[The Montana Professor 17.1, Fall 2006 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Henry Gonshak
English
Montana Tech-UM
hgonshak@mtech.edu
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1954
251 pp., $2.95 pb.
Pictures from an Institution
Randall Jarrell
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952
277 pp., $7.95 pb.
Small World
David Lodge
London: Penguin Books, 1984
339 pp., $14 pb.
The Groves of Academe
Mary McCarthy
New York: Harvest/HBJ Books, 1951
302 pp., $12.95 pb.
Straight Man
Richard Russo
New York: Random House, 1997
391 pp., $25 hc.
Moo
Jane Smiley
New York: Ivy Books, 1995
437 pp., $7.99 pb.
The Masters
C.P. Snow
Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1951
312 pp., $8 pb.
Stoner
John Williams
New York: Viking Press, 1965
278 pp., $9.95 hc.
When I was an undergraduate at Vassar College in the late 1970s, my father came once to pick me up for summer vacation. Before leaving, I had to drop off a paper on the Old Testament. So, my dad and I walked across Vassar's pastoral campus, shaded by towering elms and oaks, to the old, ivy-covered building housing my professor's office. We found him reclining in a plush easy chair in his book-lined abode, reading and smoking a pipe, while on a table beside him sat a wooden box filled with other student papers. I dropped mine atop the stack; my teacher nodded, briefly but amiably, and then we left.
When we got back outside, my father was agog. "That's the life!" he cried. By this time, my dad had spent over 20 years teaching social studies in a New York City public junior high school. By the late '70s, New York and its schools were in chaos. Students were calling my dad "baldy" and tossing his books out the window, while others smoked pot in the bathrooms and mugged their wimpier classmates in the schoolyard. No wonder my dad saw my professor's life as Edenic. I fully shared his enthusiasm. Raised in a household which revered the life of the mind, I grew up believing that academics led a privileged existence, a sheltered life spent thinking profoundly about "Great Truths" (whatever they were), surrounded by other equally sanguine and contemplative eggheads. The academic life was a religious vocation, and a doctorate was an imprimatur not just of superior intellectual achievement, but of genius.
Many of my fellow Americans also think that academia is an idyllic "ivory tower" detached from the "real world". I am struck by how many average people admire me for being a professor. Even when my academic vocation makes me the butt of jokes about "absent-minded" or "do-nothing" professors, there is usually a trace of envy beneath the aspersions.
Today, however, middle-aged and having spent my whole adulthood in academe, I find myself reflecting on that story about my Vassar professor, and suspecting that his life was probably less ideal than it seemed at the time. Isn't it likely he had to cope with, say, rivalrous colleagues, "publish or perish" pressures, obtuse or inflexible administrators, apathetic or ill-prepared students? The "ivory tower" view of academia, I now believe, is largely a myth--one reflecting less the reality of the contemporary university than, by contrast, widely shared frustrations with the average American workplace. Certainly, had I read as a young man any of the college novels under discussion here (all penned by authors who spent at least part of their careers in academe), I would have been rudely disabused of my own utopian views about higher education.
This special issue of The Montana Professor is devoted to the subject of "academic responsibility". In 1987, the American Association of University Professors issued a "Statement of Professional Ethics" which listed five criteria for ethical, responsible academic behavior:
- Professors'...primary responsibility to their subject is to seek and to state the truth as they see it....
- As teachers, professors encourage the free pursuit of learning in their students.... Professors make every reasonable effort to foster honest academic conduct....
- As colleagues, professors have obligations that derive from common membership in the community of scholars. Professors do not discriminate against or harass colleagues.... In the exchange of criticism and ideas professors show due respect for the opinions of others.... Professors accept their share of faculty responsibilities for the governance of their institution.
- As members of an academic institution, professors seek above all to be effective teachers and scholars....
- As citizens engaged in a profession that depends upon freedom for its health and integrity, professors have a particular obligation to promote conditions of free inquiry.
(--from Zealotry and Academic Freedom, Neil Hamilton, Appendix C, 386-387)
Has there been a college in all of human history which lived up to the AAUP's ideals? These academic novels suggest not. In contrast, they offer a packed rogues' gallery of irresponsible academics who behave badly in a range of ways, many of which directly violate AAUP standards. Moreover, if academe tends to be less than utopian, irresponsible academics, these books imply, are largely to blame. Why do academics behave irresponsibly? Are there systemic problems in the university which inadvertently encourage, even reward, such behavior? How does such irresponsibility impact the college community? How does it affect public attitudes toward academe? Are there solutions? As a whole, these novels offer some provisional answers.
One variant of the irresponsible academic proliferating in these books is the professorial opportunist. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with trying to advance one's career, if it is done honestly. But professorial opportunists, on the contrary, hoist themselves up the academic ladder by any means necessary, often behind a veneer of "selfless" devotion to the intellectual life. Claiming to be above money-grubbing, status-seeking business types, the professorial opportunist is really their hypocritical twin. Academic opportunists refute the commonplace that high culture and advanced degrees elevate one's moral character, since professorial opportunists use their learning and intelligence to be ingeniously rotten. As such, AAUP be damned, they do not "foster honest academic conduct," while they do "discriminate against and harass colleagues," while flouting their "obligations" as members of an academic community.
Moreover, the professorial opportunist is nothing new. In a 1959 article, "The Managerialization of the Campus," which discusses (among others) Pictures from an Institution, The Groves of Academe, and The Masters, Earl Latham maintains that, "It would not be difficult to conclude from the evidence of the...novels that the full drama of college life is to be found almost exclusively in the recruitment, promotion, and tenure of professors and presidents. Here, the human condition is one of anxiety about status, prestige, and money; and the stratagems to which the characters stoop to acquire and hold these psychic and material goods are many and devious" (Public Administration Review, Winter 1959, 54).
The professorial opportunist is sharply depicted in Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe. The novel's protagonist, Henry Mulcahy, is an arrogant literature professor who teaches at a small, progressive liberal arts school, Jocelyn College. When Mulcahy learns from Jocelyn's president that his contract will not be renewed, he instantly launches a sleazy campaign to keep his job. First, he lets slip news of his firing to a student, hoping this will inspire an outcry among the student body. Obviously, professors who use students to further their own interests are behaving irresponsibly, but it is a real temptation, because the nature of professor/student relations ensures that some students will idolize their instructors, and because all students have an incentive to please their teachers in order to get good grades.
Next, Mulcahy lies to a young friend and junior colleague by claiming that his wife is dangerously ill, and that news of her husband's firing may kill her--a plea sure to appeal to the colleague's tender-heartedness. The woman is a Russian emigre, and Mulcahy plays on her lack of familiarity with American institutions. Finally, Mulcahy pretends to be a member of the American Communist Party--a fiendishly shrewd ploy. As the head of a progressive college, the president is a staunch liberal who has published a pamphlet decrying Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunts on college campuses, which forced professors to sign loyalty oaths and blacklisted left-leaning academics. Thus, if Mulcahy can convince the faculty that he was fired because of communist affiliations, he may be able to shame the president into changing his mind. Mulcahy's scheme is an excellent example of how a professor can exploit for selfish ends the university's admirable commitment to academic and political freedom.
The humanities faculty agree that Mulcahy's firing was unfair (though no one seems to know much about his teaching), save for the department chairman, who points out that Mulcahy is irresponsible; he's late turning in paperwork, unavailable to students, and, on faculty committees, he makes a fuss about trivia. Over the chairman's objections, the department sends a delegation to meet with the president. While pointing out that, contrary to Mulcahy's claims, he was never given a permanent contract, the president nonetheless agrees to reappoint him--less, it seems, because he has changed his mind about Mulcahy's qualifications, than because he has capitulated to faculty pressure.
The decision proves to be a disaster, as Mulcahy continues being a bad teacher and Machiavellian colleague. The college president realizes the professor must go, but, as the man who rehired him, he considers his own hands to be tied. So, ironically, it is the president who quits, hoping his successor will dispatch Mulcahy, but, at the novel's end, the vile prof remains firmly ensconced. Thus, The Groves of Academe depicts both an irresponsible academic, who will do anything to further his career (other than, of course, doing his job properly), and an irresponsible administrator, who is too timid to make hard decisions.
In C.P. Snow's rather dull The Masters, about the campaign to elect a new master of a prestigious English university after the old one abruptly dies, the main professorial opportunist is a young chemistry professor, Max Nightingale, who supports the less attractive candidate over the better choice, because he hopes that the former, if elected, will repay Nightingale's loyalty by using his influence in the scientific world to get the second-rate professor appointed to the distinguished Royal Academy of Science. In striving to feather his own nest, Nightingale is perfectly willing to stoop to unscrupulous tactics. For example, he anonymously distributes among the faculty a scurrilous pamphlet defaming the better candidate's wife as a vulgar harridan dreadfully unsuited to preside as the mistress of the lodge where the master resides.
While Snow began his career as an academic, he spent most of his life in politics, serving in various Labour governments in Whitehall, and Lionel Trilling has argued that Snow in The Masters sees academic and political life as analogous. Rejecting the notion that the university is divorced from the "real world," Snow suggests, instead, that in both academe and politics ambitious, immoral individuals indulge in character assassination against their opponents in a deliberate breaching of the necessary divide between the personal and the professional.
In the poet and literary critic Randall Jarrell's only novel, the rather infuriatingly plotless Pictures from an Institution (like The Groves of Academe a satire of a progressive liberal arts school), the professorial opportunist is a celebrated novelist, Gertrude Johnson, who is spending a year at all-women's Benton College as a visiting writer. Caring for nothing save her art, Johnson passes her time at Benton (other than those few hours devoted to her limited teaching duties) composing a wicked roman à clef blatantly satirizing the educational institution that has graciously granted her this sinecure.
Since she will be gone at year's end, and since she defines herself as a writer rather than an academic, Johnson feels no "obligations" to her academic community. In the 1950s, when the novel is set, it was more common than today for well-known writers (like Jarrell himself) to roam nomadically from one temporary academic appointment to the next, a situation which fostered little allegiance to whatever institution was providing interim employment. In our era of depleted university budgets, visiting professorships are harder to obtain, which may make the type of professorial opportunism represented by Gertrude Johnson largely obsolete.
A more current form of academic opportunism abounds in David Lodge's hilarious Small World, which parodies a melange of mostly hotshot English professors from prestigious schools who globe-trot from one snazzy international literary conference to another, where they eat and drink to excess, sleep around, take in a few tourist sights, and deliver opaque papers couched in the fashionable jargon of literary theory, with their exorbitant expenses dutifully paid by either the conference organizers or their respective institutions. It's a hell of a racket.
Academic opportunism arises through a subplot relating the frenzied competition among the planet's most renowned profs for the coveted UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism: a posh post which pays lavishly and entails no responsibilities other than requiring the honoree to sit around thinking deep thoughts. Even before the chair's availability is officially announced, the top candidates are all furiously trying to maneuver themselves into it.
For example, to enhance his reputation, the imperious, black-gloved German professor, Siegfried von Turpitz, reads a paper in Amsterdam in which he plagiarizes the book idea of a young, unknown Irish professor, after the prof's prospective publisher had sent the book proposal to von Turpitz for his appraisal. When the Irishman, who happens to be in the audience, notes the theft during the discussion period, he is backed by a fast-talking American deconstructionist, Morris Zapp, but mainly because Zapp is eager to discredit von Turpitz, his rival for the UNESCO Chair.
Meanwhile, the famous Oxford traditionalist, Rudyard Parkinson, bashes Zapp's latest tome on literary theory in the Times Literary Supplement in order to further Parkinson's own campaign for the chair. When Zapp reads Parkinson's review, he revises an as yet undelivered conference paper in order to insert some nasty potshots at the Brit. Ultimately, none of the jostling candidates receive the UNESCO Chair, because the professor picked to bestow the award, Arthur Kingfisher, the aged international doyen of literary criticism, decides to throw his own hat in the ring. Even though the blocked academic has published nothing of note for years, Kingfisher's bloated reputation ensures that he wins hands down.
In Small World, the professorial characters resoundingly reject the AAUP's quaint notion that the "primary responsibility" of academic scholarship is "to seek and state the truth as they see it". On the contrary, scholarship is a means to an end: a way to advance a career, disarm academic opponents, snare prestigious prizes. Truth has nothing to do with it. Of course, if the aim is simply to get ahead, it is infinitely preferable to parrot the latest "cutting-edge" literary jargon than to say what one actually believes--a situation which fosters a group-mentality which is antithetical to the independent thinking that academic freedom is supposed to inspire.
Though Lodge never says so directly, Small World suggests that academe's ill-considered reward system is to blame for this sorry state of affairs. Seeking to publish rather than "perish," junior faculty especially are pressured to deliver as many obscure papers at arcane conferences as possible, hoping their esoterica will pique the interest of an editor in attendance from some abstruse journal. In this glutted market, it is hard to be original, which leads even a star academic like von Turpitz to plagiarize the ideas of a young, unknown instructor. And, naturally, if academics are constantly dashing off to conferences, their teaching and service will languish. Through the UNESCO Chair, Lodge lampoons the basic emptiness of academic rewards. Isn't this the ultimate professorial prize--a chair with no responsibilities?
In Jane Smiley's best-selling Moo, a multi-plotted novel with a large ensemble cast set at a huge Midwestern state university known as "Moo U," the best example of a professorial opportunist is Dr. Lionel Gift--a suave, world-famous, richly paid economics professor and apostle of laissez-faire capitalism. Gift couches his free-market ideology in explicitly religious terms: "His first principle was that all men, not excluding himself, had an insatiable desire for consumer goods, and that it was no coincidence that what all men had an insatiable desire for was known as 'goods,' for goods were good.... In this desire, all men copied the example of their Maker, Who was so...Prodigal in His production of goods" (31). Gift advises the Costa Rican government, to whom he sends a top-secret report urging gold-mining in the last remaining virgin cloud forest in the Western hemisphere. The gold is to be extracted by a subsidiary owned by a folksy Texas billionaire who is offering big bucks to Moo U in exchange for access to the university.
The university is receptive to the Texan's ministrations because the state's Republican governor has slashed the university's budget, justifying the cuts by insisting that "supporting a large and nationally famous university with state monies was exactly analogous to raising a nest of vipers in your own bed" (19). Eventually, Gift's report is leaked to the public by the provost's middle-aged secretary, who, like secretaries everywhere, has more inside information than anyone else on campus. Before long, the story has appeared in The New York Times, while Gift's faculty antagonist, an unregenerate Marxist and head of the horticulture department, launches an absurd 60s-style campus protest.
All the fuss forces Gift to withdraw his recommendations, though the public furor does not seem to faze him or slow his relentless acquisitiveness and self-promotion. Moo's plot shows that professorial opportunists hail from the right as well as the left, especially in departments such as economics, business, or engineering, where the dubious morality of the corporate world holds sway. Academics like Gift urge universities to partner with industry, and, in a time of dwindling state-support for public education, many cash-strapped administrators find such appeals attractive. But what price, Moo asks, will colleges pay if they allow corporate donors to exercise increasing control over university affairs? A high price, the book implies, and not necessarily just for the university; in Moo, unlike the other novels, academic irresponsibility also threatens the "real world" with nothing short of global environmental devastation.
According to these books, one irresponsible trait possessed by many academics, both professorial opportunists and their less driven colleagues, is a penchant for conspiracy-mongering--the paranoid conviction that one is threatened by large, dark, nebulous forces. Conspiracy-mongering is common to human nature; resulting, perhaps, from the fact that so much in our lives is beyond our control. But academics seem to succumb to this delusion to an extreme degree, maybe because professors tend to be, on the one hand, inordinately imaginative, and, on the other, socially marginalized (at least in America)--a rather toxic combination. Not surprisingly, conspiracy-mongering academics display a profuse lack of collegiality, which they often privately (and sometimes publicly) justify by imagining that their behavior is nobly principled. Tilting at windmills, they violate the AAUP's standards by "discriminating against and harassing colleagues" while believing they are battling ogres.
Academic conspiracy-mongering runs through many of these novels, both older and newer. In The Groves of Academe, Henry Mulcahy's form of this pathology ultimately gets detached from his scheming to keep his job and becomes a crazed end in itself. This becomes clear when his friend and colleague shares with another faculty member how Mulcahy sees his position as a James Joyce scholar: "I think Henry is mad. He comes to me at night and talks, talks, talks. He has a delusional system centering on Joyce. He speaks of Joyce's life as a Ministry. He speaks of the Book, the Revelation, the Passion.... He believes that he's being subject to persecution for propagating the Word. This, he insists, is at the bottom of his troubles; all the rest is pseudepigraphal: that was his own word. He is hated, he says, by Joyce's enemies, who comprise the whole academic world, with the exception of rival Joyce experts who hate him also, since they are really Joyce's enemies in disguise" (210-211).
Academic conspiracy-mongers like Mulcahy may fight their paranoid intellectual battles with such fervor because they are desperately trying to deny nagging suspicions of their own marginality and irrelevance. As Henry Kissinger once said, the fury of academic in-fighting is often in inverse proportion to how much is actually at stake.
Inveterate academic conspiracy-mongers teem in Richard Russo's Straight Man, which is narrated by Henry Devereaux, Jr., a middle-aged, burnt-out, congenitally irreverent English professor at a third-rate state university in a dying industrial town, who has been chosen by his department colleagues as interim chair simply because they are convinced the hapless Devereaux will do absolutely nothing in the position. Nonetheless, Devereaux's colleagues are sure that, as chair, he has met secretly with the school's budget-slashing CEO, where, it is widely believed, Devereaux listed all the members of his department whom the university should fire to stem the school's financial crisis. Partly based on these erroneous convictions, every member in Devereaux's department has filed at least one official grievance against him. One colleague, for example, has lodged a grievance because Devereaux has recommended short-listing in a search to fill an English position an academic who is also a poet, and, since the colleague is a poet herself, this move threatens her turf. The professorial fondness for frivolous grievance-filing relates to academic conspiracy-mongering, since if profs are sure that colleagues or administrators are out to get them, litigiousness is the institutionally sanctioned response. Reflecting on his colleagues' yen for conspiracy-mongering, Devereaux sagely concludes that academics "indulge paranoid fantasies for the same reason dogs lick their own testicles" (204).
Nasty academic politics show irresponsible professors who flout the AAUP's call for collegiality. The novel here that best dramatizes the vitriol of academic politics, and how it is often rooted in professorial neurosis, is anomalous in being a drama rather than a comedy: John Williams's Stoner. When its protagonist, William Stoner, born at the end of the 19th century to poor farmers, reaches manhood, his father advises his son to enroll in the new agriculture school at the nearby University of Missouri in order to learn methods that might help the family farm. At UM, however, Stoner falls in love with literature, changes his major to English, and eventually becomes a professor at the university. Unfortunately, his first romantic infatuation also leads Stoner to wed a pampered, sexually frigid woman.
One semester, Stoner lets into a graduate seminar a lame student who is the protege of one of Stoner's colleagues, the hunchbacked Hollis Lomax. When the student proves to be a fraud, Stoner flunks him. Later, university protocol forces Stoner to sit on a committee examining the same student to determine if he is qualified to continue in the literature Ph.D. program. Lomax is also on the committee, and he questions the student on his thesis, about which the young man is remarkably fluent, though Stoner quickly realizes that the student's discourse, in both style and content, is a pure imitation of Lomax. However, when Stoner quizzes the candidate it becomes clear that he knows nothing except his thesis topic.
Ultimately, the student is passed (over Stoner's objection), but Lomax is enraged by his colleague's unmasking of his protege. Soon after, Lomax is made chairman of the English Department, where he wields his administrative power to make Stoner's life hell, saddling him exclusively with freshmen courses, and scheduling his classes throughout the day and week. Stoner is rescued from the depression induced by Lomax's maltreatment when he truly falls in love for the first time, with a brilliant and kindly former student, now employed at the university as an English instructor. However, in their gossipy, conservative community, word of the affair soon leaks out. Lomax seizes the chance to further plague his nemesis. Rather than attacking Stoner directly, however, he tells the dean that, due to public disclosure of the affair, the chairman is forced to fire the instructor--much to his own regret, Lomax insists, but out of unavoidable submission to "community morals". Under the circumstances, Stoner decides that divorcing his wife is impossible (especially since the couple have a daughter). Stoner's stigmatized lover is forced to leave town, and he never sees her again. In short, Stoner's department chairman deliberately ruins his entire life.
The story vividly dramatizes how brutal academic politics are potentially consequential enough to be handled as tragedy. Still, it is unclear why Stoner passively permits Lomax to persecute him rather than confronting him, or launching a formal protest, or taking any action at all. Williams's only explanation is to suggest that Stoner has a generally fatalistic nature. Moreover, Williams never reveals why Lomax feels such intense loyalty to his vile protege. In only one scene does the subject arise, during a conversation between Stoner and the dean, when the dean says, "I wonder what it is between him and Lomax," and Stoner replies, "It isn't what you're thinking.... I don't know what it is. I don't believe I want to know" (172).
Stoner's remark seems to rule out one possible explanation which may have struck readers: that the unmarried Lomax and his student are homosexual lovers. Perhaps the student and his mentor bond because they are both disabled. Or maybe Lomax is flattered that this fawning disciple is willing to turn himself into a clone of his instructor. In any event, the novel suggests a dark underside in some close professor/student relations which has the potential to turn ugly. As well, Stoner implies that in academia, as in most social institutions, acting responsibly is often a lousy career move, since if Stoner had simply agreed to pass the unqualified student, he would have been spared Lomax's relentless retribution.
Finally, in Hollis Lomax, we have an irresponsible administrator who is even more reprehensible than the spineless college president in The Groves of Academe. The answer to this abuse of power by a department chair, Stoner suggests, must be a vigilant, proactive administration. In the novel, in contrast, the dean, having seen Lomax rant at Stoner following the college exam, has reservations about Lomax's suitability to be chairman, yet appoints him to the post anyway, and, after Lomax begins his campaign against Stoner, the dean fails to take any action. As in McCarthy's novel, administrative timidity abets faculty abuse.
What has caused this dearth of academic collegiality? In the business world, the "team" approach has grown increasingly prevalent. In academia, in contrast, the entire system works to turn professors into lone wolves. In their educational training, almost all the work graduate students do is solitary--holed up reading, or writing papers. Once they become professors, even as junior faculty there is relatively little oversight. Basically, professors operate in their own private fiefdoms. And when academics are not teaching they are usually stowed away in their offices grading papers, or preparing for class. I suspect those drawn to academia are often recluses looking for a job where there will not be much employer supervision, or regular demands to team up with co-workers. For many academics, their hermitism may be rooted in childhood, when they spent a lot of time alone, nose stuck in a book.
Under the circumstances, is it surprising that, on those rare occasions when faculty interaction is required, friction often results? Can lone wolves be collegial? Straight Man ends with a wonderful example of (and symbol for) this academic inability to cooperate with one's peers, when, at a faculty party, a large number of guests become crowded in a small room and can't get out: "Clearly, the only solution was for all of us to take one step backward so that the door could be pulled open. By this point a group of plumbers, a group of bricklayers, a group of hookers, a group of chimpanzees would have figured this out. But the room contained, unfortunately, a group of academics, and we couldn't quite believe what had happened to us" (391).
Another example of the irresponsible academic is tenured deadwood: those professors who, basically assured by tenure life-long employment, pontificate year after year to their students from the same yellowed lecture notes, cease to publish since there is no longer a danger of "perishing," fail to keep up with new developments in their fields, refuse to contribute to extracurricular faculty activities such as committee work, are unavailable to students outside of class, and steadfastly resist any departmental reforms which might upset the cushy status quo. Thus, among their other sins, tenured deadwood reject the AAUP's demand that "professors accept their share of faculty responsibilities for the governance of their institutions." Tenure is needed to protect academic freedom, but its unintended result, all too often, is tenured deadwood. The solution to tenured deadwood is a rigorous and enforced system of post-tenure review, but, based on my experience, that is rarely practiced on most campuses. As noted, academics receive little peer oversight as junior faculty, and they receive even less once they are tenured.
As Michael Lewis argues in Poisoning the Ivy: The Seven Deadly Sins and Other Vices of Higher Education, "By the time newly minted Ph.D.'s take their first jobs, they are fully aware that academic etiquette requires obliviousness (or feigned obliviousness) to everything their colleagues are doing.... Paying uninvited critical attention to collegial effort or its absence is inevitably regarded as unprofessional and a transgression against the most zealously guarded of all professorial protections, academic freedom" (7). The result is that unless a tenured professor bursts into the Student Union brandishing a submachine gun, his employment is secure. Lewis continues, "How would you like a job that you won't be fired from no matter what you do or don't do? A job that's yours even if you show up for work less than half the time? A job that will remain yours even if you consistently fail to produce what you have been hired to produce?" (48).
Kingsley Amis's celebrated Lucky Jim includes a prime example of tenured deadwood in the character of the senescent Professor Welch. As chairman of the history department at the provincial British university where the novel is set, Welch is the worst kind of tenured deadwood--tenured deadwood with clout, which he exercises over the book's protagonist, the young, perpetually feckless history instructor, Jim Dixon. The absent-minded Welch repeatedly fails to finish his sentences, a habit that especially vexes Dixon when he is trying to learn from his chairman whether his one-year contract will be renewed.
Moreover, during his momentary spasms of lucidity, Welch bullies Dixon unmercifully. For instance, Welch forces the young instructor to deliver a campus lecture on "Merry Old England"--a topic Dixon loathes, but which appeals to the aged prof's sentimental conception of the Middle Ages. The very day of the presentation, Welch also compels Dixon to spend the whole afternoon in the library laboriously researching a subject for one of Welch's lectures. If abusing powerless junior colleagues is not-academically irresponsible, what is? After his chairman saddles him with this assignment, Dixon glimpses the old prof furiously trying to enter the wrong way through a revolving door.
My last example of academic irresponsibility is one that seems to arise in many of these novels almost inadvertently, as if the authors themselves were unaware of the problem; namely, the professorial flight from teaching, as the academic characters focus far more on scholarship than on students (unsurprisingly, since academic promotion is determined primarily by research). In their public relations statements, colleges invariably insist that teaching is their top priority, but, based on these novels, the reality appears otherwise. Among the books, Moo is the only one which includes students as main characters, and Smiley's novel, along with Stoner and Straight Man, are alone in containing scenes set in classrooms.
As with professorial opportunism, the flight from teaching is nothing new, as the invisibility of students and classrooms in The Masters, The Groves of Academe, and Pictures from an Institution makes clear. Moreover, since Snow's work is set at a British institution, the problem does not seem to beset only American universities. Perhaps the most "student-free" of all these books is also by a British author--Small World, in which the profs spend all their time cavorting at conferences, and there is not one undergraduate character in the whole novel. How many parents saving up their hard-earned money to send their children to college are aware that teaching is depreciated by most academics? It is a commonplace that our culture devalues teaching, but apparently this lamentable notion even prevails in, of all places, the university. Such devaluing ignores the AAUP's insistence that "professors encourage the free pursuit of learning in their students." Of all the types of academic irresponsibility cited in this essay, the worst, I believe, is when teachers don't care about teaching.
Is the scathing portrait of professors in these novels excessive? Admittedly, I have focused only on those professorial characters who exhibit some aspect of academic irresponsibility. Of course, many other academics in these books are decent human beings. Still, the composite portrayal of the professoriate is undeniably damning. To an extent, such vilifying reflects the demands of fiction. Villains create conflict, which inspires interesting stories. Who wants to read a college novel in which all the faculty get along great, the student body is deeply contented, and the institution functions as a shining educational ideal?
Nonetheless, I would argue that the dark portrait of academia on display in these novels, while exaggerated for comic or dramatic effect, largely rings true. I could easily compose a second essay in which all the instances of academic irresponsibility addressed here--professorial opportunism, conspiracy-mongering, frivolous grievance-filing, uncollegiality, tenured deadwood, neglected teaching--were exemplified not by references to novels but by experiences from my own career. Maybe I'll write that essay after I retire.
Still, to return to the point raised in my introduction, I maintain that the basic problem is not with academia itself, which, ultimately, is no better or worse than most social institutions, all created by inherently imperfect human beings. The problem, rather, is with the cultural myth of academia as a utopian "ivory tower" which I (and so many others) grew up with, and which I mistakenly thought epitomized by my Vassar religion prof. In truth, rather than being some blissfully detached ivory tower, academia is the real world. All the problems millions of workers encounter every day on the job--despotic employers, nasty, lazy or incompetent co-workers, inequitable salaries, long, unrewarding hours--are reproduced in the university.
One might counter that academia is distinct from most other institutions in our capitalist society in that it is not driven by the profit motive. This is somewhat true; most people do not become professors in order to get rich, and the aim of most universities is to educate students and produce intrinsically valuable research, not to acquire massive profits. Still, it is striking how in many of these college novels money proves to be a central issue. Some star professors are lavishly paid, such as Dr. Lionel Gift. Indeed, academics can be seen as intellectual entrepreneurs devoted to promoting their own careers, locked in Darwinian competition with their colleagues for scarce tenured positions and other academic prizes. As for those few students who appear in the books, they generally expect their education to provide them with degrees enabling them to land high-paying jobs, not to turn them into cultured, well-rounded human beings.
Moreover, as state-support dwindles in Moo and Straight Man, administrators in the former school desperately turn to shady industrialists to try to make up the difference. In Smiley's novel, grants from government and industry tend to be judged less by the inherent value of the work commissioned than by the amount of cash the grant brings the institution. It is telling that the subject of a financial crunch in higher education, absent from the college novels written in the 1950s, arises in books published in the 1990s like Moo and Straight Man. The problem, it seems, is getting worse.
Under these conditions, can professors be happy in academe? Or have irresponsible academics, and other grim realities of university life, wrecked it for everyone? I am not that pessimistic; indeed, I think the chances of professional satisfaction are greater in academe than in many other jobs. To return to my opening anecdote, my father was wrong in assuming that my Vassar religion professor's career was ideal, but he was right in perceiving that the man had a much better job than did my junior-high-teaching dad. However, professorial fulfillment is impossible unless we banish the myth of the ivory tower, and, instead, embrace reality. Reading these eight uneven but worthwhile college novels is a good place to start.
[The Montana Professor 17.1, Fall 2006 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]