Professional Qalifications of WAM

[theodore]

Dear Dean of the School of Music:
 
This is in response to your suggestion that we appoint  Mr. Wolfgang Mozart to our music faculty. The music department appreciates your interest, but the faculty is sensitive about its prerogatives in the selection of new colleagues.
 
While the list of works and performances the candidate has submitted is very extensive, it reflects too much activity outside of academia. Mr. Mozart does not have an earned doctorate and has very little formal education and teaching experience. There is also significant evidence of personal instability as evidenced in his resume. Would he really settle down in a large university such as ours?

The applied faculty were impressed with his pianism; the fact that he also performed on violin and viola seemed to us to be stretching versatility dangerously thin. We suspect a large degree of dilletantism on his part.

The composition faculty was skeptical about his vast output. They correctly warn us from their own experience that to receive many commissions and performances is no guarantee of quality. The senior professor pointed out that Mr. Mozart promotes many of these performances himself and has never won the support of a major foundation.

One of our faculty members was present a year ago at the premiere of, I believe, a violin sonata. He discovered afterwards that Mr. Mozart had not written out all the parts for the piano before he performed it. This may be very well in the performance world, but it sets a poor example for our students. We expect deadlines to be met on time, and this includes all necessary paperwork.

At our interview, one of our female faculty members was deeply offended by his bluntness. She even had to leave the room after his endless parade of anecdotes. This propensity of his to excite the enmity of professional colleagues is hardly in accordance with the establishment of the academic community to which we aspire.
 
We are glad as a faculty to have had the chance to meet  Mr. Mozart, but we cannot recommend his appointment. Even if he were appointed, there is almost no hope of his being granted tenure. The man simply showed no interest in going to school to better his compositional skills. This smacks of egotism at its zenith.

Sincerely yours,
 
The Chair and Faculty of the Department of Music