Satire is uniquely suited to respond to challenging times because it provides a comedic safety valve that admits the existence of tragedy while also holding on to hope that the world can change for the better. programs stocked with fiction writers fulfilling the age-old maxim to write what they know with contentious campus debates over racial justice, gender and reproductive rights, mental health, disability rights, police abolition, academic freedom and so many other issues, it’s no wonder that fictions about college provide such fertile imaginative territory. With more people spending more time in college and graduate school, seeking refuge from economic uncertainty with the proliferation of M.F.A. That matters because the real campus is far more complicated - and compelling - than most projections ever show. Pembroke, the Ivy-inspired setting of “The Chair,” is the first place I saw professors both satirized and humanized, presented as fully conceived members of an imagined community. If you tour fictional colleges - Faber from “ Animal House” (1978), Hillman from “ A Different World” (1987-93), Port Chester University from “ PCU” (1994), Cal U from “ Grown-ish” (2018-present) - you’ll discover that faculty are either overlooked or introduced as comic foils trying to catch a contact high off their students’ youth and cool.
Onscreen, most college-based films and television series favor students nearly to the exclusion of faculty, staff and administration, like 2021’s “ The Sex Lives of College Girls” on HBO Max and “Dear White People” (both the 2014 Justin Simien-directed film and the 2017-21 Netflix series).
College has long figured as a second womb, a space of quasi-independence in which young people, finally free of their childhood homes, can come of age in mind and body with the more measured paternal intervention of the campus: professors to cultivate the mind staff to provide hot meals administrators to offer a baseline of safety, a buffer from law and consequence. College-age 18-to-20-somethings are navigating their identities, tacking to extremes in pursuit of a centered self. And students’ lives are intrinsically interesting. After all, most of us were students once.
I’ve grown accustomed to campus fictions that center students, a sensible creative choice. Of all the places I know, I know the college campus best. I’ve taught at small liberal arts colleges, Ivy League and large public universities, on the East and the West Coasts, in the South and in the Mountain West. By a conservative estimate, I’ve spent some 3,000 hours lecturing. I led my first college class when I was 23, which means I’ve been a teacher over half my life. I am a tenured English professor, 47 years old, Black as well as white, more likely to wear a hoodie than houndstooth, Nikes rather than tasseled loafers.
When two of her character’s aged, tweedy white colleagues began discussing colonoscopy results (“Clean as a whistle! You could serve shrimp off my colon”), an existential dread welled up within me: “Perhaps I’m them now - not the hero but an easy satirical mark.” I must have been a sight: swigging Suprep, laughing in the dark, illuminated only by the glow of my iPhone as Sandra Oh played out scenes from my professorial life. It was the night before my first colonoscopy, a middle-age rite of passage, and I was a captive, contemplative audience of one. Fight overwhelming forces, manage dwindling resources and make choices with devastating consequences in a bitter struggle for survival and salvation.IN THE SMALL hours of the morning, as my viscera turned to water, I binge-watched the entire season of “ The Chair,” Netflix’s 2021 campus comedy. The Last Bastion is a survival-management game where you lead an army of defeated soldiers across a setting inspired by medieval India. With the enemy close on your heels, keep moving to stay alive while mustering your strength, as you make for the last bastion of resistance to stave off complete annihilation. Panicked and directionless, the people turn to you for help as you attempt to gather troops, resources and companions to mount a desperate defense. Panicked and directionless, the people turn to you for help as you attempt to gather troops, resources and companions to Burdened with the responsibility of command after a catastrophic defeat, you are forced to flee through a country unraveling before the sword of a ruthless conqueror.