Less than a month before the date of my premature graduation, I had filed an answer to a complaint by the University of Pennsylvania that I owed them $15,000, in part for University housing. I have never lived in University housing. Instead I have lived in one of two wheelchair-accessible apartment buildings near the University, but more affordable than University Housing.

I also did not know how the bill had climbed to nearly $15,000. Despite my repeated requests (unfortunately by phone), the University had not sent me any itemization of charges for almost ten years. In some of those phone calls I made, I’m sure I gave them my current Philadelphia address. Still no bills. Once I had cleared the lawsuit, I found out that their computer system persisted in listing the address I had in 1996-1997, when I had a fellowship at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Their address is 15600 Mulholland Drive. The resident students and standing faculty are so few that there is a mailroom that handles mail for , 15600 Mulholland Drive.

Now if you have been to Los Angeles, or seen the movie Mulholland Drive, you may know that it runs along the ridge between West LA and the Valley. It requires wealth to live on Mulholland Drive. If I were wealthy, I would rather live in San Francisco, but Mulholland Drive is certainly nice.

That mailroom, for the offices, and faculty, and academic residents such as students, told me that they would forward stuff for one year after I left, and then would just throw out anything that came after that. So the University of Pennsylvania detailed accounting was toast, or smoke, or ash, after 1998.

The same day I filed the answer to the collection lawyer’s complaint, I found in the mail I collected when I got home, finally, what I should have received six or eight years earlier. My more persistent calls had located someone in Student Financial Services who took down my actual address and sent me a copy of the University’s “archive.” The archive is in tiny print; it is a record of every financial transaction with the University, from kosher meals to grants and fellowships, from a xeroxed course pack to tuition. And of course late penalty fees.

Those late penalty fees amounted to about $7,500. The tuition and fees and the odd meal here and there amounted to $7,500 or so, that had no “offset.” An offset would be the tuition rebate granted for teaching a course, or a reduction in tuition for taking fewer than four courses.

I had talked to a lawyer. For a free half hour of his time he coached me in how to file the Answer to Penn’s Complaint. I was to deny those aspects of the Complaint that “on information and belief” were incorrect. There was no accounting attached to the Complaint, only an affidavit that I owed the amount, and they had been unable to collect it. I said that I did not owe that amount, and that they had not made any effort to collect until they (somehow) located me and started legal proceedings. That’s very odd. As I write this I find it very odd that the UPenn collections department could find me when they wanted to sue me, but they couldn’t send me any information about the account to the same address.

After I was (actually) cleared for graduation in October 2006, after successfully overturning the lawsuit, I was able to log in to the University’s computerized system for student accounts, for the first time. I saw that my address was listed as 15600 Mulholland Drive; I was at that point unable to change the address, because the bill hadn’t yet been cleared after the court appearance of September 16th. Later, in November, I used the system to pay the $80 fee for filing my dissertation, and also changed my address to where I really live.

Because I have an apartment, not a house, when I get a fellowship or travel for any length of time, I give up my apartment. That’s what I did for the one-year fellowship at the University of Judaism on Mulholland Drive. I listed the UJ address as my permanent address; what other address did I have? My parents are dead, my daughter lived in an apartment herself.