing—submit a vivid and celebratory depiction of murder and mayhem, complete with flesh-eating robots, werewolves, resurrections from the crypt, or some combination of the above. Students’ lives have been cheapened in ways of which they remain blissfully clueless, because of so much TV.
The only other information I can offer you about Ms. Newcome is that during the semester she was enrolled in my class she was having a difficult time. Students don’t generally confide in me regarding their personal crises (I am not known for being particularly approachable or cuddly), but Ms. Newcome did, and I remember that in the interstices of our conversation she chewed at the lime-green polish—an unfortunate color—on her fingernails. A few weeks later I asked if her situation had improved and she said it had not, but she was “learning to accommodate.” I found that impressive, and remembering Ms. Newcome now—though my file drawer contains thousands of lives6 for which I often find myself feeling accountable—I realize I am well disposed in her favor; in fact, I thoroughly urge you to offer her a job.
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
November 6, 2009
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,7 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