Don’t You Dare Call Me Without Texting First

For some people, there is nothing more delightful than the surprise ringing of a phone that signals someone is thinking about them. For others, there is nothing ruder, more intrusive or panic-inducing than an unannounced call. You are out of your mind—and possibly not in their life—if you’re not sending them a text first.

Phone-call etiquette has never been more complicated. Family members, co-workers, spouses and friends can’t agree on whether it’s OK to call someone without first alerting them via text that you plan to call.

The debate is intensifying: the more entrenched texting has become, the more people have come to find a phone call without warning unacceptable. Those who call without warning, in turn, find the phone-call-phobic rigid to the point of absurdity: calls aren’t “unannounced”—the ringing is the announcement, with more than 100 years of precedent.

“I just don’t think calling is that big of a deal,” says Aparna Paul, 41, of North Easton, Mass., director of communications for a nonprofit.

She frequently calls friends and family out of the blue. Once when she needed to get a work task done that required contacting a colleague, she dialed him up without texting or emailing first.

“The co-worker was very annoyed that I called him,” she says. “Extremely annoyed.”

Paul is flummoxed by the shift toward some unwritten rule that a phone call must be a planned event: “To me it’s a little bit narcissistic to think your time is so important that I have to pencil myself into your schedule for a two-minute call.”

Expectations for communicating by phone tend to fall along generational lines, though outliers exist. Those who grew up with landlines and can remember having to pick up a phone to know who was on the other end often aren’t as perturbed by an unannounced call. People who’ve been texting away on cellphones since high school expect a heads up.

Preference for text messaging is highest among those aged 18 to 24, followed by those 25 to 34, according to a December survey from YouGov. Among 2,000 white-collar professionals surveyed by recruiting firm Robert Walters in March, just 16% of those who are Gen Z—those born between 1997 to 2012—thought the phone was a productive form of professional communication.

Merci Grace, 39, an investor in San Francisco, finds unannounced calls intrusive. She would just as soon not receive unscheduled calls—or calls of any kind—unless there is a specific reason.

Her husband finds specific reasons to call her all the time.

While she was in Fresno with her sisters recently, he called twice in quick succession: the first to tell her something the dogs had done. The second call prompted concern from one sister.

“I had to tell her, ‘Oh, he’s Gen X, he just calls me when he absolutely could have and should have texted me,’” says Grace. “I have found it’s healthy for my marriage to not try to change his behaviour.”

Yanda Erlich, Grace’s husband, considers phone calls among his love languages.

“I like hearing her voice,” says Elrich, 46, chief revenue officer of an AI startup. “I like her.”

Diana Fox, 38, of Miami Beach, Fla., finds calling more efficient than texting and then sitting around waiting to schedule the call. As the founder of Odyssey Gaming, which makes online games, her work is often time-sensitive. She doesn’t buy the argument that calls are intrusive and has found herself explaining to business partners that there’s a decline button they’re welcome to use.

“The person doesn’t have to pick up the call,” she says.

Whether it’s socially acceptable to still be calling people without texting remains an open question for descendants of etiquette guru Emily Post.

“I don’t think we’re going to land on one side of this issue or the other,” says Daniel Post Senning, a spokesperson for the Emily Post Institute. (Emily was his great-great-grandmother.)

Factors that must be considered include the relationship you have with the person and whether they have expressed a preference about how to communicate, he says. Senning is OK with friends and family calling him without texting first but not strangers.

“If I were to ask the world a favour, I would ask people that have never communicated with me, if they got access to it, not to use that direct number,” he says.

Stevie Steinberg, 24, an electrical engineer in San Francisco, doesn’t have an issue with unexpected calls because no one in his life would ever call him unless a call was agreed upon over text first. This includes his parents, brother and friends. The exception is if while making plans there have been so many texts that it’s faster to get on the phone; even then there’s an understanding that a call might be coming.

The three times Steinberg can think of when he received calls without first being notified by text, someone had died. He now associates unplanned calls with emergencies and generally bad things.

“If I was driving and I got a call from, I don’t know, someone who lives near me maybe, I’d think my apartment was on fire,” he says.

Vanessa Lincoln, 24, often calls friends without texting first. She’s especially partial to a surprise FaceTime.

“A lot of people in my generation have phone anxiety. They get freaked out by the idea of answering the phone,” says Lincoln, who lives in New York City and works at a consulting firm. “I’ve never been like that.”

Sometimes when Lincoln and her parents, in Washington state, are done talking over FaceTime, they stay on the call—spending time together, cooking or doing things around the house.

“I kind of like FaceTime because you don’t have to be talking,” says Lincoln. “You can kind of just hang out… I don’t know if that is a normal thing to do.”

Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.

These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.

That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.

“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.

The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.

“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.

Randy Boyagoda speaks at a panel discussion. — Randy Boyagoda taking part in a panel discussion at the University of Toronto in 2024. Polina Teif/University of Toronto

The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.

“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”

In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.

On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.

“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”

Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.

He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)

“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”

Illustration of the book cover for "Lords of Serendipity" by Randy Boyagoda, depicting a woman wearing a hat with various buildings on top, against a blue background with a white airplane.

“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”

In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”

His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”

“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”

The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.

Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”

As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.

“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”

Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)

Don’t You Dare Call Me Without Texting First

‘Extremely annoyed.’ The etiquette of unexpected phone calls divides friends, families and co-workers.

Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.