What I’m Reading: ‘Dear Committee Members’

Julie Schumacher’s epistolary novel, Dear Committee Members (Doubleday, 2014), with its wonderfully satirical insights into the dysfunction of an English department at a Midwestern university, made me wonder: Why do all English departments I have known or known about produce such emotionally abusive behavior and foster such psychological vitriol?

While I can’t satisfactorily answer that question, I can say that the read offered catharsis and comfort — in part because Schumacher’s narrator seems to have it even worse than the rest of us do. The author, a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, paints a portrait of the professional life of a tenured professor of English (very much like the protagonist of Richard Russo’s equally amusing novel, Straight Man) that suggests that a collection of English nerds inevitably cultivates petty, self-centered neuroses and a toxic environment.

My only objection to the book is that the author chose to make her protagonist a middle-aged man. Fine, I can deal with middle age. But, for once, can we have a serious, backboned intellectual who is not a laid-back man on the verge of a bitter withdrawal from the world? I want a strong woman with integrity and compassion.

For those readers considering an academic career, this novel will either make you reconsider your life’s ambition, or prepare you to steel yourself for it.

Kimberly M. Vanderlaan is an associate professor of English at California University of Pennsylvania.