Business English: How do I spurn a former classmate?

A Senior fellow at world-famous think tank (in his 60s) wrote: I've just received an e-mail out of the blue from a college classmate whom I last saw cheating on an exam. I asked him to stop and he told me rudely to mind my own business. ... von Lucy Kellaway, London

... He was a BMOC (Big Man on Campus) at the time and I was in social Siberia. Now he is a senior partner at a major New York law firm (Yale Law School, Class of 1968) and is asking me to lunch, no doubt hoping to get something out of it. He ranks at the very top of classmates I hope never to see again and ignoring him seems too kind. I hope you can suggest a more imaginative response.

Read what Lucy Kellaway, "agony-aunt" of the Financial Times (London), answered:

The fact that you have kept your loathing of this man burning steadily for 42 years is no surprise to me: these student dislikes are oddly durable. I have faithfully despised for decades a couple of people who were at university with me. These days I can't remember anything much about them - and certainly wouldn't recognise them if I bumped into them in the street - but I do remember they are forever hateful to me.

Lucy Kellaway

Although your dislike endures, you have changed a great deal in the intervening four decades - at least in one respect. While he has (annoyingly) been as successful as he always thought he would be, your relative position has improved beyond measure. As a senior fellow at a world-famous institution, you are his equal now. That shift in perspective alone may cause you to view him differently; if he no longer looks down his nose at you, you might find you no longer dislike him.

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Meet him for lunch

If I were you, I'd say yes to lunch. Enjoy the fact that the former BMOC is now cap in hand to the former LMISS (Little Man in Social Siberia). With a cool curiosity, I'd let him say his piece and try to assess him dispassionately.

If you decide he's as hateful as he always was, you have at your disposal a particularly nasty tool of torture. Over dessert (if top New York lawyers eat such a thing, which I doubt), you should obliquely refer to the cheating incident. Don't confront him directly, as any halfway decent lawyer will be adept at wriggling off the hook. Instead, find some way of gently dropping a hint to show you haven't forgotten about it. He most certainly won't have forgotten either; and won't at all enjoy the feeling that his lunch guest does not view him as a legal god, but persists in seeing him as a nasty, sneaky cheat.

Hopefully you still dislike him

For your sake, I hope you do still dislike him. The alternative - that you come away thinking that he's a perfectly nice guy - would be a less satisfying outcome. To nurse feelings so strong and for so long is a serious commitment; almost an act of faith. To discover it was all for nothing could simply prove too disorienting, this late in the day.

Aus der Financial Times, London. www.ft.com