The Chair

Having grown up in academia, academic satire is going to be my genre of choice, no question. Favorites? David Lodge’s “Campus Trilogy,” Richard Russo’s Straight Man and Michael Malone’s Foolscap.

So when I saw word of a new Netflix series set on a college campus called The Chair, I was in, especially since it was only six short episodes – equivalent of watching a 3-hour movie – so why not? Toss in Sandra Oh and Jay Duplass, both of whom I like a lot, I was in.

Well, that was disappointing.

Brief, official synopsis:

At a major university, the first woman of color to become chair tries to meet the dizzying demands and high expectations of a failing English department.

Pros: Mostly good performances, enjoyable to watch. Yes, Duplass plays a cliché – the disheveled, charming dysfunctional middle-aged humanities professor, but his humor, sharpness and self-awareness bring it up a level. Oh as the chair – Ji-Yoon Kim – is excellent, of course.

Most notable, though, is Everly Carganilla , the child actor who plays Oh’s adopted daughter Ju Ju. She’s only six, and of course a great deal of what makes a child actor’s performance effective on film can often be ascribed to skillful editing, but as a person who finds most American child acting wooden in one sense or another, this little girl was a cut above – natural and unforced.

There are individual moments of warmth and realism – mostly offhand exchanges between characters that are strikingly true, either affecting or humorous. I found the presentation of Ji-Yoon’s homelife to be quite interesting and a relaxed, unique presentation of a different kind of cultural diversity – she’s an American woman of Korean ethnicity who’s adopted a child with a Mexican background. Ji-Yoon’s father and extended family is around, and his house, in particular, is decorated with Catholic imagery. It’s never mentioned, but it’s present.

So yes – the family material, the Jay Duplass character and small moments were good – very good, in fact.

But…when it comes to the big picture? The main point? The foundational setting? The academic world it’s presenting to us?

Sorry. F. Maybe D+ at most.

First – one of the plot points revolves around the issue of free speech on campus – hot, of course – but does so in an easy way that doesn’t even come close to the actual conflicts we’ve been seeing for decades now.

Duplass’ character, Bill, teaching a class on “Death and Modernism,” joking imitates a Nazi in class. Student cameras sneak out, and before you know it, he’s viral and in deep trouble.

The defense centers on his right to tell jokes, to use that imagery to make a point – that is, of course, not at all, supportive of actual Nazis.

(My favorite point in this subplot comes when Bill, explaining how he’ll defend himself, is perfectly serious, then edges into…..I’ll say it…..Springtime! for Hitler! And Germany!)

And this is all well and good – touching, as it does, although not explicitly, on the use of “unacceptable” language and imagery to make points in teaching – or even to convey a sense of a period or work accurately. (See…Huckleberry Finn…)

Which of course is not how it’s usually playing out on contemporary campuses, in which it is not that there are people telling actual Nazi jokes, but that anyone and everyone who breaks the code of acceptable Right Think is called a Nazi or a fascist, whether they are or not.

The conversation on college campuses is not generally – what is appropriate language – but what views are acceptable to hold, what worldviews are permitted – and then by extension – why are we here? What’s the purpose of higher education?

Secondly, while the show assumes a stance against racism and sexism, the ageism in character presentation comes on strong – surprisingly so, and in a way that has been remarked on by reviewers. These elderly faculty members are certainly sympathetic but they are also mostly clueless caricatures.

Finally – and this is really the major point, the big problem.

This is 2021. The show is set in the present.

The older vanguard of (white) faculty keeps telling us how they’ve been in place for thirty years.

Which, you know – hate to break it to you, because it makes me feel old, too – would take us to:

1990.

Not 1950, with tweedy white men smoking pipes in the faculty room, sniffing at the colored folk, droning on about sonnets.

No – 1990. Decades into the transformation of the humanities in western higher education.

But that’s not the sense you get from The Chair. The central pedagogical conflict is between those stuffy, hidebound traditionalists, who have been supposedly dominating the department, and who apparently haven’t been to an MLA conference – ever  – with the resultant decline in enrollment – and the with it minority faculty, with their innovative teaching and eye on colonialism and queer subtexts.

In 2021.

Really?

I mean, this has been well-documented everywhere, and everyone knows it, so I shouldn’t have to press the point but some personal insight nonetheless. I was in college from 1978-82, then graduate school from 83-85. In the south. My emphasis was on history, not literature, but nonetheless, it will not be news to anyone, that my studies were engaged with all sorts of isms – and I’m not saying that’s a negative either – it’s just the way it was. My “History of the Industrial Revolution” course was shaped by leftist, labor-sympathetic ideals and took as its primary text one of the major leftist-centered labor histories out there. It was a great class! My 18^th and 19^th century American history classes all centered the experiences of native peoples and women. Religious studies? A global view that critiqued the role of colonialism in the expansion of Christianity. Even in those ancient days, the humanities I was taught as both an undergraduate and graduate student was very much moving away from being centered on European males to be inclusive of the experiences of “minorities” and women, to explore social and cultural history instead of being centered, as has been traditional, on political history.

This was forty years ago.

I think if you were to do a more accurate satire of contemporary academic life, you’d have to take into account that the old fogeys who got into this forty years ago and are grumbling in confusion at the present scene are probably going to be, not cut in the mold of Mark Van Doren, but Noam Chomsky.

And you know what? That would be a fascinating piece, wouldn’t it? To see the conflict between the aging radical academics and their replacements of every ideological stripe?

Yeah, so The Chair lost me, ultimately, because of that distance from actual reality. Diversity in academia is an issue these days, yes. But the tension is not about pedagogical or even ethnic diversity, but diversity of viewpoint. That’s the current flashpoint.

And there’s this: effective satire, it seems to me, can’t have heroes. Oh, maybe it can have one – the innocent observer, appalled at all she is witnessing – but no more. In order for satire to be effective and strike us as true in its absurdity, everyone must be the butt of a joke, everyone’s foibles be exaggerated and held up for mockery – not just the bad guys with the appropriately unacceptable viewpoints.  In an academic setting, every character should have a share of that unique, weird combination of obsession, introversion, ambition, passion, cynicism and weary disillusionment that is the typical academic personality.

Believe me – I know.

Update: Case in point, just from today.