Dark Chapter for Michael Ryan’s Victims

Well isn’t that just typical? Yet another privileged white male with a 40-year-old excuse on the shelf ready for deployment--its mission: Absolve him of responsibility for his abominably cruel, unspeakably damaging behavior ranging over years and years and thousands of victims.

Your profile of Michael Ryan (“His Darkest Chapter,” July 4) was downright stomach turning, exacerbated by the pseudo-intellectual blahblahblah spewed in his defense by Michael Clark, chair of UCI’s department of English. Guess what, hundreds and thousands of hapless students and parents? The UCI English department decided several years ago that a man with Ryan’s background deserved a “second chance,” and you, and your children, were just the folks to give it to him.

One wonders, head spinning, just what does it take to not be hired by UCI? We are to believe, perhaps, that other job-hunting academic poets who manage to get through careers without repeatedly molesting children were, as a group, less talented than this guy?

With good jobs eternally at a shortage in the world of the academic humanities, it is no great leap to surmise that there was quite a field of other qualified candidates. Could it be that Ryan’s particular history gave a frisson of excitement to the hiring committee and worked to his advantage?

PRISCILLA MAYFIELD

Orange