Early on in her first tenure-track job at Michigan State University, in the late 1970s, the author happened to be riding the same train from Lansing, Michigan, to Chicago as the department chair who hired her, Alan Hollingsworth, who had since become dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. It had taken her three years to land a tenure-track position, and she was a second-round pick at that, after the original candidate failed to pan out. In this article, the author describes her "strangers on a train" encounter with Hollingsworth which provided a lesson in complicity and the never-ending crisis in the humanities.