All in the Game

Reading the Morning Mail

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By Stanley Fish BACKUP

The letter, dated September 21, 2001, had only one sentence, but it was a doozy:

You and your kind finally stand stripped of all credibility, revealed as just plain ass-holes and fellow travellers of marchists [sic] and terrorists committed to bringing down the institutions of America and its Christian culture, like those pictured below.

Those pictured below were two of my colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who had lately been in the news because Ayers's memoir Fugitive Days -- detailing the now married and incredibly respectable couple's past life in the Weather Underground -- had suffered the bad timing of being published just before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Many people were indignant at a perceived lack of remorse and contrition on Ayers's part and outraged that the former fugitives were now university professors and credentialed experts on secondary education (Ayers) and the problem of violence against children (Dohrn).

But why write to me? I wasn't in the Weather Underground. In fact, I am the only academic I know who was a supporter of the Vietnam War. The answer is that I am a dean and occasionally identified as such in the press; so when someone is upset about something related to the university I work at, I get the letter (which may have also gone to the provost and chancellor).

This one was typical in some respects and anomalous in others. Like many I receive, it assumes that the Bill Bennetts of the world are right and that American universities are now hostage to un-American and anti-American faculty members whose professed mission it is to corrupt the youth of our country.

Along the same lines, it declines to distinguish between those who hijack planes with the purpose of killing as many U.S. citizens as possible and those who (at least in the view of the letter writer) are hijacking and killing the traditions that make this country what it is. It is also typical in misidentifying (in addition to misspelling) its enemy; surely Marxist academics are now an endangered species. And, finally, it conforms to a pattern, first by being handwritten, and second by being anti-Semitic.

This letter, however, is anomalous because its anti-Semitism is implied rather than overtly declared -- usually the anti-Semitism takes the form of a rant complete with quotations from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- and because it is written in ink not pencil -- usually the letter is scrawled in a hand that seems to be the officially approved style for disaffected crackpots; and it is most anomalous because it is signed and furnished with a return address.

This gave me the opportunity (which I always seize) to search for my correspondent's telephone number and call him up. The result, once he got over his surprise at having actually to confront the total stranger to whom he had sent a nasty missive, was a very pleasant conversation at the end of which he apologized profusely and invited me to dinner.

It doesn't always turn out that well. When the Chicago Tribune ran a story on the relationship between projected cuts in the budget of the University of Illinois system and recent efforts on my campus to attract high-profile senior professors, I got a letter from someone who declared himself to be flabbergasted that the University of Illinois at Chicago had aspirations of any kind. He had always thought of the campus as a second-rate institution and believed it should remain just that.

I called him and asked what seemed to me to be a fail-safe question: "Don't you think that the children of the citizens of Chicago are deserving of a first-rate university?"

"Haven't you ever heard of Northwestern and the University of Chicago?" he asked in scorn.

"But," I replied, "those two are private schools with tuitions 600 percent higher than the tuition of UIC. Shouldn't there be a high-level alternative for the less affluent?"

"I'm late for an appointment," he said and hung up.

Not all letters a dean receives have something to do with the college he or she administers. I periodically hear from someone who wants me to join with him to reform the federal tax system. I made the mistake of responding and telling him that I really couldn't be of any help. He keeps me updated.

A more recent correspondent (just last month) who is also interested in tax matters -- he wants to abolish the income tax and replace it with a sales tax -- sent me a kind of form letter. Full of typos and crossed-out words, it was originally sent to all gubernatorial candidates, but that salutation was replaced by my name and I was asked to support "the killing of well-deserving criminals," "eliminate stupid bussing," and promise to "raise the driving age to 21," "raise the blood alcohol test up to 1.5" -- a little contradiction here perhaps -- "lower taxes on tobacco and liquor," and "refrain from describing homosexuals and lesbians as 'gay.'"

I don't think I'm going to get his vote.

Someone else who recently found me wants me to advise him on how to start over again, although what advice I might give to someone who tells me (parenthetically) that he is a Nobel Prize winner isn't clear. Another epistolary friend sends pages of mathematical formulas along with a quite learned and well-written piece on the relationship between St. Paul and Old Testament law. What am I to do with either?

As you can see from these random examples, letters sent to administrators fall into different categories and accordingly require different responses. Hostile and angry letters are easy. Since those who write them don't expect you to reply -- they are, as is said, only "venting" -- contact them immediately. Either you will gain a new friend or, even better, you will never hear from him or her again.

Ditto with letters from angry parents who either have a general complaint about the sorry state of education or a specific complaint about the way a precious offspring has been treated by one of your faculty members. Nine times out of 10 the faculty member's only mistake was to be too lenient, but people are entitled to be irrational when it comes to their children's well-being, and you should hear them out and acknowledge their concern, if only to lower the volume and the temperature.

Then there are the letters from people you know and people you don't know asking for a job and sending along enough reading material to keep you occupied on a flight to Australia. Here everything is on the side of generosity and courtesy. Not only do you want to encourage fellow scholars going through a bad patch; you want to hedge against that future when the person who wrote to you has a job at an institution that a student of yours has applied to.

The really troublesome letters are those you can't place, those that come out of the blue or out of left field or seem to have been written to someone else. You ask yourself, "Is this a crank letter or a con letter or a letter written by a person genuinely disturbed?" but you can't tell.

Crank letters, if you are confident you've received one, should probably be ignored because you don't want to risk a lifetime of serial correspondence. The problem with something you suspect is a con letter is that it might not be one. Better to send the requested books to that foreign country where library holdings are thin; maybe the person who asks for them will really read them before he turns around and sells them.

Letters that suggest instability are the trickiest of all and require the greatest thought and care. One tip-off that you may be dealing with someone on or over the edge is the complaint that he or she is the victim of conspiratorial forces that either include you or can be defeated if only you will lend a hand. If you decline to respond, you might be feeding the paranoia. If you respond as a therapist, you will be committing malpractice and might possibly cause harm. A middle course, one that acknowledges the writer while maintaining a purely professional stance, is to find in the letter a question of fact or bibliography to which you can reply in the manner of someone providing information for a colleague; you've shown respect while avoiding the danger of venturing into waters you couldn't possibly navigate.

It might seem that I have been treating mail, especially mail on matters remote from my competence, as a distraction from my appointed duties, but in fact responding to mail that seems to have flown in from the stratosphere is an activity very much like the activities I -- and you -- regularly engage in.

The pleasure in administration, for those who like it, is the pleasure of daily encountering problems, questions, requests, and crises you could not have anticipated no matter how long you've been in the job. It's always new, you're always scrambling, you never cease being surprised at the creativity (sometimes perverse) of the men and women who importune you. What is required is that you be flexible, sympathetic, firm, wary, generous, suspicious, careful, and adventurous all at once.

Answering the morning mail is a rehearsal for the work of the day.