The Author of ‘Dear Committee Members’ Takes On the Corporate University

Photo by Ackerman Gruber

Julie Schumacher is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and an award-winning academic satirist. Her books riff on colleges’ corporatization, the withering of the humanities, and scholars’ eccentricity.

For her 2014 novel, Dear Committee Members, she became the first woman to win the Thurber Prize for American Humor. The epistolary novel is a series of warped letters of recommendation written by Jason Fitger, a bilious, down-and-out creative-writing professor at Midwestern Payne University.

Its sequel, The Shakespeare Requirement, finds Fitger chairing, from a decaying basement office, his misfit colleagues in the English department. It is under existential threat from the prosperous second-floor economics department, led by the slick sellout Roland Gladwell. Through Payne’s Quality Assessment Program, or QUAP (“the sound of a door clicking satisfactorily shut”), he seeks to crush the unlucrative humanities while wooing more corporate sponsors to expand his dominion.

Although Fitger disdains the exercise, the English department must produce a consensus Statement of Vision to scratch out its meager budget.

Schumacher spoke with The Chronicle about academic satire, the future of the humanities, and how to foster creative impulses.

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The writer Andrew Kay recently argued in our pages that the academic satire is dying. He says academics are too scared to laugh. Is he right?

In the end, I just can’t believe that. People need humor. It’s a relief and a release.

He emphasizes the political correctness and humorlessness of academic life today.

It’s a very tricky time, when people on the left sometimes have unwittingly played into the hands of the right, and the right has taken advantage and twisted what people on the left say, to belittle or make fun. People aren’t engaging in dialogue so much as in a Facebook kind of one-upmanship. It’s about sound bites and not discussion. It’s about who is more cleverly righteous in the moment.

What authors have influenced you?

When I started Dear Committee Members, I really wasn’t thinking, “I’m going to write an academic satire.” I was thinking solely about form. Was it going to be possible to write a novel in the form of letters of recommendation? The books I looked at as models were Nicholson Baker’s A Box of Matches, a series of diary entries (I just love that book), and 84 Charing Cross Road, which I had reread at the time. And I just thought, “How to make something whole out of these strange little pieces?” It was a puzzle I had set for myself.

I had to make the main character write about himself in letters that should have been advocating for others. And then I thought, “This guy’s going to be a total jerk.” That’s where the humor started to come in. I thought, “Nobody would do this — it would be so inappropriate — but my guy’s going to do it.”

With the second book, I knew already that it would be much more an academic satire.

I like that your protagonist Jason Fitger’s students want trigger warnings for his course “Novels of the Apocalypse.”

Yes, I have a friend at another university who just says on her syllabus, “Everything that I teach in this class is potentially disturbing.”

Do you model your characters on real academics?

My husband and I have lived in academia for decades now, and it’s a strange world. There’s always lore. There are urban legends I might twist and make use of here and there. But nobody that I know directly. I wanted to avoid that, because I really like my colleagues.

Are there elements of Fitger in you?

Totally. I was raised to be polite and to be appropriate and to keep my head down. I’m not a brash person, I’m an introvert. And to create an alter ego, who can give voice to the things that come into your head that you would never say, is really satisfying — some strange version of me that would normally not see the light of day.

What about all the professors’ medical woes — Fitger’s dental problems, his colleague’s bowel disease, and so on? Is that just your portrait of the graying faculty?

The physical crumbling of the body goes along with the crumbling of the building — a general deterioration that Fitger would like to keep at bay. But you’re fighting time. That’s a losing battle.

You also highlight the corporatization of the American university, with the security passes, scheduling software, bidding for use of conference rooms. Do I sense some authorial aggravation there?

Oh, totally. At Minnesota we’re supposed to be using Moodle or Canvas or something with our students, and I announce on Day 1: “Not gonna do it. If you guys want to know what the assignment is, come to class. I’m going to write it on the chalkboard right here in front of you.” I use email. I use, reluctantly, a cellphone. But I don’t like the cellphone. I usually leave it in my sock drawer.

Do you see yourself as a satirist?

I don’t consider myself a satirist or a humor writer. I consider myself a children’s author, because I wrote five books for kids. I did the academic coloring book. I’ve written a few essays, not a whole lot.

One thing I always try to emphasize to my students is to approach writing as a fun experiment and remember why you loved it in the first place, rather than sitting down and thinking, “This is an important thing that I must get right.” If you take something too seriously and decide ahead of time what it will be, that’s often a way of killing an idea.

I started writing the young-adult and kid novels because I was stuck on some other project. My kids were young at the time — I was reading Charlotte’s Web to them and Bridge to Terabithia and other books — and I thought, “I will try to write something for this age group, 10 to 12, just as an experiment. If it’s lousy, I’ll throw it away.” There was real pleasure in it for me. Once my kids grew up, I thought, “Well, what else can I do?”

Even if we recognize Roland Gladwell’s humanities-crushing dreams as a caricature, do you feel like those subjects, English in particular, are on the ropes? Or is there a touch of underdog optimism that they, like Fitger himself, will hang in there?

I like that phrase, “underdog optimism.” Enrollments in the humanities have been going down. You have places like the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point doing away with, what, 13 of their majors — including English, philosophy, Spanish — and still calling themselves a university. That’s impossible — that’s a vo-tech school.

When the pinch comes, of course, it’s always the arts that are going to suffer. I mean, that’s the skewed thinking we’re engaged in.

People need to be creative. Creative thought is part of what makes people educated and makes them fit for the marketplace as well. Given financial straits and student debt, the reaction is to move toward technology or business. And I don’t think that’s really the best course. I think we will swing back toward the humanities again.

What courses and authors do you like to teach?

I’ve taught periodically a class called “Coming of Age in Fiction.” It’s an English and creative-writing class for incoming freshmen. In all the novels, the main character is leaving home. I start with Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. We do James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Round House by Louise Erdrich, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding. All the young protagonists are encountering something hard or confusing for the first time.

The students do a bit of personal essay but write mostly traditional papers. When I teach creative writing at the undergrad level, students sometimes come in and think, “There’s this novel about elves I want to write, and here’s my chance.” I say, “No, no, no, that’s not what we’re doing here.”

This fall I’m teaching a graduate fiction workshop, which is always great fun, and an undergrad class in writing young-adult fiction, which is very hot these days. We haven’t offered it before, but it filled up in a heartbeat.

Is there more academic satire coming? What are your current projects?

I’m very fond of Fitger. At the end of the first book, I thought, “Well, I’ve made him chair, what’s that going to be like?” But now I feel like I know.

I’m working on a 3-D collage project, collecting old printer’s trays, which I find irresistible. What I need to do is collect old letters to set into the trays to create tiny narratives. I also have a collection of grammar and education books from the early 1900s. I splice them all together with foul-smelling glue. Totally bizarre, but especially at this point in my career, I want to work on things that bring me enjoyment.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.