Dear Committee Members
How Julie Schumacher's brilliant novel pulls the curtain back on academic cynicism
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Julie Schumacher’s 2014 campus satire Dear Committee Members is a nearly perfect subject for this newsletter. There are two reasons for this. First, it’s an immensely pleasurable novel. It resists the academic’s tendency to rip a book to shreds in the name of “committed close reading,” or “analysis.” Second, once one has luxuriated in the humor and humanity of the book, it strikes one that Dear Committee Members is really saying sometime profound about our world, particularly as it pertains to academics in the humanities — though certainly not limited to that group.
Let me explain.
I assigned the book for my Modern American Novel students this semester, based only on its reputation. I hadn’t read it, but always wanted to, so I co-opted my students into joining my little book club — I will do this from time to time and I argue that it’s actually a good teaching practice (perhaps the subject of a later post).
The book takes the form of an epistolary novel (a real throwback to the Eighteenth Century), and consists wholly of letters of recommendation, along with other professional requests, from Jason Fitger, a creative writing professor at fictional Payne University. His letters are to colleagues, prospective employers of his students, and faculty at other academic institutions. Like most campus novels, Dear Committee Members is a scathing satire of the institution of higher education, and it particularly aimed at the so-called “crisis in the Humanities” discourse.
Many campus novels are funny, but few are as funny as this book. Fitger’s cynicism empowers him to be entirely whimsical and hilariously bitter in his communications with people from various professions (my favorite letter is addressed to a company called “Avengers Paintball, Inc.” Fitger’s salutation, “Esteemed Avengers” comically establishes his refusal to take the task, or the idea of one of his students working at a paintball store, seriously). Overall the book’s humor springs from the reader laughing at things they know are inappropriate, like when someone’s digestive system makes a rude noise during a church service.
An exemplary passage from a letter to Torreforde State University’s MFA program, written on behalf of former student Iris Temple. Fitger opens with the following:
“Iris Temple has applied to your MFA program in fiction and has asked me to support, via this LOR, her application. I find this difficult to do, not because Ms. Temple is unqualified (she is a gifted and disciplined writer and has published several stories in appropriately obscure venues), but because your program at Torreforde State offers its graduate writers no funding or aid of any kind — an unconscionable act of piracy and a grotesque, systemic abuse of vulnerable students, to whom you extend the false hope that writing a $50,000 check to your institution will be the first step toward artistic success.”
The tone of the letter is terribly unprofessional, but his critique of the MFA system is spot on and, dare I suggest, something that needs to be said more often, straight to the faces of administrators who run these programs.
A Teaching Problem
As I read, I breezed through the book with belly laughs and joy, but, almost immediately, the teacher in me became filled with anxiety. How does one “teach” a book that doesn’t lend itself to analysis? Could I walk into class and just say, “listen to this one!” and guide my students through my amusement? Can admiring aesthetically pleasing works of art still count as academic and scholarly in the modern age? If a book doesn’t lend itself to the hermeneutics of suspicion, is it worth studying?
As it turns out, the answer to all these questions is “yes.” My students and I spent a good chunk of class just sharing quips that we found funny or moving. And those moments of simple, old-fashioned “art appreciation” set the stage for our more rigorous “analysis.”
For instance, the epistolary form is interesting, isn’t it? As we discussed the letters, a tangible picture of the main character and his setting came into view. But it did so with no plot. What Schumacher gives us is a terrific story, but no plot to hang it on. That is constructed in the mind and imagination of each reader. This offers a unique advantage to authors who want to engage their readers in unconventional ways, no?
Also, once we assembled a picture of Fitger and Payne University, obvious connections to other campus novels became clear, particularly in the form of parallels between Dear Committee Members and Richard Russo’s classic comedy Straight Man, another class favorite. There are ways in which Schumacher seems to be responding directly to Russo, from the perspective of gender’s role in the power relations of higher education, in both appreciative and corrective ways.
So there. We did our academic work on the book.
But what I most appreciate about Dear Committee Members is that it is a work of art in which the first principle of engagement is appreciation and enjoyment, not critical analysis and intellectual deconstruction. It’s incredibly smart, don’t kid yourself. But it’s a work aimed at your emotions first and your intellect second.
An Epistolary World, With or Without Twitter
This leads me my second argument about why this book is perfect for this newsletter: after I took it in and enjoyed it, the novel struck me as having some profound insight about our world.
Fitger is a brilliant person and a successful academic by any measure. Yet he is cynical, for reasons that are understandable enough. The institution he entered is fading away before his eyes, leaving ruined victims in the wreckage. The crisis of the humanities has arrived at Payne and Fitger is supremely embittered by this tragedy.
Jason Fitger is a symbol of academics everywhere now. One can see him and his bitterness in any number of colleagues for whom higher education has proved to be a grave disappointment. Just like Fitger, many of us were drawn to our work out of love. Love for the humanities, and by extension, love for humans. Our disillusionment has, as with Fitger, driven us to behave in most inhumane ways, however.
Fitger’s letters, filled with irony, hilarious wit, and bitter cynicism, are a stand-in for the Tweets of countless academics (and professionals of all sorts). Our wit, designed for a loving engagement with the world, has been turned into a nasty instrument of scorn.
As Twitter seems to be teetering on the brink of oblivion under the chaotic leadership of Elon Musk, academics are currently engaged in a season of collective mourning for what will be lost. But I wonder if we’d all be better off in the end.
Fitger’s letters are hilarious, but one cannot imagine they lead to positive outcomes for the people he’s advocating for. He is simply creating more chaos and disillusion by tossing his pain back into the machinery that makes him miserable.
Why do we continue to pretend that our divisive, arrogant hot takes and other witticisms will do any good? Tossing our anger at the inhumanity of Twitter only makes Twitter more inhumane.
We should be able to laugh at Dear Committee Members even as we allow it to teach us something.
I have nothing useful to add except that I read this and its sequel a few months ago (I am a sucker for an epistolary novel, be it a historic travelogue or a teen diary) and found it both absolutely delightful and a bittersweet reminder about why I changed course away from academia all those years ago. Oh the snark I could have snarked!