Anyone using one of the suggestions based on "create a fake free email account" should watch out for the possibility that the free email provider will include your IP address in the message. If it does, it is trivial for the recipient (here, the author) to determine which university owns that IP address, which would probably let them make a very good guess at your identity (check the faculty web page for Podunk State University and see who is the expert on reticulated splines). So that would give only the illusion of anonymity.

For example, Yahoo Mail does include the sender's IP address. Gmail apparently does not do so currently, or at least doesn't include it in any obvious way (it could be encoded in some way that is well known but not by me).