Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture (Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture) [1st ed. 2023] 3031323491, 9783031323492

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN SCIENCE AND POPULAR CULTURE

Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture Edited by Marcus K. Harmes Richard Scully

Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture Series Editor Sherryl Vint Department of English University of California Riverside, CA, USA

This book series seeks to publish ground-breaking research exploring the productive intersection of science and the cultural imagination. Science is at the centre of daily experience in twenty-first century life and this has defined moments of intense technological change, such as the Space Race of the 1950s and our very own era of synthetic biology. Conceived in dialogue with the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this series will carve out a larger place for the contribution of humanities to these fields. The practice of science is shaped by the cultural context in which it occurs and cultural differences are now key to understanding the ways that scientific practice is enmeshed in global issues of equity and social justice. We seek proposals dealing with any aspect of science in popular culture in any genre. We understand popular culture as both a textual and material practice, and thus welcome manuscripts dealing with representations of science in popular culture and those addressing the role of the cultural imagination in material encounters with science. How science is imagined and what meanings are attached to these imaginaries will be the major focus of this series. We encourage proposals from a wide range of historical and cultural perspectives. Advisory Board: Mark Bould, University of the West of England, UK Lisa Cartwright, University of California, US Oron Catts, University of Western Australia, Australia Melinda Cooper, University of Sydney, Australia Ursula Heise, University of California Los Angeles, US David Kirby, University of Manchester, UK Roger Luckhurt, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK Colin Milburn, University of California, US Susan Squier, Pennsylvania State University, US

Marcus K. Harmes  •  Richard Scully Editors

Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture

Editors Marcus K. Harmes University of Southern Queensland Toowoomba, QLD, Australia

Richard Scully University of New England Armidale, NSW, Australia

ISSN 2731-4359     ISSN 2731-4367 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture ISBN 978-3-031-32349-2    ISBN 978-3-031-32350-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32350-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: PBWPIX / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

A great many people have contributed to the realization of this project. Our wonderful cast of authors deserve first praise, for the ideas and talent they have brought to such an enjoyable project, not least via the Colloquium that was held in November 2022, to discuss Unseen Universities: thank you Melissa Beattie, Kay Calver, Victoria Hawco, Susan Hopkins, Jochem Kotthaus, Kristine Larsen, Stacy W. Maddern, Bethan Michael-Fox, Catriona Mills, Ana Stevenson and Robin Redmon Wright. Many thanks also to the team at Palgrave Macmillan for their efforts in putting the volume together, including Lina Aboujieb and Raghupathy Kalynaraman. Thanks also to series editor Sherryl Vint, who helped shape what was a fanboy Doctor Who project into something larger and more meaningful (and more fun!). Thanks also to our long-time contributor and colleague Lindy A.  Orthia, for advice during the preliminary stages of our project; and those—like Kieran Tranter—we’ve connected with during the course of this project. Sadly, both editors have experienced the worst of grief during the past few months, and we would very much like to dedicate our volume to Gillian Elizabeth Scully (née Cain), and Dr. Barbara Anne Helen Harmes. March 2023

Richard Scully Marcus Harmes

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Contents

1 Unseen  Universities and Seen Academics: An Introduction  1 Richard Scully and Marcus K. Harmes 2 Absurdism  and Entanglement as an Academic Parallel in Terry Pratchett’s “Unseen University” 31 Victoria Hawco 3 A  Well-Rounded Dick? Academia in 3rd Rock from the Sun 53 Melissa Beattie 4 “I  Am a Doctor of Many Things”: Tracking the Doctor’s Relationship to the Academy Across Doctor Who 69 Catriona Mills 5 “Do  What You Like with Him”: Sherlock Holmes’ Academic Training and How It Changed over Time 93 Jochem Kotthaus 6 Women  in the Ivory Tower: Historical Memory and the Heroic Educator in Mona Lisa Smile (2003)111 Ana Stevenson

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Contents

7 Gods  and Monsters in the Ruined University: Filmic Teachers and Their Moral Pedagogies from The Faculty to Higher Learning131 Susan Hopkins 8 A  Different Sort of Monster: Science Fiction Casts a Spotlight on the Problematic Power Dynamics of Graduate Programs153 Kristine Larsen 9 Dystopian  Higher Education: A Neoliberal Legacy173 Stacy W. Maddern 10 Dark  Comedies/Dark Universities: Negotiating the Neoliberal Institution in British Satirical Comedies The History Man (1981), A Very Peculiar Practice (1986–1988), and Campus (2011)197 Bethan Michael-Fox and Kay Calver 11 A Doctor Who Academy for Dystopian Times215 Robin Redmon Wright 12 Conclusions235 Marcus K. Harmes and Richard Scully Bibliography239 Index265

Notes on Contributors

Melissa Beattie  received a PhD in Theatre, Film and TV Studies from Aberystwyth University where she studied Torchwood and national identity through fan/audience research as well as textual analysis. She has published and presented papers relating to transnational television, audience research and/or national identity. She has worked at universities in the US, Korea and Pakistan and will be completing a year-long Assistant Professorship of English and Communications at the American University of Armenia in June. Kay  Calver is Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Bedfordshire and a senior fellow of the HEA.  Her research interests include youth transitions, inequality, and the concept of fateful moments and critical turning points. Kay’s recent research publications focus on the lives and experiences of young people and constructions of risk. Her most recent publications include Under pressure: Representations of student suicide in British documentary television (2021), Constructing the university student in British documentary television (2021) and Transitions to motherhood: Young women’s desire for respectability, responsibility and moral worth (2020). Marcus K. Harmes  is Associate Director of Research in the University of Southern Queensland College and teaches legal history in the law degree. He has published extensively in the fields of religious and political history, with particular emphasis on British religious history and constitutional history. ix

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Victoria Hawco  is a PhD student in Cultural Mediations in the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University, Canada. Having graduated with a Bachelor of Humanities, and a Masters in Public History with a specialization in Digital Humanities, Victoria is focused on the importance of the entanglement of knowledge studies across a spectrum of disciplines, including curatorial practices, the performance of history, affect theory and games studies. As the former Garth Wilson Fellow at Ingenium in Ottawa, Canada, Victoria is also interested in the ways in which communities interact with history and history making in the museum sphere. Her current research focuses include studying tabletop role-playing games and performance as a vehicle for morality. Susan  Hopkins is Associate Professor of Communications based in UniSQ College at the University of Southern Queensland, Springfield campus, Australia. Susan holds a PhD in Social Science and a Masters (Research) in Education. Her research interests include gender and media studies. Jochem  Kotthaus  is Professor of Education Science at University of Applied Sciences and Arts Dortmund (Germany). Focus of academic work: the institutional order of second/reflexive modernity; modern forms of communitization; aesthetical and narrative, cultural fringes, sociological and socio-pedagogical theory. Recent publications include work on fans of professional soccer clubs, risk society and academia, and the abject in film as flagging cultural fringes. Kristine Larsen  has been an astronomy professor at Central Connecticut State University since 1989. Her teaching and research focuses on the intersections between science and society, including sexism and science; science and popular culture (especially science in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien); and the history of science. She is the author of the books Stephen Hawking: A Biography, Cosmology 101, The Women Who Popularized Geology in the nineteenth Century, and Particle Panic! Her latest project is a book on Science and Magic in the world of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher series. Stacy  W.  Maddern  is Assistant Professor in Residence in Urban and Community Studies at the University of Connecticut. His scholarly interests include urban and community theory, social movements and change, social capital and the history of education.

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Bethan Michael-Fox  FRSA, SFHEA works as an associate lecturer at the Open University, UK, where she is an Honorary Associate of the School of English and Creative Writing. She has written on the construction of the university student in documentary television and has published widely on televisual representations. Catriona Mills  is the Content Manager and Acting Director of AustLit, the national bio-bibliographical database. A nineteenth-century scholar by training, she has also published widely on Doctor Who, including its relationship to the nineteenth century and to Australia. Richard  Scully , BA (Hons), PhD (Monash), FRHistS, is Associate Professor in Modern History at the University of New England (Australia). Richard’s primary teaching areas include modern Europe (from the French Revolution to Brexit and beyond), and his research focuses on the history of cartoons, caricature and graphic satire. He is the author of Eminent Victorian Cartoonists (2018), and British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence, 1860–1914 (2012), and has co-edited four collections of essays, including two volumes on Australia’s migrant and minority press for Palgrave Macmillan. Richard also has a wide experience of university governance, in part via his membership of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and his 2018–2020 term on the University Council, University of New England.  

Ana  Stevenson  is a lecturer with UniSQ College at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, and a Research Associate of the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her research explores the transnational history of feminism from interdisciplinary perspectives, including media studies, screen studies and feminist theory. Ana’s publications about the historical memory of women’s movements on film examine the representation of the British suffragettes in Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) and Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette (2015), respectively, appearing in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies and forthcoming in the Women’s History Review. Her first book The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) recently appeared with Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Alongside Alana Piper, she is the co-editor of Gender Violence in Australia: Historical Perspectives (2019).

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Notes on Contributors

Robin  Redmon  Wright  is currently Associate Professor of Lifelong Learning and Adult Education at Penn State Harrisburg. She holds a PhD in Adult Education from Texas A&M University. Her research interests reflect a critical perspective on popular culture and adult identity development, feminist identity development, and socio-economic class, identity and opportunity. Dr Wright received the Commission of Professors of Adult Education’s Early Career Award in 2011, the Kathryn Towns Women’s Award from the Penn State Harrisburg Commission of University Women in 2017 and, along with Elizabeth Tisdell and Edward Taylor, the American Association of Adult and Continuing Education’s Imogene Okes Best Research Award in 2017.

CHAPTER 1

Unseen Universities and Seen Academics: An Introduction Richard Scully and Marcus K. Harmes

Participation rates in higher education (learned institutes, colleges, and universities) are presently higher, globally, than at any time in the past. Today, in the United States, 40% of all 18–24-year-olds are  enrolled in college (in 2020); this figure has held steady for the past decade or so, but is up from 24% in 1965 and 26% in 1970.1 In the United Kingdom, 1  National Center for Education Statistics, College Enrollment Rates. Condition of Education. US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, 2022, at: https:// nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cpb/college-enrollment-rate; Bureau of the Census, “School Enrollment in the United States, 1970”, Current Population Reports—Population Characteristics, Washington, DC: United States Department of Commerce, 5 March 1971, p.2, at: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/1970/demo/ p20-215.pdf

R. Scully University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] M. K. Harmes (*) University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Harmes, R. Scully (eds.), Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32350-8_1

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64,090 degrees of all levels were awarded in 1970; this figure rising to 761,215 by 2020.2 Almost 30% of Australians possess a Bachelor’s degree or higher—compared with less than 8% three decades prior.3 With elite-­ only education long consigned to the ash heap of history, 1970s-era predictions of a mass higher education system transitioning to a universal one have now come to pass,4 with governments worldwide committed to expanding participation still further as the twenty-first century unfolds.5 These increases mean there are more universities, more students attending university, and greater public engagement with universities. The practice and experience of higher education sits heavily in popular awareness and the chapters of this collection chart and interpret the current high level of interest popular culture has in higher education. The success of the Netflix series The Chair (2021)—a success marked by multiple wins and nominations in film and television award categories and positive reviews—is a powerful reminder that popular culture, film, and televisual representations of education, are the key mediators of how people understand academic culture and activity. Indeed, the contributors to this volume suggest that the popular cultural representations of these carry more weight in public and policy discourse than experience or knowledge of reality. In an era when universities globally find themselves under exceptional pressures—from the financial to the existential—and in

2  Pal Bolton, Education: Historical Statistics, Westminster: House of Commons Library, 27 November 2012, p.20, at: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/ SN04252/SN04252.pdf; Ed Castell and Daniel Wake, Higher Education in Facts and Figures: 2021, London: Universities UK, 13 December 2021 (last updated 10 February 2022), at: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/what-we-do/policy-and-research/publications/higher-education-facts-and-figures-2021 3  Christopher Hughes, “Higher education in Australia—statistics & facts”, Statista, 17 September 2021, at: https://www.statista.com/topics/6790/higher-education-inaustralia/#topicHeader__wrapper 4  Martin Trow, “Reflections on the Transition from Mass to Universal Higher Education”, Daedalus, 99: 1, (The Embattled University), 1970, pp.1–42; Martin Trow, Twentieth-­ Century Higher Education: Elite to Mass to Universal, Michael Burrage (ed.), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 5  UNESCO, World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-First Century: Vision and Action, Paris: UNESCO, 1998, at: http://www.un-documents.net/wdhe21c.htm

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which even the “death of universities” is regularly predicted,6 this ­collection is a timely contribution to examining how the creation of knowledge, the work of academics, and the value of education, are created and reflected in popular consciousness, for institutions which in fact now service more people than ever before. Through contributions that explore imaginative futures for higher education, or scrutinise what is taught, why, and by whom, this collection identifies themes which reveal shifting understandings of the purpose and role of the academy, its prominence in popular culture, and the cultural concerns that drive its fate. It provides both academic engagement with these crucial mediators of public understanding of the academy, and breadth, in terms of both the genres examined and the interdisciplinarity of focus. In this chapter, we provide an analysis of the real world and creative context for each of the contributors’ studies of higher education in popular culture. A brief rundown of each chapter helps to frame the volume as a collective effort and identify the congruences and connections between individual chapters across the whole work. Across this collection, the approaching ubiquity of the students’ experience of higher education is noted, but so is a converse experience: that despite huge expansion across the past few decades, the experience of academia from the perspective of faculty membership remains much more circumscribed. Despite mass participation from students, the day-to-day business and work of academics is largely unseen by students, whose weekly contact hours may be counted on one hand. The opacity of the academic working week has been a major enabler for hostile politicians to attack the “ivory tower” and cut public funding—their justifications further driven by myths of universities as hotbeds of revolutionary thinking, sinks of sexual and moral corruption, and as playgrounds for layabouts who spend too much time thinking in the abstract and not enough time learning how to make a living. This was a fundamental underpinning of Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s attitude to universities in 6  Terry Eagleton, “The death of universities”, The Guardian, 18 December 2010, at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/dec/17/death-universities-malaise-­ tuition-fees; Susan Wright and Cris Shore (eds), Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy, Oxford & New York: Berghahn, 2017; Adam Harris, “Here’s How Higher Education Dies”, The Atlantic, 5 June 2018, at: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/heres-how-higher-educationdies/561995/; Peter Fleming, Dark Academia: How Universities Die, London: Pluto Press, 2021.

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Australia during his long prime ministership (1996–2007), and his successors were even more committed to punishing those who did not share their ideological leanings.7 However, politicians of all persuasions have used rhetoric against universities, and against specific domains of study such as the Humanities. Charles Clarke, UK Secretary of State for Education (2002–2004) under Tony Blair, was reported as disparaging classical and medieval studies and saying the disciplines were only of “ornamental value”.8 It seems that university managements are also unaware of what academic work actually entails; or, if they are, then caricatures of lazy academics are freely deployed in their efforts to change working habits by imposing new and often punitive workload models from on-high.

Academia: History and Emergence into Fiction If the realities of academic life and work are so opaque as to surrender to stereotype and caricature, how then is knowledge of the academy and its functions most extensively constructed and disseminated beyond the walls of a university? Where do these stereotypes and myths come from? Why do they have such cachet and currency? These questions prompt investigation not simply of the origins of higher education but the emergent intersections between higher education and its fictional iterations and analogues. Universities have existed for far longer than they have been the subject of creative interest from writers and, latterly, film and television makers. Historians of Western universities, Charles Homer Haskins and Aleksander Gieysztor, outlined certain defining characteristics of medieval universities, including their often slow emergence as organisations with endowments and buildings as well as faculties, statutes, and governance.9 There 7   Wayne Errington and Peter Van Onselen, John Howard: The Biography, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2007, pp.259, 377–378, 389–390; Frank Bongiorno, Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia, Collingwood: La Trobe University Press/ Black Inc., 2022, p.387. 8  Will Woodward and Rebecca Smithers, “Clarke dismissed medieval historians”, The Guardian, 9 May 2003, at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/may/09/highereducation.politics 9  Charles Homer Haskins, The Rise of Universities, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1923, p.2; Aleksander Gieysztor, “Chapter 4: Management and Resources”, A History of the University in Europe Volume 1: Universities in the Middle Ages ed. H.  De Ridder Symoens, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.108–136

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was also the intellectual stimulus given to societies of masters and students from a revival of the twelfth century and the influx of Arab and Greek ­learning (especially Byzantine and rediscovered Classical), as well as the importance of flourishing urban cultures in centres such as Bologna (by consensus, the oldest continuing university, founded in AD 1088). The universities which grew from the eleventh century—including Oxford (1096), Paris (c.1200), Cambridge (1209), Salamanca (1218), Prague (1348), the Jagiellonian (1364), Heidelberg (1386), and St Andrews (1411)—matured into intellectually complex organisations, which not only taught but generated their own inner imaginative lives, with mythologies related to their foundation, typologies of masters and students, and professional identities for the teachers.10 A steady stream of new foundations occurred in the centuries thereafter, before a huge boom in the nineteenth century, occasioned by Enlightenment-era reform movements—like that of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher at Berlin (1810)—was followed by industrial-­ era establishments and the so-called Red Bricks, catering for an expanding middle class; and then twentieth-century foundations designed increasingly as technocratic enablers of the aspirational working classes. In English literature at least, however, there is a powerful disconnect between the writers and their subjects in the canon. The writers in the standard English canon—from Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare to Henry Fielding, most of the nineteenth-century novelists (including of course, all the female novelists) and on to the modernism of T. S. Eliot— were not university educated, and not especially prone to writing about universities.11 George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) took a swipe at the gentleman scholar, Mr Casaubon, in “the most eloquent of academic tragedies” Middlemarch (1871),12 but it was really her awareness of German

10  Rainer Christoph Schwinges, “Chapter 6: Admission”, A History of the University in Europe Volume 1: Universities in the Middle Ages ed. H. De Ridder Symoens, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.195–202. 11  In Hamlet (c.1600), Shakespeare established Horatio’s learned credentials by associating him with the University of Wittenberg (founded 1502). This was the home institution of Martin Luther, as well as Philipp Melanchthon. This was also the alma mater of the eponymous hero of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c.1593). 12  Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, p.6.

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academia, not English, that allowed for such an approach.13 The twentieth century, however, was a period of more sustained fictional scrutiny of higher education, a growth in interest coterminous with the increasing massification of higher education. Particular landmarks punctuate the century, but the academic novel remains “a small but recognizable subgenre of contemporary fiction” with an equally small body of criticism “devoted to it”.14 Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), E.  M. Forster’s Maurice (1971), and Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954) were major works in different genres and styles. Their writers were, unlike many English playwrights and novelists of earlier centuries, educated at either Oxford or Cambridge, and the academic milieux in the works drew on this background. Significantly, they are also works that interacted with creative impulses in other media. Lucky Jim was swiftly adapted, and the movie starring Ian Carmichael appeared in 1957. Both Forster and Waugh’s works were tonally and stylistically apposite to the proliferation of drama set in Edwardian and pre-war periods made by British film and television in the 1980s. These films and television productions brought academics, their students, and their contexts onto the screen.

Stereotypes and Realities According to Elaine Showalter, most critics of the academic novel “hold that it is basically satirical”.15 In reality, rather than fiction, it is often hard to escape the impression that universities do a fine job of caricaturing themselves. Over-mighty and overpaid vice-chancellors and presidents caught out or brought low by their own actions are a favourite of the press.16 Despite some standouts, universities’ own published histories are 13  Richard Scully, British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence, 1860–1914, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp.88, 100–101. 14  Showalter, Faculty Towers, p.2. 15  Showalter, Faculty Towers, p.2. 16  Harriet Alexander, “University head charged with assaulting 16-year-old schoolgirl”, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 August 2022, at: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/ university-­head-charged-with-assaulting-16-year-old-schoolgirl-20220803-p5b6zi.html; Jamie Doward, “Revealed: British university vice-chancellors’ five-star expenses”, The Guardian, 25 February 2018, at: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/feb/24/ vice-chancellors-expenses-scandal-channel-4-dispatches-universities; CBC, “Amit Chakma, Western University president, ‘deeply sorry’ for $924K salary”, CBC News, 10 April 2015, at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/amit-chakma-western-university-presidentdeeply-sorry-for-924k-salary-1.3028389

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often exercises in celebration, nostalgia, or marketing spin; and doom-­ laden “Jeremiads” are a new sub-genre that delights in exposing the worst elements of contemporary academia (arguably to little effect).17 Too often, the turmoil of the present is contrasted with a “golden age”—Et in Arcadia Ego, an Oxbridge/Ivy League Elysium—that never existed.18 Even classic works of serious analysis fall back on tropes that do little to edify the work of academic disciplines, imagined in epistemological and sociological terms as “academic tribes”.19 Academics themselves create a lot of satire, in part as a way of coping with the stresses of their everyday existence: recreating academic league-­ table rankings as “Academic Wankings”; reimagining the lifestyle of the PhD student through “the power of procrastination”; and penning long-­ form comic art of remarkable power.20 Academic satire is championed by many of its most innovative practitioners—including Julie Schumacher, Mark Marino, and John Warner—as a means of challenging and reforming academic practices by exposing their absurdity.21 However, as Warner 17  “Jeremiad” literature is labelled as such by: Anthony Grafton, “Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?”, The New York Review, 24 November 2011, at: https://www.nybooks. com/articles/2011/11/24/our-universities-why-are-they-failing/; and Hannah Forsyth, A History of the Modern Australian University, Sydney: NewSouth, 2014, p.5; the classic “Jeremiads” are probably: Anthony T.  Kronman Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007; Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, New  York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; Richard Hil, Whackademia: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University, Sydney: NewSouth, 2012; and John Smyth, The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars and Neoliberal Ideology, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 18  Forsyth, “The end of the golden age (if there was one)”, History of the Modern Australian University, Chapter 5. Set in an idyllic Oxford, “Et in Arcadia Ego” is the first book of: Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin, 2009 [1945], pp.23–143. 19  Hazard Adams, The Academic Tribes, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976; Tony Becher, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1989; Tony Becher and Paul Trowler, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines, Buckingham: Open University Press/SRHE, 2001. 20  Jelena Brankovic, “Satire, Resignation and Anger around Higher Education Rankings and Wankings”, ECHERBlog, 7 January 2019, at: https://echer.org/higher-education-­ rankings-and-wankings/; Jorge Cham, PhD: Piled Higher and Deeper, 1997–2016, at: https://phdcomics.com/; Tiphaine Riviere, Notes on a Thesis, Francesca Barrie (trans.), London: Jonathan Cape, 2016. 21  Jeffrey R.  Young, “Satirical Takes on Higher Ed and Why They Matter”, EdSurge Podcast, 3 September 2019, at: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-09-03-satiricaltakes-on-higher-ed-and-why-they-matter

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realised when questioned by education podcaster Jeffrey R. Young, i­ ncisive academic satire “could wind up unintentionally providing ammo to those on the political right or others who are criticizing higher ed as being too liberal or too dysfunctional”.22 It would seem that—as Bethan MichaelFox and Kay Calver note in their chapter in this collection—“the modern university often houses its own worst critics”.23 While Warner felt that such a viewpoint could only come about “through a kind of deliberate misreading of them”,24 this perhaps downplays the willingness of culture warriors to believe such stereotypes and deploy them in communicating with a general public primed to accept them as reality. It is potentially dangerous because negative caricatures of academia are ubiquitous in popular culture and more than often carry a troubling message. In 2022, the finance and human resources software company Workday® ran a commercial on Australian television and streaming services that depicted a scruffy, Russian-accented professor of mathematics, drawing equations all over the rooms of the corporate office, sleeping on the couch, and consuming countless cups of coffee, all in aid of producing the “‘beautiful’ numbers”. He succeeds, only to have all his work washed off by the cleaner. The message (ironically, given the software has human resources and student management functionality): get the software instead of the university graduate; it’s better for business. Such attitudes are also in evidence where one might least expect: the 2009 “reboot” of Star Trek by J. J. Abrams. As a franchise largely predicated on a respect for academic status and achievement, and deeper thinking than its rival Star Wars,25 some Trekkers were appalled by the anti-intellectualism on display via the reimagined Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) while a student/cadet, and his clashes with his instructor Spock

 Young, “Satirical Takes on Higher Ed”.  Bethan Michael-Fox and Kay Calver, “Dark Comedies/Dark Universities: Negotiating the Neoliberal Institution in British Satirical Comedies The History Man (1981), A Very Peculiar Practice (1986–1988), and Campus (2011)”, in Richard Scully and Marcus Harmes (eds), Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2023, pp.202. 24  John Warner, quoted in: Young, “Satirical Takes on Higher Ed”. 25  The Jedi Temple and the quasi-religious order it supports can be interpreted as an institution of higher learning on the premodern, monastic model. Its aloof and dysfunctional Council bears many resemblances to the peak governance bodies of some modern universities. 22 23

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(Zachary Quinto).26 The subtext of the Vulcan Academy—the pinnacle of a philosophical and ethical institution of higher learning—being a­ nnihilated along with its home planet, leaving only the über-applied, militarised, and corporate Starfleet Academy as the remaining comparable institution in the United Federation of Planets, was emblematic of the “dumbingdown” of Star Trek in the twenty-first century.

Being Academic: Life Learns from Art Another compelling reason for a collection of this kind is the simple fact that life imitates art. It is from popular culture that students and academics gain their primary knowledge of how to be students and academics, and they then perform these roles accordingly in the real world, either consciously or unconsciously. Such an assertion is no exercise in wishful thinking from two academic Whovians (and editors of this volume) questing to become known as ‘Doctor’ (and at least one of whom also immersed himself in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited in the gap between school and university). In what remains one of the most remarkable engagements with this issue, esteemed American feminist scholar Elaine Showalter stated quite openly: In an era before there were handbooks, self-help guides, or advice columns for graduate students and junior faculty in the Chronicle of Higher Education or The Times Higher Education Supplement, novels taught me how a proper professor should speak, behave, dress, think, write, love, succeed, or fail.27

Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell had already noted this with respect to teachers in their 1995 study and extended it (as well as to cartoons, comics, and children’s toys) to film—a medium with far greater demographic reach than the campus novels that captivated Showalter.28 And even the handbooks, self-help guides, and formal position descriptions pale into 26  Amarpal Biring, “5 Blunders That Ruined J.J Abrams’ Star Trek And Destroyed The Franchise”, Whatculture, 19 September 2012, at: https://whatculture.com/film/15-­ blunders-­that-ruined-j-j-abrams-star-trek-and-destroyed-the-franchise; Alice Rose Dodds, “Star Trek: The Fan Backlash To The J.J. Abrams Films Explained”, Game Rant, 12 October 2022, at: https://gamerant.com/star-trek-fan-backlash-jj-abrams-films-explained/ 27  Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, 2005, p.2. 28  Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell, That’s Funny You Don’t Look Like a Teacher! Interrogating Images, Identity, And Popular Culture, London: Routledge, 1995.

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insignificance when exposed to the realities of what an academic job actually entails (teaching, research, and administration-cum-service are actually three jobs, after all). Small wonder we fall back on Community (NBC and Yahoo!, 2009–2015), The Big Bang Theory (CBS, 2007–2019), or even The Simpsons (Fox, 1989–present), for a more organic form of guidance. We recognise ourselves in characters drawn from life and whom occasionally seem uncomfortably close to reality.29 This is not to suggest that—like Homer Simpson in “Homer Goes to College” (The Simpsons, 1F02, Fox, 1993)—all graduating high-school students actually believe their university experiences will match what they have seen in “bad Animal House rip-off movies”, down to the repressive regime of the “crusty old dean”.30 But the possibility, even the probability, certainly exists, and all real-world experience of the academy is measured— just as Showalter has done—inevitably, against its cultural manifestation and representation.31 First-in-family attendees may have no other point of reference when first shadowing the groves of academe with their presence. Those with longer family histories of higher education are likely never disabused of their notions by parents or grandparents looking back at their university days through rose-coloured glasses, still less by older siblings currently enjoying the freedoms of campus life. Senior students induct “Freshers” at residential colleges—often quite literally, through hazing ceremonies—and these seniors are desperately trying to capture something of the idealised (if not always ideal from an ethical or behavioural point of view) experience familiar from film and TV. As Susan Hopkins notes in her chapter in this volume, purveyors of pop culture are well aware of the didactic power of their products, even ironically: in the 2011 film Bad Teacher, the eponymous character screens the movie Stand and Deliver (1988)—the classic portrayal of the idealised, self-sacrificing educator—albeit to gain some sleep time rather than take on board the lessons of being a good teacher herself. There is sheer intertextual delight in watching “Introduction to Film”—episode 3 of Community, in which Jeff Winger struggles to “seize the day”, Dead Poets Society-style, in order to pass a class taught by the infuriatingly eccentric Professor Whitman (John Michael Higgins). More seriously, John  The Chair’s Professor Bill Dobson (played by Jay Duplass)—a widower with a child being given far too much leeway in his personal as well as professional life—occasioned the need for at least one stiff drink… further compounding the irony. 30   Conan O’Brien, Commentary on “Homer Goes to College”, The Simpsons—the Complete Fifth Season, DVD, Twentieth-Century Fox, 2004. 31  Showalter, Faculty Towers, p.2 29

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Singleton’s Higher Learning (1995) always set out to “question the knowledge” encoded in American youth at college, with its “racial, sexual, and class distinctions”.32 First conceived while the writer-director was himself studying at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts (1987–1990),33 the film receives close attention from Susan Hopkins, in part because its ground-breaking commentary and challenge to accepted norms are nonetheless couched in an attachment to romanticised notions of inspirational Sage professors. Romanticising university life this way—whether idyllic or more darkly satirical—may, in fact, be the germ of pathology at the very heart of every unsatisfied career in higher education. The failure to live up to the ideals of literature, television, film, and broader popular culture—let alone the scholarly ideals promulgated by the likes of John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold, Raewyn Connell, and their lesser (corporate) imitators—must be a source of frustration for even the most hard-headed professional.

Types of Academia One of the (albeit minor) dangers of a volume like this is that we as editors, or the contributors, “miss” someone’s favourite campus novel, academically themed TV show, or film (or other work).34 An oft-cited favourite among the #twitterstorians is Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys (1995), and its film adaptation starring Michael Douglas (2000). But this book is not encyclopaedic, so readers may search in vain for surgical dissections of Wonder Boys, Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered (2018), John Dale’s The Faculty (2022), or Diana Reid’s Love and Virtue (2022). Therefore, it is worth glancing at the key works of popular culture that the following chapters do not cover in-depth. The key, foundational arena for satirising or otherwise treating the academy—one that both predates and overlaps with the mass-media popular culture of film and television—is literary fiction, and especially the 32  John Singleton, quoted in Craigh Barboza (ed.), John Singleton: Interviews, Jackson: University Press, of Mississippi, 2009, p.68. 33  Singleton, Interviews, p.67. 34  Philip Tew, “Review: Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and its Discontents”, Modern Language Review, 102: 3, July 2007, p.845, points-out that Showalter omits Willa Cather’s works (including The Professor’s House, 1925), as well as Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue (1974), Howard Jacobson’s Coming from Behind (1983), and  Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995).

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“campus novel”. Flourishing since the 1950s,35 the “campus novel” as a genre or sub-genre treats the business of academia more seriously as a subject than as a backdrop to romance, crime, thriller, or other narratives. But as Showalter has shown so well, academia and its politics can be central, and intrinsically bound up with, the plot and resolution of many of the most fascinating such works, especially when the author has first-hand experience of universities.36 Key modern examples have crossed over via adaptation from literature to film or television, most notably Colin Dexter’s “Inspector Morse” stories, set in and around Oxford, but not always concentrated on the affairs of the university and its constituent colleges. Thirteen Morse novels were published between Last Bus to Woodstock (1975) and The Remorseful Day (1999), and these formed the basis for 33 television episodes (across eight ITV series of varying lengths), starring the incomparable John Thaw (1942–2002) as Morse and Kevin Whatley (b.1951) as his junior partner, Lewis (who then got his own spin-off series, 2006–2015, totalling 9 seasons and 33 episodes). While set in the present day, the location filming in Morse, in and around the medieval and baroque buildings in Oxford, as well as the titular character’s preference for the old and vintage in everything from his car to his beer, caused significant stylistic slippage, with the present-day setting undercut by heritage and history in most scenes. Given permission by Oxford colleges to use their photogenic gardens and buildings (among them University College, Brasenose, Merton, and Oriel), the series also brought onto screen petty academic feuds and pettier academics. Ghost in the Machine, made in 1989, begins with scenes of a college fellowship engaged in electing a new master, and the bitter rivalry between two candidates is central to the episode’s murder mystery. In The Infernal Serpent of 1990, the master of one of the ancient colleges is not only a murder victim but a sexual deviant, with the narrative and dialogue suggesting the mastership was an effective way to screen his perversions from society. There is also a noteworthy creative trajectory from the real-world Oxford which inspired Dexter, to Dexter’s fiction feeding back into actual and real-world academic disputes in Oxford. It is a matter of public record that during a protracted dispute among the Dean and Fellows of Christ Church Oxford, some fellows exchanged emails about “the Inspector Morse  Showalter, Faculty Towers, p.1.  Showalter, Faculty Towers.

35 36

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episode we could make when his [the Dean’s] wrinkly withered little body” would be found floating in the Isis.37 Here is the creative modulation, from the memories of Oxford which Dexter used in his fiction, to actual Oxford dons drawing on that fiction in their own academic disputes, with life imitating art. Dexter’s setting of murder mysteries and crime detection in and around academic colleges has long antecedents, which date from well before Showalter’s chosen decade of the 1950s as the starting point.38 Later in this collection, Jochem Kotthaus considers the different creative iterations of Sherlock Holmes, including the character’s academic background at University College London. In the decades after Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, some of the Golden Age detective writers were early examples of women accessing higher education. Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night (published in 1935 and adapted for television in 1987), is the “classic novel of life in an Oxford women’s college” and was set in Shrewsbury College, a fictional analogue of Somerville College, Oxford.39 Other detective writers, including Michael Innes, found hermetic college fellowships and ancient colleges effective settings for murder mysteries, including Innes’ 1936 novel Death at the President’s Lodging. The television adaptations of Dorothy L. Sayers and Colin Dexter’s novels were products of, and aesthetically and tonally aligned with, the period drama boom of 1980s British television. Despite the prevalence and dominance of the Oxbridge/Ivy League setting in such novels, and understandings of academia in pop culture, it is notable how the modern universities have been focal points for some of the finest satire of more recent times (including UNE and Bristol). A key example is the first novel by well-respected English crime writer Robert Barnard (1936–2013), whose experience at Balliol College, Oxford, followed by his five years at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia (1961–1965), and then at Bergen and Tromsø in Norway, gave him ample fuel with which to scorch the English and Australian academies 37  “Revealed: The emails dripping in poison that dons at Oxford’s most prestigious college tried to cover up—including one which read, ‘Think of the Morse episode we could make when his wrinkly body is found!’”, Daily Mail, 16 February 2020, at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8008293/Think-Morse-episode-make-wrinkly-body-Oxford-­ donssay-­plot.html 38  Showalter, Faculty Towers, pp.17 ff. 39  Alison Hoddinott, Women, Oxford & Novels of Crime (Brandl & Schlesinger, Blackheath, 2018), p.33.

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in Death of An Old Goat (1974).40 The protagonist—Balliol man Bob Bascombe—is distracted from his vast quantities of marking, interminable programmes of lectures and tutorials (including out-of-hours at weekend schools), and internecine departmental politics, by the seemingly motiveless murder of a visiting Oxbridge don. A former colleague of Barnard noted how the prose “contains many plays on colleagues’ names”, and how “many social or personal equations with local places and still living persons would seem very easy to make”.41 Barnard’s satire was one of the first about an Australian regional university.42 Appearing just one year later, Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975) was even more excoriating of its target: the culture inhabiting the “glass and steel” universities of modern Britain. Although it “disclaim[ed] any relation to academic reality”, this is itself as tongue-in-cheek an example of the classic “all persons fictitious” clause as it is possible to imagine.43 “Recognisable emblems of the nastiest sides of [the] late ’60s and early ’70s” abound throughout,44 as Bradbury does his best to match one of his literary heroes—Kingsley Amis—whose Lucky Jim (1954) he later described as not merely the standout academic novel of its decade but “the exemplary Fifties novel”.45 There is no murder in The History Man, but numerous instances of what today would be classified as gross misconduct by an academic staff member: sexual predation of students and faculty by the protagonist, Howard Kirk, for which he is nearly sacked; domestic exploitation of student labour by Kirk and his wife, Barbara; drug and alcohol abuse; and—in a precursor to something similar in The 40  John S. Ryan, “‘Just some childish itch to play detective?’ Robert Barnard: Armidale’s sometime author of detective fiction”, Biblionews and Australian Notes & Queries, 31 (4), December 2005, pp.126–156. 41  Ryan, “Just some childish itch to play detective?”, pp.131 & 135. Indeed, the late Emeritus Professor John S. Ryan was notoriously irritated that Barnard had not featured a caricature of him in Death of an Old Goat. Ryan was hardly more cheered by J. R. R. Tolkien’s semi-scathing reference to his analysis of Lord of the Rings “in a nonsensical article by J. S. Ryan” (see J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter to Mr Rang, August 1967, in Humphrey Carpenter (ed.), The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981, pp.379–80. 42  Although more a satire of Australia and Australians, Eric Idle’s 1970 “Bruces Sketch” for Monty Python’s Flying Circus contains elements of satire directed at the pretensions of Australian higher education. 43  Showalter, Faculty Towers, p.71. 44  Showalter, Faculty Towers, p.71. 45  Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, 1878–2001, London: Penguin, 2001, p.339.

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Chair—exposing the student body to the trauma of Barbara giving birth in the name of critiquing first-hand aspects of the National Health Service.46 In a shocking display of hypocrisy and abuse of power, Kirk conspires to have a blazer-clad, tie-wearing conservative student expelled from the university, largely for refusing to adopt (or at least ape) Marxist perspectives. Yet at the end of the television series (but not, significantly, at the end of the novel), Kirk himself has turned Tory and votes for the Thatcher government.47 British readers had a second dose of Bradbury’s satire when it was adapted for the BBC, with Antony Sher giving life to Howard Kirk, alongside Geraldine James as Barbara. “An enormous success” when broadcast in January 1981,48 the context for its satire had shifted markedly, from Bradbury looking back at the 1960s and early 1970s from the stagnation of the mid-1970s, to the perspective of a Britain of “rocketing unemployment, riots in major cities and a country governed by the most divisive prime minister”.49 So different had Britain become in the interim that director Robert Knights felt as though the novel might as well have been set “four hundred years” ago, as the energy of the 1960s “had stopped dead”.50 As Bethan Michael-Fox and Kay Calver show in their chapter for this collection, despite the passage of time, the satire of the academy as depicted in The History Man in many ways remains evergreen; particularly to those whose workspaces resemble the bare, cream-brick dungeons inhabited by Kirk and his colleagues (filmed on location at Lancaster and recreated in the Birmingham studios of the BBC). Though hideously outdated, all the talk of students and staff being in the revolutionary vanguard of late capitalism is still very much present in radical circles, as Gen-X and Millennial members of the student and academic unions struggle to find a language beyond that bequeathed to them by the idealised, romanticised generation of Baby Boomer activists.  Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man, London: Arrow, 1985, p.29.  Marcus Harmes, “Humanities and the Politics of Higher Education in 1980s Popular Culture”, History of Humanities, 7: 2, Fall 2022, p.296. 48  Sergio Angelini, “History Man, The (1981)”, BFI screenonline, 2003–14, at: http:// www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/803414/index.html 49  The description of 1981 comes from: Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, “1981”, The Rest Is History, Goalhanger Podcasts, 16 November 2020. 50  Robert Knights, Interviewed for “Film of the Book (The History Man)”, BBC2, 17 March 1986, at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcjqNaExUwo 46 47

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The viewership of The History Man was inevitably wider than the readership of the novel, underscoring again the need for a volume such as this, which moves beyond assessments of the campus novel and academic-­ satire-­for-academics, and strikes out into new, interdisciplinary territory to explore popular culture more broadly. The Chair—with its authenticity deriving in part from the experience of co-creator Annie Julia Wyman as a Harvard PhD (examining the comic novel)—is a case in point.51 But the most sustained engagements with the academy in recent years have been Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady’s Big Bang Theory and Dan Harmon’s Community. Both are targeted at an audience of people “who are currently attending or have attended college”, and “are likely to have a deeper, more meaningful engagement with the show because they will understand its premise more fully”.52 In the latter, the inept and egocentric Dean Craig Pelton (played by James Rash)—who is obsessed with branding and performance; the notion that one faculty (air conditioner repair) subsidises the entire rest of the college; and the mature-­ age versus school-leaver demographic division—spoke to contemporary academics on a level that would not be seen again until The Chair. Only the “hyperreality”, absurdity, and deliberately destabilising intertextuality of the series pulled it up short of being true-to-life (in a way perhaps mirrored by Scrubs [NBC and ABC, 2001–2010] for the medical, nursing, and allied health professions).53 Crucially, Community is not set in an elite university, but a community college, meaning that an assumed mediocrity is part of the overall joke. Everyone feels the mediocrity, from the main protagonist, Jeffrey Winger (Joel McHale) and his cohort of student misfits, to the staff; especially Winger’s old acquaintance, the English-educated Dr Ian Duncan (John Oliver), whose accent and evident class consciousness makes his status as a community college professor especially ridiculous. 51  On Wyman, see: Alison Herman, “The Harvard PhD Turned Screenwriter Behind Netflix’s Hit ‘The Chair’”, 24 August 2021, at: https://www.theringer.com/ tv/2021/8/24/22638728/the-chair-netflix-annie-julia-wyman-amanda-peet 52  Laura Detmering, “‘Just Tell Me the Rules, and I Will Follow’: Active Viewership in Dan Harmon’s Community”, Studies in Popular Culture, 37: 1, Fall 2014, p.53. 53  Nettie Brock, “Greendale Hyperreality”, in Ann-Gee Lee (ed.), A Sense of Community: Essays on the Television Series and its Fandom, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2014, p.37. The clash between image and reality as far as students are concerned is covered nicely in: Genie Giaimo, “From the Guest Editor”, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, 15: 1, 2017, p.1, at: https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/62931/329_ Giaimo_-­_PDF_final%5b1%5d.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y

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Epitomised by the presence of Duncan, part of the inherent humour and satirical approach of Community is that it is definitely not an Oxbridge or Ivy League school.54 The fictional Greendale Community College is in Colorado, about as far from green and pleasant England or New England as it is possible to be. It is “‘loser college’ for remedial teens, twenty-­ something dropouts, middle-aged divorcées, and old people keeping their minds active as they circle the drain of eternity”;55 the academic standards are laughable; and the administration hopeless (Dean Pelton loses all the academic records of his students because he had them saved to a Microsoft® Paint file, which he was assured was “future proof”). As an engagement with “nerd culture”,56 Community “inverts the narrative of improvement” found in classic campus narratives;57 and the humour is self-deprecating, but risks also perpetuating elitist visions of the ideal academy: a campus of dreaming spires somewhere else where there is more than enough time, money, and inspiration to do things properly. Such critiques can be particularly harmful in postcolonial contexts like Australia, where the transplantation of the English model and a persistent “cultural cringe” undercuts the legitimacy of the universities (whether they be “Drummondale” or the Philosophy Department at “Woolamaloo”).58 Nonetheless, as Bethan Michael-Fox and Kay Calver argue in their chapter, the focus of such shows “only on modern institutions” (post-1960s) is  not necessarily about privileging the elite institutions but should be taken at face value, suggesting as it does

 For a destabilisation of this, see: Lindsy Lawrence, “Inculcating Victorian Masculinities  at ‘Loser College’: Jeff Winger’s Male Poses”, in Ann-Gee Lee (ed.), A Sense of Community: Essays on the Television Series and its Fandom, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014, pp.65–81. 55  Dean Pelton, quoted in: Shannon Wells-Lassagne, “Transforming the traditional sitcom: Abed in Community”, TV/Series, 1: Les Séries télévisées américaines contemporaines: entre la fiction, les faits, et le réel, 15 May 2012, at: http://journals.openedition.org/ tvseries/1560; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/tvseries.1560 56  Tully Barnett and Ben Kooyman, “Repackaging Popular Culture: Commentary and Critique in Community”, Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 5: 2, 2012, at: https://doi.org/10.31165/nk.2012.52.272 57  Lawrence, “Inculcating Victorian Masculinities”, p.72. 58  Robert Barnard, Death of an Old Goat, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985; [Eric Idle], “Bruces Sketch”, in Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, Monty Python’s Flying Circus—Just the Words, Volume 1, London: Methuen—Mandarin, 1990, pp.294–296. 54

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anxieties about the shifting identity and meaning of higher education in the popular consciousness, with the massification of Higher Education raising questions about the purpose and value of degrees and about the tensions between (especially modern) universities’ identities as both businesses and purveyors of an intangible public good.59

As such, a critical appraisal of the corpus of pop-cultural depictions of academia and higher learning has the potential not only to reveal much about its reality but also, it is to be hoped, help understand how it can be changed for the better. For, as Victoria Hawco notes in her study of Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” series, with its Unseen University, the negative critique provided by satire is never sufficient to enact change. A positive, prescriptive element (What Is to Be Done?) is the crucial next step.

Spoiler Alert: Overview of the Volume The original idea for this volume came from a conversation between two Doctor Who fans-turned academics, fascinated by the contrasting depictions of academia in Douglas Adams’ unfinished Tom Baker/Fourth Doctor story “Shada” (1979–1980) and in Peter Capaldi’s final series as the Twelfth Doctor (2017). In the former, the character of Professor Chronotis (played by Denis Carey) is just about believable as a portrayal of an Oxbridge don, despite the renegade Time Lord having inhabited his book-lined St Cedd’s College rooms for “three hundred years” (“one of the advantages of the older Cambridge colleges. Everyone is so discreet”).60 Location filming in and around the Backs and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, creates an appropriate mise-en-scene for the aged don, who has quietly done little for many centuries. His 300 years of genteel college life is a parodic extension of the geriatric college fellowship in Tom Sharpe’s novel Porterhouse Blue (1974; made into a miniseries in 1987), where the ancient dons had existed for—if not centuries—decades, living an undisturbed life in their medieval college while doing no research and very little teaching. The Yes, Prime Minister episode “The Bishop’s Gambit” (1986) makes a similar point, whereby colleagues note the laziness of a clerical don: one who “never reads a new book, never thinks a new thought”, and  Bethan-Fox and Culver, “Dark Comedies/Dark Universities”, p.202.  Douglas Adams, Doctor Who—Shada. The Six Original Scripts [10 September 1979], BBC, 1992, p.19/1. 59 60

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has to give only the occasional lecture. Professor Chronotis is, as noted, a parodic extension by virtue of his longevity over centuries, but Porterhouse Blue and Yes, Prime Minister are themselves parodies of ancient and conservative fellowships, which by the 1980s were still cabals running Oxbridge colleges. By contrast, the Twelfth Doctor’s 70-year tenure at St Luke’s University is quite unbelievable, not least because nobody in the hyper-surveilled university of the twenty-first century would permit such limited workforce turnover to occur (especially in the absence of a publication track-record, and egregious departure from the set poetry/physics syllabi). The Doctor’s companion notes, “It’s like the university let you do whatever you like. One time, you were going to give a lecture on quantum physics. You talked about poetry”—again, a latitude in content delivery, curriculum design, and alignment of learning objectives scarcely conceivable in a modern university. As Catriona Mills discusses in her chapter, in an earlier Doctor Who serial “The Time Monster”, an alien imposter impersonating an academic was found out, precisely because there was no CV or publication track record, and the imposture foundered on not having these credentials. At St Luke’s, however, the reverse quite implausibly prevails with 70 or more years of dilettanti inactivity on the part of the Doctor. Thankfully, despite the scope of the volume having expanded since that original germ idea, we have not had to abandon thoughts of a scholarly engagement with Doctor Who, thanks to Catriona Mills. Although her chapter eschews the examination of the imagined Cambridge of “Shada”, and instead focuses on the televised adventures of the Doctor, therein she engages closely with the double a/Academy: both the depiction of the human community and set of institutions that constitutes higher education, and the fictional Time Lord Academy as presented in serials from the classic series (1963–1989)—such as “The Deadly Assassin” (1976)—and the “rebooted” series (2005–present)—such as “The Sound of Drums” (2007). Doctor Who is rich in traditional Western models of knowledge creation: universities, academies, schools, and scientific think-tanks. From their title (the conferring of which remains something of a mystery) to their relationship with their companions, the Doctor stands as a representative of these, treating travel through space and time as a pedagogical exercise. But while s/he is always didactic, the Doctor nevertheless demonstrates a changing and sometimes conflicted relationship to these traditional models of both knowledge creation and knowledge dissemination.

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Mills is cognisant of, but not limited by, the programme’s overarching educational brief, and the ways in which this was mediated across the First Doctor’s tenure (1963–1966), focusing instead on the in-universe models of knowledge creation. The analysis begins with the tense relationship of the First, and Second Doctor (1966–1969), with their home planet’s academical torpor, and the extent to which this influences their exile and their wandering. It then examines the Third Doctor (1970–1974) and his (initially unwilling) occupation of a more conventional role, as scientific advisor to military organisation UNIT. From this basis, covering roughly the first ten years of the programme, the chapter argues that most subsequent Doctors have positioned themselves, to greater and lesser extents, as aloof from the models of knowledge creation that their earlier incarnations occupied, beginning with the reluctance of the Fourth Doctor (1974–1981) to serve the needs of either the Time Lords or UNIT. An ambivalence set in during the 1970s; fluctuating relationships that operated in conjunction with changes within both the programme (textual and extratextual, in the regenerating Doctors and in the roster of producers and script editors) and the society into which it was broadcast, as post-­ Second World War educational opportunities diminished across the Thatcherist period—the time of the Fifth (1982–1984), Sixth (1984–1986), and Seventh Doctors (1987–1989). However, despite both ambivalence and absence, these traditional models remain a valued benchmark for the character. Unlike their long-term adversary, the Master— who is more likely to work from within business, politics, or the civil service—the Doctor continues to treat pedagogical roles as ones into which they can step at will, something particularly evident in the Tenth Doctor (2005–2010) and the 70-year tenure of the Twelfth Doctor (2014–2017) in an academic role. Dealing with the volume’s contents out of order (in a very Pratchettian, even Time Lord, fashion), the chief inspiration for our theme—Unseen Universities—comes from the magical academy of Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” series, as analysed by Victoria Hawco. Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University sprawls across his many fantasy Discworld novels, and is styled as a critique through satire of universities such as Oxford. The wizards of Unseen University are steeped in absurd rituals and illogical traditions, refuse to teach, and deny all attempts to generate new knowledge. Hawco argues that Pratchett thus builds a comprehensive satire of higher education by presenting the fallibility and absurd nature of this highest place of learning.

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Beyond the simple re-reading of the Discworld, though, Hawco turns to twenty-first-century attempts by decolonial academics, and academics of critical pedagogics, to examine the state of the modern university. These scholars take a holistic approach to suggesting reforms through a process of first a negative, deconstructive critique, and then a positive and prescriptive one. While Pratchett most clearly partook in this first phase— through satire and the absurd, he deconstructs and presents to the audience the shortcomings of the university as he saw them—he lacked the second, prescriptive element, and in fact, his conceptualising of the relationship between knowledge and power in many ways reifies the same problems identified by decolonial and critical-pedagogical scholars. Pratchett’s Discworld novels are about unsettling the academy, in which magic, knowledge, and the absurd intermingle. In many ways, however, Pratchett can be seen as suggesting that this is the strength of his academy. The necessity of grappling with the slipperiness of knowledge can prepare academics for a shifting world. In the same way, academics today advocate for a university structure that decentres its internal hierarchies in favour of a system based on unlearning and the entangled multiplicity of knowledge. Melissa Beattie takes up the engagement with the absurd in her analysis of the NBC comedy 3rd Rock from the Sun (1996–2001). In that series, in order to learn about humanity, alien High Commander Dick Solomon (and the production team) seems to have thought that a university was the perfect place to do so. In the guise of a physics professor at the fictional Pendleton State University, Solomon runs afoul of office politics and is a terrible teacher, confusing and berating his hapless students with information learnt from being part of a space-faring species. Dick ultimately learns about humans, however, through his relationship with anthropologist (later briefly Dean) Dr Mary Albright, and through experiencing and critiquing sociocultural norms (especially relating to gender in academia as well as outside of it). Thus, Beattie’s purpose is two-fold: she examines the series’ representation and critique of gender in academia through Dick and Mary’s diegetic experiences, as well as contextualises it in STEM-­ professor Dick’s own education in the Humanities/humanity and the social sciences through his experiences. She thus illustrates both the importance of critique within academia with regard to gender (amongst other identities) and the importance of Humanities and the Social Sciences in bringing about such changes. Ultimately, the chapter argues that, though imperfect, 3rd Rock from the Sun showcases the problems that still

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plague academia today, as well as offering at least a general path to improvement. Sherlock Holmes and his myriad academic contexts is the subject of Jochem Kotthaus’ chapter. Protagonists know what the plot needs them to do—or requires them not to do. “All knowledge comes useful to the detective”, muses Holmes in The Valley of Fear (1914–1915).61 But how Holmes began to gain his encyclopaedic knowledge remains a mystery. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never stated clearly which university Holmes attended; presumably Oxford or Cambridge, but Doyle’s own alma mater, Edinburgh, is a possibility. At least, in passing, there is mention of his degree in chemistry, but that alone cannot account for the miraculous knowledge and skill Holmes possesses. Modern adaptations/interpretations (Elementary and Sherlock) are clearer concerning his academic background (whereas science in Guy Ritchie’s adaptions is close to sheer magic), bringing them more in line with modern expectations towards “grounded” characters. Kotthaus seeks to reconstruct Holmes’ evolution from a kind of superhero into a well-rounded scientist (who just happens to solve one murder case after the other). Special emphasis is upon the question of how academia shaped his character, skills, attitude, and knowledge. Finally, a broader sociological perspective is established: that the evolution and elaboration of Holmes’ academic career is a necessity as everyday knowledge itself becomes more aware of its own limitations, vacancies, and contradictions. In other words, as knowledge becomes more reflexive in the “real world”, so does the narrative of knowledge in fiction. But, in order to do so, there must be a firm narrative of the protagonists’ academic background. Ana Stevenson then takes a searching look at the status of women in the academy in the period film Mona Lisa Smile (2003). Mike Newell’s film— a film set during the 1950s in the cloistered world of women’s liberal arts collegiate education in the United States—offers a case study through which to examine the construction of historical memory about women in academia and its implications for higher education policy. Mona Lisa Smile thus portrays a fictional narrative set at an institution with particular significance in the history of women’s higher education. As Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, a Wellesley College alumna and historian of higher education at Smith College, wrote in the American Historical Review: “What makes this film about teaching unusual is that… a woman teaches and inspires  Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear, New York: A. L. Burt, 1914, p.33.

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female students”.62 Across the twentieth century, film became a powerful mediator for interpreting academic cultures across different eras, societies, and geographies; yet the film itself has received limited scholarly analysis beyond such initial film reviews. To contextualise Mona Lisa Smile historically, socially, and culturally, Stevenson’s chapter explores the history of women’s higher education in the United States; then examines the film’s construction of historical memory about women entering academia. The interplay between Julia Roberts’ star persona and the film’s pedagogical undercurrents offers an illuminating representation of knowledge production in the academy. Finally, the chapter considers the degree to which Mona Lisa Smile represents its main character in terms of what education scholar Marianne A. Larson describes as the “discourse of teacher centrality”: a trope with significant influence in public and policy discourse that centres effective pedagogy around individual teachers rather than systemic issues in education.63 The widespread romanticisation of women in academia, as evidenced in this historical film, has the potential to influence public and policy discourse about higher education. In “Gods and Monsters”, Susan Hopkins takes up the notion of the Sage professor signalled by Stevenson and explores “Filmic Teachers and their Moral Pedagogies”. The Faculty (1998) and Higher Learning (1995) form the essential foundations of a chapter that explores the gendered narratives and ideologies—and their implicit moral-political pedagogies—of relevant film case studies centred on filmic teachers from the 1990s through the 2000s, including Good Will Hunting (1997), Bad Teacher (2011), and Gross Misconduct (1993). Through close, critical textual analysis, including framing and feminist analysis, Hopkins analyses the visual, discursive constructions of “good” and “bad” teachers in mainstream commercial cinema across a variety of genres from horror, thriller, and drama, to comedy. The chapter argues that these moral pedagogies are sexualised and gendered, with female bodies and female sexuality constructed as problematic and non-normative in the form of the bad or monstrous teacher. These films commonly foreground the figure of the gendered, low-culture, unwieldy “monstrous-feminine”, who—in the case of Bad Teacher (2011), for example—“drinks and gets high”, and 62  Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Movie review: Mona Lisa Smile,” American Historical Review, 91: 3, 2004, p.1135. 63  Marianne A. Larsen, “Troubling the discourse of teacher centrality: A comparative perspective”, Journal of Education Policy, 25: 2, 2010, pp.207–231.

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gives her students “an education like no other”. Similar themes are evident in The Faculty (1998), wherein students learn “their teachers really are from another planet”. Unlike the comic or villainous monstrous-feminine figure of the “bad” female rule-breaker-teacher, the masculine rule-­ breaker-­teacher type is typically constructed as “good”, moral, and heroic; or as a “University Professor adored by his students and the envy of his peers” (Gross Misconduct, 1993). These films reveal not only gendered constructions of “good” and “bad” teachers but the shifting sociocultural climate of the 1990s and into the 2000s, particularly around the sexualised bodies of fantasy teachers and professors. If Hopkins engages with science fiction and its perpetuation of the “god professor” as the archetype in a cast of “gods and monsters”, then for Kristina Larsen, “A Different Kind of Monster” stalks the hallways of science-fictional academies. While a 2018 report from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine documented the pervasive nature of sexual harassment in academic science,64 the problem is neither new nor “American”. Roberta M.  Hall and Bernice R.  Sadler’s influential 1982 report The Classroom Climate: A Chilly One for Women? laid out the subtle and overt ways in which male and female college students are treated differently in the classroom, and the deleterious effect these differences can have on female students.65 Among the groups of women said to be most affected were graduate students and women in traditionally masculine fields such as science. A 1990 survey of members of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) found that 50% of female respondents reported witnessing or experiencing general discrimination against women, and a follow-up AAS survey in 2015 found that 82% of respondents had witnessed remarks from peers and 44% from supervisors.66 A 2013 internet-based survey of 666 field scientists (including anthropologists, archaeologists, biologists, zoologists and geologists)

64  National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2018, pp.3–4. 65  Roberta M. Hall and Bernice R. Sadler’s influential 1982 report The Classroom Climate: A Chilly One for Women? 66  Sarah Scoles, “Astronomers are Finally Doing Something About Sexual Harassment”, The Atlantic, 6 January 2016, at: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/ gender-discrimination-astronomy/422817/

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found that “harassment and assault were commonly experienced by respondents during trainee career stages”.67 Larsen shows how science-fiction media warns us against not only the scientific abuses of the mad scientist but the monstrous abuses of the predatory and misogynist scientist. Using the problematic power dynamics of the relationship between graduate student Lila and her thesis advisor Bill depicted in The Chair as a starting point, Larsen examines depictions in science fiction films of the gendered power dynamics between faculty mentor and science graduate students, as well as gendered power relationships between graduate students. Examples selected range in time from Prince of Darkness (1987), Jurassic Park (1994), and Nightwish (1989), to Timeline (2003), Magma: Volcanic Disaster (2006), and Legion of the Dead (2005), and on to Decay (2012—written and produced by actual graduate students at CERN), Time Trap (2017), and Midsommar (2019). There are connections to sensational real-world examples of sexism and sexual harassment in the graduate academy, including the fall of astronomer Geoff Marcy and geneticist Francisco Ayala. Stacy Maddern continues the examination of academia and higher education as presented in science fiction by considering its essential absence (even extinction) in the imagined dys/utopias of Hollywood. The chapter examines the seizing of education by the state apparatus across the science fiction genre with a particular focus on cinema. In doing so, the ideological parallels in our current society—the banning of books, partisan agendas, discrimination—may be given greater context. Education viewed through the dystopian filter often reveals the meddling hand of the state. Post-apocalyptic narratives portray knowledge as a commodity guarded heavily: survivors must harness and redirect these to serve a smaller oligarchic interest. The science fiction genre has best cast the institution of education as a weapon of the state. Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949), Brave New World (1932), and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) are literary sources that portray education in a concentration camp-like setting. Learning is a process that indoctrinates students into a world that may not be their choosing. Forces derail opposition and dissent to create a society with more obedient and productive citizens. Education in this realm is no longer intended for intellectual growth and discovery but for confinement and 67  Kathryn B.  H. Clancy, Robin G.  Nelson, Julienne N.  Rutherford, and Katie Hinde, “Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault”, PLoS ONE, 9: 7, 2014, p.4.

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control. In 2014, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar rendered this concept by reconfiguring the purpose of education to meet the future needs of the state. The film represents dystopian culture through an environmental disaster in a struggle to discover new means of sustenance. Education becomes a tool in that search by dissuading science and discovery in favour of agricultural pursuits. For this to work, the history of space travel, discovery, and the Apollo missions are recast as ‘propaganda’: ideological weapons used to fight the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The altering of history eliminates choice; it denies students the ability to hope for new possibilities, to see and participate in their own future. Rather, they are enlisted to serve the interests of the state. Following on from the powerful dissections of science fiction by Hopkins, Larsen, and Maddern, Bethan Michael-Fox and Kay Calver return to terra firma in their exploration of three British comedy series (albeit dark comedies) spanning the 1980s and into the 2000s. A Very Peculiar Practice was a British Broadcasting Company production that ran for two seasons in the late 1980s (1986 & 1988; with a one-off special in 1992). The dark comedy series was based on the writer Andrew Davies’ experiences at the University of Warwick and is a clear critique of the marketisation of higher education. Focusing on a medical doctor working at the fictional Lowlands University’s medical practice, the series mediates understandings of the ‘well-being’ of academia as the doctor treats the ailments of the staff and students. Funding cuts, new buildings, corruption, redundancies, stressed students, bureaucracy, and sexism all feature, as do stereotypes of neurotic professors and ruthless vice-chancellors. As the series becomes increasingly surreal—mirroring the processes of international higher education as explored in a range of texts including Peter Fleming’s Dark Academia: How Universities Die (2021)—Lowlands’ campus descends into total breakdown. In several ways A Very Peculiar Practice appears prescient, depicting a university that has become increasingly familiar to those working, studying in, and witnessing higher education institutions from the outside, over recent decades. Campus (2011) is a semi-improvised sitcom shown on British Channel 4 and led by Victoria Pile, which similarly adheres to the conventions of dark comedy and surrealism. The series features a power-hungry Vice-Chancellor called Jonty de Wolfe, an English lecturer who grades assignments using a dart board, a doctoral student who shows little interest in reading any books, and a mix-up in which the university pays everyone twice. Through an analysis of these television series—and the earlier 1981 BBC adaptation of Malcolm

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Bradbury’s The History Man (1975)—this chapter argues that while television can operate as a powerful mediator of academic culture and activities, it can also act as a form of critique, contributing to the cultural production of knowledge about the academy and its discontents. Rounding out the volume, and returning to something highlighted in Hawco’s chapter (as well as the subject matter of Mills), Robin Redmon Wright looks to move beyond simply critique to explore the Doctor Who universe for the constructive lessons it can offer an academy living through dystopian times. Today, it seems that facts don’t matter, and many of the discourses associated with leftist cultural resistance have been appropriated by far-right actors. Educators worldwide find themselves teaching within, and often against, this rising tide of post-truth propaganda that persistently casts doubt on nearly every facet of reality. Even more disheartening, many of the followers and promulgators of these conspiracy theories and ‘alternative facts’ claim to use tools and approaches that approximate those of critical media literacy. Finding ways to soften defences and encourage critical analyses of this onslaught of disinformation is imperative. In her chapter, Wright takes several episodes of Doctor Who, along with the third season of Torchwood, as content for facilitating critical analysis of these real-world issues. Whether by joining fan groups as activist educators or using Doctor Who and its spin-off Torchwood (2006–2011) as assigned texts in courses, educators and activists should not ignore the power of story to change hearts and minds. Rather than another analysis of the academy in sci-fi, Wright discusses the possibility of creating Doctor Who Academies of Informal Critical Learning. The reason some sci-fi programmes, films, or film series endure, and most do not, is the depth and intelligence of the writing. Many blockbusters are forgotten because the stories soon feel outdated or stale. Or they contained predictable plots that rely on special effects, rather than questioning cultural institutions, presenting alternative societies that have solved—or that are solving— issues around equity, inclusion, diversity, and community, or challenging entrenched norms of capitalism, human hierarchies, and environmental neglect. Stories that continue for generations, with fans that follow them for decades, contain enough depth not to get old, get outgrown, or get boring. Wright’s chapter considers the concept of viewing Doctor Who and Torchwood as (to borrow a term from Antonio Gramsci) “organic”

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academies,68 where characters become both students and teachers, and so do fans, who often join or form fan groups that, in reality, become pseudo “study groups” for discussing plot meanings, to extend metaphors, and to interrogate the episodes as cultural texts. These groups may meet in person and/or in virtual spaces. Such gatherings can be likened to Habermas’ Public Sphere and may offer activists venues for facilitating critical learning with people who might resist any other type of approach. As authoritarianism spreads across the globe; the United States becomes more divided every day; climate change accelerates; racism and sexism proliferate; anti-­ democracy insurrectionists plan their next attempt at a coup; and educators struggle to use critical media literacy to help students understand and deconstruct disinformation and conspiracy theories currently circulating about the pandemic, vaccines, government entities, ‘White-replacement’, the ‘deep state’, and other related topics—this chapter offers a curriculum that may help in that struggle. Of all the areas requiring urgent reform and attention, the ongoing #MeToo phenomenon has foregrounded the institutionalised abuse and sexual harassment of women as the most pressing. The sexualised connotations of the “ivory tower” have been apparent from its earliest, Biblical deployments (in the Song of Songs 7: 4), through the religiously inspired phallicity of Oxford’s Magdalen Tower to its more secular counterpart at Princeton.69 Small wonder that this thread runs through almost all the contributions to this volume, with critical appraisals of the poor behaviour in this regard of otherwise heroic figures, Dr Henry “Indiana” Jones, Dr Alan “Jurassic Park” Grant, and others, offered in particular by Kristina Larsen. As such, this book incorporates perspectives from History, Education, English literature, Theatre, Film and TV Studies, Communications, Physics and Astronomy, Sociology, and Urban and Community Studies. While concentrated in the Anglophone West, the contributors bring expertise from the Australian, North American, and European contexts, and beyond (one author is presently based in Ethiopia; another holds associate status with the University of the Free State, South Africa). Our differing institutional contexts also provide for a rich set of perspectives. Both 68  Gramsci’s concept of “organic intellectuals” suffuses his Prison Notebooks; see: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: ElecBook, 1999, at: http://courses. justice.eku.edu/pls330_louis/docs/gramsci-prison-notebooks-vol1.pdf 69  Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, London: Vintage, 2014, p.148.

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editors are senior staff-members at two of Australia’s leading distance education providers, with backgrounds in the more established and traditional, “Group of Eight” metropolitan universities (specifically, the University of Queensland and Monash University). While one editor represents Queensland and the other Australia’s New England, there are other contributors from the “old” New England of Connecticut, as well as Pennsylvania. Others hail from Ottawa, Canada; Aberystwyth, Wales; Bedford and Milton Keynes, England; and Dortmund, Germany. Readers will find countless fascinating intended or unintended links between 3rd Rock from the Sun, Mona Lisa Smile, and the novels, adaptations, and original productions of Sherlock Holmes, and beyond. Taking The Chair as a touchstone, one can see such links as conceptual, as with the absurd as a literary genre evident in Victoria Hawco’s exploration of Terry Pratchett’s fiction, as well as in The Chair: exploring the tension between fascism and the absurd was the spark that toppled Bill Dobson, after all. So too, there are some remarkable reiterations of similar tropes that are part of an unspoken academic genre: just as Malcolm Bradbury imagined Howard Kirk taking his class to see his wife give birth, this foreshadows Dobson’s accidental screening of his wife giving birth in The Chair. The serious issue of a dominant whiteness in the academy can be interrogated through comparing and contrasting series that are poles apart in terms of genre: the superb Australian comedy series Ronny Chieng: International Student (ABC, 2017) tackled issues of race from an Asian-­ Australian perspective, much as Sandra Oh did with her performance as Asian-American Professor Ji-Yoon Kim in The Chair. Even casting is a rich source of connection and cross-fertilisation: witness the two very different, but equally admirable, professorial characters given life by Holland Taylor in Legally Blonde (2001), and The Chair.70 Our aspiration is that readers will learn much from what the content of our volume has to teach; just as we as editors and contributors have developed a new understanding of our subject matter. As always, the ultimate 70  In The Chair, Taylor’s character, Professor Joan Hambling, enacts many of the ultimate fantasies of the put-upon academic, including burning her student evaluations and tracking-­ down and telling a snarky reviewer on RateMyProfessor exactly what she thinks of him and his attitude. Without offending anyone, she also manages to become chair of her department, and immediately begins reforming her layabout colleagues in crucial ways, without surrendering to managerialism. That said, her triumphs come only after experiencing across her career all the ageist, misogynist, sexist, abuse-laden tribulations faced by women in academia.

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goal of any pedagogical or research exercise is the fostering of new ideas, enhanced perspectives, and challenges to the received wisdom. At the very least, having imbibed the contents of our Unseen Universities will hopefully prompt readers to seek out classics like A Very Peculiar Practice or The History Man (novel as well as TV series), and also to ensure you never watch Community, Indiana Jones, or Doctor Who, in quite the same way, ever again.

CHAPTER 2

Absurdism and Entanglement as an Academic Parallel in Terry Pratchett’s “Unseen University” Victoria Hawco

Beginning with The Colour of Magic in 1983, British novelist Terry Pratchett introduced the Unseen University into his dozens-long fantasy Discworld series. The fictional academy is a university of magic formulated to be something between a guild and a school, in which men (and only men, with one exception) from across the Discworld can come for training as wizards. They graduate wizard levels and obtain university staff positions, and the various characters within the Discworld novels call on them to solve problems of a magical nature. This series participates obliquely in the genre of academic novels, though its fantastical elements and use of satire and comedy are used to great effect to critique their real-world parallels. Pratchett created the Unseen University as a sly reference to the ancient seats of higher learning in the Western world such as Oxford and

V. Hawco (*) Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Harmes, R. Scully (eds.), Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32350-8_2

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Cambridge. The books in the library are chained as they were historically in the Bodleian1—though in Unseen University this is to prevent the books from flying around rather than to protect them from thefts—and the coat of arms and some rituals bear strong resemblances to those of Oxford. Unseen University fits the genre of fantasy, in that both its architecture and its staffing are fundamentally absurd. The layout of the campus is whimsical, with many classes taught in a room that does not exist, a library with books shelved on the ceiling, and a constantly shifting campus map. The university creates an environment in which magic, as the focus of this centre of higher education, is slippery and impossible to have complete control over. The university staff grapple with the difficulty of magic, and the magic contained within the walls of Unseen University changes its very physical nature. The absurdity of Pratchett’s creation across multiple novels in the Discworld series forms a negative critique of higher education that is paralleled in real academia by both decolonial scholars and those who argue for a shift in the pedagogics of higher learning.2 By making magic absurd, and by making the venerated institution that teaches it even more so, Pratchett satirizes Western higher education itself and, in this chapter, I draw direct parallels between the description of Unseen University and the critiques lodged by many modern scholars of decolonial studies and critical pedagogics. However, Pratchett’s work falls one step short of the full critique of Western academia lodged by modern scholars. Decolonial and critical pedagogical scholars argue that the fullest criticism of academia must include a positive, prescriptive element as well as a negative deconstructive one, and this is what Pratchett’s work lacks. In fact, through his negative critique, Pratchett straddles the line between critiquing academia via satire and lending authority to some of those same criticized elements through an implicit agreement with their role in society. The loosely defined system of magic, as the focus of Unseen University, creates an implicit connection between the university structure and the systems of knowledge and power that many academics work to problematize. The Unseen University thus

1  B.  H. Streeter, The Chained Library, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp.75, 202. 2  Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Decolonizing the University”, in Knowledges Born in the Struggle: Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South, Maria Menses and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (eds), New York: Routledge, 2019, pp.226–231.

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resembles modern universities but does not represent the growth that decolonial and critical pedagogical scholars have been striving towards. The satire of Pratchett’s works then effectively makes its argument while in some ways undermining it. The satire of English universities helps identify and problematize many issues that academics recognize by making them so patently absurd. However, the overwhelming absurdity of these same facets weakens any possible prescriptive suggestions, as their absurdity makes these problems too ephemeral to change.

Unseen University: Architecture and Absurdity It is here useful to clearly define a set of terms before putting them in context with Pratchett’s work. In brief, my use of satire here develops in part from the work of Robert Phiddian in Satire and Public Emotions. In it, Phiddian establishes satire as a method to critique power through its dual roles of criticism and catharsis.3 Satire is hard to pin down directly and is connected to the use of humour in literature or humour as a literary genre; it often ridicules or makes that which it is oriented towards ridiculous.4 While the laughter this prompts is, to Phiddian, often harsh or bitter, as opposed to plainly amused, this nevertheless relates satire back to its roles of both criticism and catharsis. By making its object ridiculous, it disempowers it by pointing to its flaws and additionally allows the readers to engage in an act of catharsis by seeing often oppressive systems ridiculed. However, as Phiddian also stresses, satire as catharsis can inhibit change by functioning as a public release valve to deny the build-up of social tension necessary for change.5 Ultimately, I argue that the use of satire in this academic novel presents a strong critique of many of the aspects of English higher learning by making them absurd for the purpose of comedy. However, in doing so, this satire similarly is unable to serve prescriptively due to the constraints of it as a mode for catharsis. Moving to my sense of the absurd, philosophically the absurd is a “term used by existentialists to describe that which one might have thought to be amenable to reason, but which turns out to be beyond the limits of

3  Robert Phiddian, Satire and the Public Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, p.2. 4  Phiddian, Satire and the Public Emotions, 4, 18. 5  Phiddian, Satire and the Public Emotions, 12–14.

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rationality”.6 In this regard, actions that follow internal logic, but from which the starting premise is not grounded in a rationality derived from objective reality, are considered to be absurd. By this definition, even when there is an internal logic, say of magic within Pratchett’s fantasy world, the resulting circumstances can still be absurd, so long as the starting premise for a chain of choices is not grounded in the external logic of the fantasy world. Literary theorists helpfully broaden this definition of the absurd to be one in which the actions in the setting are lacking in logic and coherence, emphasizing the nonsensical nature of actions and characters, often with a focus on comedy.7 This broader definition is more useful, considering the guiding lines of the genre of fantasy within Pratchett’s works. Here again, regardless of the possible rules contained within the fantasy world of the Discworld books, the absurd is still that which seems unintelligible or lacks coherence. Taking this definition, Unseen University is fundamentally absurd because the logic of the school seems disconnected and unintelligible even to the other characters within the fantasy world. Rules and rituals which have no clear grounding in reality dominate the staff and the staff obstinately hold to tradition instead of the logic of its reality. More immediately tellingly, the architecture of the university is impossible to understand, and the characters who reside within the campus must contend with actively hostile buildings and a system of magic that they neither control nor to which they are entirely subservient. From the outset, Unseen University has no set dimensions, nor does it occupy a set space within the geography of the world. In fact, as characters within the novels discover, the university buildings seem to occupy a greater space inside than they do outside due to the impact of so much magic in a condensed space, which caused the dimensions of the physical space to be largely a matter of chance.8 In a move reminiscent of the TARDIS from the hallmark of British science fiction, Doctor Who, Unseen University is bigger on the inside. The exact shape and mapping of the university are malleable and unknowable, creating a sense of general frustration or bemusement among its occupants. In Sourcery, Pratchett writes 6  Ted Honderich, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p.3. 7  Neil Cornwell, The Absurd in Literature, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006, pp.18–23. 8  Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent, London: Corgi Books, 1999, p.42.

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that “the layout of the Library of Unseen University was a topographical nightmare”;9 and in The Last Continent, he writes that any map of the university would only be accurate for a few days, and instead of a flat piece of paper would be an origami model that looked like a flower exploding.10 The architecture, both of the campus at large and individual buildings such as the library, denies any rational attempts at explanation or representation. One of the most notable examples of the absurdity of the architecture and history of the Unseen University is Room 3B, which “is not locatable on any floor plan of UU” but which, according to the schedule, always has classes.11 In some regards this is played as a joke—you can never find the professor you need when you need them to do work, simply because they are in a room you cannot find! However, this room, along with the other impossible rooms—the Uncommon Room; the lost reading room in the library; even the bell tower in which the bell, missing its clapper, still chimes out every hour with silence—proves the absurdity of the campus. The buildings follow no rational system of logic, even a logical system in which wizards can summon fireballs from their hands. As a result, navigating the campus is no simple matter. Again in The Last Continent, Pratchett writes that “there were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered then, turned out to contain the room you’d started with”.12 Some of the rooms are built on fissures of gravity, such as the Lavatory of Unreason,13 and Room 5b is dealing with the ramifications of temporal discontinuity, in which time passes slower while inside.14 All this contributes to the general feeling of a university which, belying all logic and rationality, seems to be alive, and possessing of its own personality.15 The inability to clearly travel from one classroom to the next, much less from one end of campus to the other, makes the exact purpose of the campus itself debatable. As students and professors alike struggle to find their classes, the question draws in the pedagogical purpose of the university. Underneath the university, this absurdity becomes even plainer through a juxtaposition. Despite the trials of navigating the campus above ground,  Terry Pratchett, Sourcery, London: Corgi Books, 1989, p.152.  Pratchett, The Last Continent, p.43. 11  Stephen Briggs and Terry Pratchett, The Ultimate Discworld Companion, London: Gollancz, 2021, p.380. 12  Pratchett, The Last Continent, 42. 13  Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times, London: Corgi Books, 1995, p.310. 14  Pratchett, The Last Continent, p.335. 15  Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites, London: Corgi Books, 1987, pp.190–191. 9

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the undercroft of the university is shockingly usable. In Unseen Academicals, Pratchett writes that the “cellars and undercrofts of the university were a small city in themselves… If you knew all the passages and stairs, and if they stayed still for five minutes, it was possible to get to anywhere in the university without going above ground”.16 This aside creates a useful contrast that furthers the absurdity of the university. Accessing it as normal, the university is absurd, irrational, and actively hostile to its denizens. Users are denied the fundamental purpose of a university—to teach or to learn. However, by approaching the same institution from below, the institution becomes easier to navigate, if not necessarily use. This relates to a larger satire that Pratchett here establishes but never fully expands upon. The university structure is absurd to those who grapple with it, but its contours are easier to understand for those who approach it differently. Academics make similar arguments regarding the production of power in institutions of knowledge generation today. In archival work, Ann Laura Stoler argues that reading archives against the grain they were developed with produces a clearer understanding of their biases and power structures.17 Similarly, Nora Sternfeld in her writing on “unlearning” as a pedagogical and critical practice argues that unlearning dominant knowledge enables those who do so to both identify and challenge “the value-­ encoding apparatus from inside the structure of knowledge generation”.18 It is only by approaching the dominant knowledge system from the converse perspective that the whole of it can be examined for a proper critique. Pratchett confirms this same argument through the actions of one young wizard in Equal Rites, who first enters the university from below. However, as she remains in its structure, she is accepted within its halls only as she approaches magic and its relevant pedagogy “properly”, thus denying the actual act of resistance that Pratchett first implied. The history of Unseen University supports the absurdity first suggested by its architecture. The university’s central structure, the Tower of Art, sprang up one day, seemingly from nowhere, and it was from there that the rest of the university was created to act as a keep,19 with the rest of the  Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals, London: Corgi Books, 2010, p.89.  Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 18  Nora Sternfeld, “Learning Unlearning”, CuMMA Papers, September 2016, https:// cummastudies.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/cumma-papers-20.pdf 19  Briggs and Pratchett, The Ultimate Discworld Companion, p.14. 16 17

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surrounding city likewise establishing itself around the university.20 The university, then, has a history longer than recorded history, an architecture that cannot be explained rationally, and the workings of which actively inhibit students and staff from using the institution for its initial purpose.

Satirizing the Academy in Unseen University Though the most evident, the architecture of the university is also the least interesting aspect of its absurdity in terms of establishing the Unseen University as a satirical parallel to real-world institutions of higher learning. Just as the university has an infinite supply of rooms, constantly changing and expanding its architecture, it also has an infinite supply of potential staff. Wizards who come to train almost invariably end up as tenured staff members at the university, thus prompting the building to restructure to create more offices and more classes and classrooms.21 As a result, the university continued to establish professorships in an increasingly bizarre array of areas, including the Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, the Professor of Recondite Architecture and Origami Map-Folding, the Professor of Illiberal Studies, and the Lecturer in Creative Uncertainty (the last of which any university would likely profit from).22 The strangeness of the professorships and their suggested course materials relate well to the simple fact that, as Pratchett continuously establishes, what the professors at Unseen University hate most of all is to teach students. The school, despite being a place to train wizards in magic, has short academic terms to limit the interaction between staff and students.23 Professors frequently take classes in a room that does not exist and are hard to find when students need them. Most of the staff prefer to spend their days researching, enjoying a good meal, or doing anything other than engaging with the hordes of young student wizards. This creates a tension between a few characters, such as Spelter of the Council of Seers, who recognize that these behaviours are not in line with the actual purpose of the university. Spelter recognizes that the university has been overindulging in food and rituals and old books, however, he seems

 Pratchett, Sourcery, p.264.  Pratchett, Unseen Academicals, pp.32–42. 22  Briggs and Pratchett, The Ultimate Discworld Companion, pp.373–374. 23  Briggs and Pratchett, The Ultimate Discworld Companion, p.374. 20 21

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disinclined to change.24 The problem is there, but the staff of Unseen University seem disinclined to evolve. Despite the seemingly infinite number of staff, however, the higher positions at Unseen University have a very high turnover rate. As wizards move up in wizard levels, the number of open positions per wizard level dwindles, until there are only a handful of wizards at the highest level (Eighth Level). This creates deadly competition among wizards to move up the ladder, resulting in a dangerous environment in the upper echelons of magic.25 Many wizards refuse to progress out of fear for their own lives, and this has also halted all collaboration between wizards at higher levels.26 This sets up another of Pratchett’s critiques, that wizards, so concerned with themselves, do not set out to take over and rule the Discworld. Instead, the rigours of the university keep them controlled. In fact, as the Ultimate Discworld Companion points out, a wizard’s level is less about recognizing skill than controlling and representing their power.27 The interaction between wizards and the institution that keeps them employed creates a deconstructive dialogue between the real-world analogues of academia and universities, in which the deconstructive critique sets out to question the base assumptions and implications of the system.28 Professors at Unseen University rarely concern themselves with the actual acts of teaching and reject attempts to change their daily life or their approaches to magic, even going so far as to discourage new research that may question or change the dominant knowledge systems.29 Similarly, decolonial scholars and scholars of critical pedagogics argue that the modern university system struggles with change, and is oriented towards a reproduction of knowledge rather than an exploratory approach.30 The competition between wizards halts all collaboration, and similarly the stratification of knowledge and disciplines within the overly hierarchized modern university structure inhibits interdisciplinary approaches to  Pratchett, Sourcery, p.47.  Pratchett, Sourcery, p.33. 26  Pratchett, Sourcery, p.49. 27  Briggs and Pratchett, The Ultimate Discworld Companion, p.373. 28  De Sousa Santos, “Decolonizing the University”, p.226. 29  Pratchett, The Last Continent, p.47. 30  Anders Burman, “Damnés Realities and Ontological Disobedience”, in Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without, Ramón Grosfoguel, Roberto Hernández, and Ernesto Rosen Vela (eds), Maryland: Lexington Books, 2016, p.79. 24 25

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knowledge generation.31 The hallmark of a wizard’s success is not to teach students, to produce new research, or to change the current state of knowledge, rather it is simply to stay alive. In this regard, wizards and the Unseen University are fundamentally oriented towards appearances. This is implied (through the need for classes and classrooms despite a general distaste towards actually teaching), and directly stated. For example, wizards refuse to use new candles, preferring ones that already have dribbles to keep up their air of mystery.32 Their focus is on the appearance of knowledge and authority rather than practising pedagogy. Moreover, one of the key roles of the wizards and various sundry staff of the university is to participate in elaborate rituals. In The Ultimate Discworld Companion (collected and presented with the aid of co-author Stephen Briggs), Pratchett provided a list of the ceremonies and festivals undertaken at the university or by university members. The list is several pages long. One ceremony, “the Ceremony of Keys”, involves several members of staff walking in a formation and speaking from a script as they commence a hand-off of important keys. The script reads more like a parody of Porterhouse Blue, as staff members ritualistically lose and find the keys before the end of the ceremony. As the Companion states, several who overhear the loud ritual at night question its very purpose and ask them to stop the racket, but “they’d never stopped, or even thought of stopping. You can’t stop tradition”.33 This, along with the other ceremonies which are similarly farcical and often involve the phrase “because of Tradition”, creates a comedic tension between ritual and reality.34 The rituals are strange, often purposeless, and the people who enact them only do so out of duty as opposed to real necessity. The readers are driven to see the banality in these absurdly organized rituals and come to the same conclusion as the watchers of the “Ceremony of Keys”. These ceremonies are ridiculous, and absurdly organized according to tradition, not reality or logic. Here Pratchett satirizes the English Oxbridge system in several ways. First, professors are, without significant effort, given the ultimate honours in academia—tenure at an accredited and esteemed university. However, they abhor the actual work that comes with this role. They refuse to teach  De Sousa Santos, “Decolonizing the University”, 236–238.  Pratchett, Unseen Academicals, p.47. 33  Briggs and Pratchett, The Ultimate Discworld Companion, p.375. 34  Briggs and Pratchett, The Ultimate Discworld Companion, p.374. 31 32

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and limit their interactions with students, and the baffling number of professors leads them into further and further specializations which have limited applications. But despite having tenure, they are still in direct competition with each other and refuse to collaborate unless under world-­ ending circumstances. They refuse to participate in new knowledge generation, either through their own research or through teaching, in direct correlation to the tension between the modern university and change.35 Secondly, the university staff engage in many absurd rituals, which additionally aids them in their desire to avoid teaching, driven by the compulsion of tradition rather than a grounding in logic or material reality. By making these rituals and traditions so absurd as to appear irrational, Pratchett both mocks and calls into question all the rituals of Unseen University’s real-world parallels. The temporality of the Discworld books and Pratchett as their author here enriches this analysis. The majority of the 41 Discworld novels were written between 1983 and 2000, with a further 10 novels being written between 2000 and 2005. It was only in 1986 that all Oxford colleges changed their statuses to admit women and the demographic shift was slow to take hold. As a result, Pratchett was satirizing the Oxbridge system during a time of transition, when others were examining the vast male privileges of the system. As a result, the entrenched privilege was still in need of stark consideration, and Pratchett’s creation of Unseen University in the first Discworld novel The Colour of Magic in 1983 reflected this. In effect, Pratchett was reacting satirically to the academic context of his world, and pointed out its shortcomings for ridicule, even though he did not himself present a fantasy university that showed what the university could look like.

Pedagogy at Unseen University Despite their frequent attempts to avoid it, the staff at Unseen University do occasionally teach. There are exams that take place at the conclusion of each of the eight academic terms,36 and a variety of classes open to students, such as Beginner’s Dematerialization.37 However, the bulk of the pedagogical approach in Unseen University is hands-off, as “education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of  Burman, “Damnés Realities and Ontological Disobedience”, p.79.  Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures, London: Corgi Books, 1991, p.41. 37  Pratchett, Equal Rites, p.201. 35 36

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young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other”.38 Students are left to their own devices, even when this can cause a fair bit of destruction. Though the faculty recognize that they work in an institution, the stated goal of which is to act as a school for practitioners of magic, they do not seem to hold education as a priority. This illogical approach to running a school is, in part, answered by Pratchett’s conception of magic. Pratchett only ever loosely defines the focus of Unseen University. Magic is neither passive, and therefore possessed by wizards and wielded like a tool, nor active and therefore controlling wizards. There is an inherent tension in its existence that Pratchett makes comedic but never really resolves. Pratchett creates a timeline of sorts of magic, arguing that in the beginning there was wild, raw magic ruled by an internal, knowable logic like mathematics.39 However, magic practitioners such as wizards went to war with each other and decimated the magical landscape. This led to a field of magic across the world that was unpredictable and used people as much as they tried to affect it.40 In the present of the novels, magic does not have a set of clear rules and logic. By its very definition, magic is absurd. It refuses to follow rules and has no grounding in material rationality, even within the confines of the genre of fantasy. It demands incredible skill and strength to wield by its practitioners, but there is no logical, stable way to practice and learn magic; rather it seems a dangerous field of trial and error, in which getting things wrong frequently rips open doorways to the ever-present Dungeon Dimensions. Magic is hard to learn and impossible to master, but because there are still those who wield it, the university exists to function like “the weight on the arm of magic”,41 continuing to ensure that wizards are unable to wield magic so precisely as to be a danger. By presenting magic in this way, Pratchett can argue that it is a good thing that magic is so absurd because it prevents those who do attempt to wield it from abusing it. Wizards do not rule the world despite the power of magic because that would be an abuse of power (a fact that comprises the core conflict in Sourcery). Conveniently from a metatextual perspective, magic is too absurd and slippery to ever be wielded to world-dominating ends. In this way,  Pratchett, Interesting Times, p.22.  Pratchett, Sourcery, p.118. 40  Pratchett, Sourcery, p.231. 41  Pratchett, The Last Continent, p.285. 38 39

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Pratchett’s magic both resembles and critiques the understanding of knowledge prevalent in the Western academy, one that is similarly problematized by decolonial theorists and those critical of the Western academic and pedagogic tradition. In our world, knowledge and education contribute to a cultural consciousness dominated in the West by colonial ideologies and a binary split of knowledge into the known and the knower.42 Magic, by contrast, is too absurd to ever be known in this same way, despite the existence of a similarly venerated institution devoted to its teaching. However, despite this very deconstructive critique of the Western academy, constraints of satire as a form weaken Pratchett’s satire, restricting the system of magic in such a way that it resembles conceptions of knowledge weaponized by the colonial education system of the time. Magic is complex, hard to understand, and only used by those privileged few of the Unseen University. In this regard, magic resembles the arguments regarding knowledge and the privileging of a Western epistemology at the expense of other, non-Western ways of knowing.43 As decolonial academics argue, the privileging of Western education and ways of knowing create systems of supposedly objective truth that reify existing power structures. Additionally, though Pratchett critiques the demographic of the wizards, and thereby the demographic of Western academia in his time, he nevertheless narratively denies the possibility for there to be any diversity in magic. Pratchett at length describes other practitioners of magic, such as witches and conjurers, but denies them the narrative authority of the wizards of Unseen University in terms of practising this ultimate art.44 Even as changes happen, such as in Equal Rites when the young girl Esk is born with the powers not of a witch but those traditional to a wizard, she cannot enter the university on the grounds of her sex. She eventually ends up sneaking into the university from its undercroft, in a seeming acknowledgement of the possibility of approaching the university from below, or against the grain, as in Stoler. However, her positionality is never one of actual resistance. When wizards later acknowledge her, it is only in the context of that aspect of her nature that is coincident with theirs, not 42  Achille Mbembe, “Decolonizing the University: New Directions”, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 15: 1, 2016, p.32. 43  Hans Schildermans, Experiments in Decolonizing the University: Towards an Ecology of Study, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, p.5. 44  Pratchett, Equal Rites, p.175.

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through a growth within their system of values. She cannot participate in this system of knowledge production as anything other than a wizard. In this way, by overly satirizing the faults and deficiencies of the academy at the time (1987)—lack of diversity and rigidity in pedagogical approaches— the confines of satire as a form so limit Pratchett that there can be no possibility for change or reflexive growth through a positive critique. As the Companion states, the heroine of Equal Rites was the first and last girl ever admitted to Unseen University.45

Reading Unseen University into the Real World: Decoloniality and Critical Approaches to Pedagogy Within the confines of its own genre, Unseen University is absurd. This absurdity leads to what de Sousa Santos and Ramon Grosfoguel would agree constitutes a negative decolonial critique. The absurdity of Unseen University functions as a deconstruction of that which it satirizes, namely the structure of Western, and particularly English, institutions of higher learning. These institutions, especially in the last two centuries, have become “crucial actors in the construction of a Western canon… often at the expense of non-Western ideas, thoughts, and ways of knowing”.46 University structures historically were about gatherings of community and functioned like a guild to provide an education centred less around generating new knowledge than understanding the knowledge which already constituted a cornerstone of Western society.47 The university structure, therefore, is fundamentally Western, following from a Western epistemic tradition “that claim[s] detachment of the known from the knower”,48 and that fulfils ideals of the Enlightenment project such as scientific progress, formal rationality, and the modern bureaucratic state.49 It is important here to clarify the use of words and their definitions once more. Decolonialism, as a critical theory evolving from the legacy of postcolonial studies, takes the position that colonialism is not a binary  Briggs and Pratchett, The Ultimate Discworld Companion, p.132.  Schildermans, Experiments in Decolonizing the University, p.5. 47  Schildermans, Experiments in Decolonizing the University, pp.29–42. 48  Mbembe, “Decolonizing the University”, p.32. 49  Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “The University at a Crossroads”, in Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without, Ramón Grosfoguel, Roberto Hernández, and Ernesto Rosen Vela (eds), Maryland: Lexington Books, 2016, pp.3–4. 45 46

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state in which an entity is either oppressing or not oppressing, rather it comprises various societal structures enacting, among other forms of oppression, epistemic violence to maintain set power structures. The decolonial perspective in academia is even broader, however, as it “does not limit itself to the historical legacy of colonialism in particular, but also interrogates the logics and mentalities that continue to occupy the university still today”.50 To Anders Burman, the Western university structure is connected to “academic processes of learning and knowledge production that… contribute to the generation of a specific reality [and]… are thereby quite resilient to change, since they not only define reality, but are accomplices in generating it”.51 Current decolonial critical theorists all argue that something must be done. Current knowledge production in the academy is bound by those same hegemonic processes described by Burman, resulting in an academy that is in many ways unable to critique itself. It falls into the same trap as Pratchett—able to recognize problems, but not to suggest solutions. In working through this problem, academics such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Achille Mbembe argue that any approach to decolonize the university—and therefore to shift its epistemic system of knowledge production more generally—must involve both radical philosophical changes and material changes.52 This will require both a negative, deconstructive critique, and a positive, prescriptive critique.53 In the first sense, academics can analyse structurally the ways in which knowledge power is generated in the academy, and critique this web of connections that results in the same hegemony that Burman addressed. The critique is negative in that it is deconstructive and breaks down the colonial whole into understandable parts. In this way, there is scrutiny of education and pedagogy as mechanisms by which colonial power and the power of the dominant hegemony are both generated and maintained.54 In the second sense, academics can prescribe changes, whether to small aspects or to the very groundwork of the institution. Once the whole is deconstructed, the possibility for change becomes manageable instead of overwhelming. The decolonizing project today, specifically in terms of academia, sets out to first critique the  Schildermans, Experiments in Decolonizing the University, p.6.  Burman, “Damnés Realities and Ontological Disobedience”, p.79. 52  Mbembe, “Decolonizing the University”, p.31. 53  De Sousa Santos, “Decolonizing the University”, p.226. 54  Burman, “Damnés Realities and Ontological Disobedience”, p.79. 50 51

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Eurocentric academic model, and then to attempt to imagine the alternatives to that model.55 The second sense must follow from the first, but without the positive critique, the negative critique can simply be reincorporated into the episteme that formed the academy in the first place, denying change. Without the positive critique, Esk enters the Unseen University despite being a girl, thus recognizing the limitations of the institution, but only in that she denies her difference and can be accepted as a wizard, and therefore still maintains those boundaries. The university Pratchett satirizes closes itself to new systems of knowledge production and knowledge sharing. Pratchett satirizes this by commenting on the unwillingness of teachers in the Unseen University to teach, and their unwillingness to ignore tradition, interrogate, or grow with the world around them. However, due to the limits of satire as a form, this negative critique lacks the positive necessary for actual growth and change. Pratchett’s presentation of the university, ignoring the trappings of fantasy, is an incomplete one that ignores the positive critical work done today to reimagine academia and pedagogy in light of a complex and entangled world. It is here important to add an addendum to this argument: much of the academic world is still as Pratchett saw it between the 1980s and the 2010s. Then, universities maintained limits to those with social privilege, and the university structure itself reified those same binaries and social divisions. There was significant authority granted by attending colleges such as Oxbridge, and as a result, their limitations furthered social divisions. Universities (particularly those with longer histories) resist attempts to change entirely, maintaining their stability within the Western social world that contributes, at least implicitly, to the maintenance of colonial power and the Western epistemosphere.56 Despite changes occurring throughout the duration of Pratchett’s first dozen novels, these works still had only limited demographic diversity and even more limited epistemic diversity. Currently, universities still struggle with the tension between tradition and the complex world they occupy. They struggle with demographic and epistemic diversity—in particular, with the challenge of how to conceptualize or privilege alternate ways of knowing. The challenge is not a simple one. The call is to change the very epistemic structure of the university and to use the university classrooms to “make systemic forays  Mbembe, “Decolonizing the University”, p.39.  Burman, “Damnés Realities and Ontological Disobedience”, pp.73–79.

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beyond our current knowledge horizons”.57 However, great work has been done, first at identifying the interconnected problems, and then, haltingly, at proposing solutions. Decolonial academics, as I have argued, have done excellent work identifying the underlying problems within academia and current pedagogical practices, providing the negative critique necessary for growth. Mbembe and de Sousa Santos recognize the need for both philosophical and material changes, which decentre Western practices and traditions, in favour of a broader approach to alternate epistemologies and methodologies. The current epistemological and pedagogical approaches reify hegemonic power structures, stratifying knowledge and creating a binary of the known and the knower, which denies alternate ways to understand the world, including, for example, indigenous epistemologies.58 It is this part of the critique that is most prevalent in Pratchett’s work. In it, I identify tension within the very definition of magic. Sometimes, wizards possess and wield magic in such a way that corresponds to the Western perspective on knowledge. In Sourcery, the lead antagonist enters into a competition of magic against another high-level wizard, in which both wield magic accurately and succinctly like a tool in the hands of an expert carpenter.59 However, magic is also slippery, and acts on the wizard as much as the wizard attempts to act on it.60 In this way, magic is absurd, with no clear logical consistency. This connects to the decolonial perspective that challenges dominant perspectives on knowledge and knowledge generation, in which knowledge cannot be the binary of known and unknown, but in which there must be room for multiplicity.61 Academics and critical theorists have made broad strokes into defining the complementary positive critical approach that is today entangled with the deconstructive critique. Nora Sternfeld in her 2016 piece “Learning Unlearning” defines the act of unlearning as “a form of learning that actively rejects dominant, privileged, exclusionary and violent forms of knowledge and acting which we still often understand as education and knowledge”.62 Unlearning does not function like a delete button to erase  Mbembe, “Decolonizing the University”, p.30.  Mbembe, “Decolonizing the University”, p.32. 59  Pratchett, Sourcery, pp.44–46. 60  Pratchett, Sourcery, p.231. 61  Jacques Rancière, “Un-What?” in The Pedagogics of Unlearning, Éamonn Dunne and Aidan Seery (eds), Maryland: Project Muse, 2020, p.14. 62  Sternfeld, “Learning Unlearning”. 57 58

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current knowledge and practices, but rather is about decentring dominant epistemologies and pluralizing them to challenge “the value-encoding apparatus from inside the structure of knowledge production”.63 Crucially, unlearning and critical pedagogical approaches are not goal oriented—the goal is not to recentre, for example, indigenous epistemologies instead of Western, or to replace current methodological practices with others. Rather, these practices and critical theories want to alter the state of goal-­ oriented pedagogy itself64 and to disarticulate “the presumed homogenizing connection between pedagogy and politics” so as to “save” the promise of openness in the university.65 These current pedagogical theories argue that education must abandon its goal of maintaining the current cultural consciousness by fundamentally reassessing the methodologies of education and pedagogics in order to change the resulting epistemological, and thus cultural, structure of knowledge generation from the bottom up. Just as the current state of pedagogy has widespread cultural ramifications, this change to a system of plural, entangled ways of knowing will have a positive impact on the cultural consciousness that academia impacts. Jacques Rancière argued that intellectual emancipation should not be concerned with alternative pedagogies or anti-pedagogies but should instead be about addressing intellectual equality. Much as Mbembe, de Sousa Santos, and Sternfeld argued, replacing colonial epistemologies with alternate epistemologies will not fundamentally change the epistemological framework that leads to the generation of knowledge power. What Ranciere argued instead is that the inequality between types of knowledge and demographics of knowers needs addressing.66 By privileging multiple ways of knowing, and who, demographically, is believed as a source of knowledge, the colonial matrix of knowledge power can be decentred and affected. In this regard, the role of education must change from affirming social worlds to teaching study practices. This replaces the idea of goal-oriented pedagogy with a pedagogy of surprise. Hans Schildermans’ work Experiments in Decolonizing the University: Towards an Ecology of Study presents a history of the “ivory tower” of the university, presenting first  Sternfeld, “Learning Unlearning”.  Rancière, “Un-What?” pp.29–33. 65  Paul Bowman, “The Intimate Schoolmaster and the Ignorant Sifu: Poststructuralism, Bruce Lee, and the Ignorance and Everyday Radical Pedagogy”, in The Pedagogics of Unlearning, Éamonn Dunne and Aidan Seery (eds), Maryland: Project Muse, 2020, p.133. 66  Rancière, “Un-What?” pp.29–33. 63 64

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the deconstructive critique,67 before arguing for this transformation of study practices to address a new system of knowledge-generation that is plural and decentred. Schildermans argues that study practices and pedagogy should be considered in the “middle voice”.68 This will deprive educational practices and learning of the act of possessing knowledge in the active voice and consider knowledge and the act of knowing reflexively. Knowledge, like Pratchett’s magic, is slippery but requires constant interrogation into what counts as knowledge and who counts as a knower. To Schildermans, “the question of how to learn something new gets thoroughly entangled with the question of how to learn anew”.69 This is exactly what the Unseen University does not, and perhaps due to the limits of satire, cannot do. While it makes absurd the ways of the university, thus setting them up for critique both within the text and by the reader, the characters do not participate in new ways of learning, as modern academics in decolonial studies and critical pedagogies have set out to do. The wizards of Unseen University, though the weaknesses of their institution confront them, refuse to change. They will envelop new ways of being into their epistemology, but in an act of transformation, not resistance or evolution.

An Ecology of Knowledge There has been significant, albeit slow, progress towards achieving the kinds of changes decolonial and critical pedagogics scholars argued in favour of. For example, in Canada, Indigenous scholars are working to create systems of knowledge generation that can be integrated with the Western academic system while still privileging and acknowledging indigenous ways of knowing.70 In some systems of indigenous knowledge practices, oral tradition is privileged, and the relationship between “teachers” and “students” is conceptualized differently. Indigenous ways of teaching privilege land-based pedagogies,71 not the Western academic classroom  Schildermans, Experiments in Decolonizing the University, pp.4–44.  Schildermans, Experiments in Decolonizing the University, p.130. 69  Schildermans, Experiments in Decolonizing the University, p.136. 70  The Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Culture (https:// grasac.artsci.utoronto.ca/?page_id=680) is a great example of current work being done to combine Indigenous and Settler ways of knowing. 71  Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation”, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3: 3, 2014, pp.1–25. 67 68

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and its internalized hierarchies, and use the systems of critical unlearning and pedagogics that Western academics have begun to argue for in practice. Canadian universities have made halting progress towards integrating indigenous ways of knowing and teaching into their Western educational model, such as including Indigenous Elders as academic collaborators where relevant72 and seeking to incorporate Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Holders in a variety of academic events. These alternate forms of knowledge generation decentre the binary of authority between student and professor and instead privilege the ideas of an ecology of knowledge for which Schildermans advocated. As a result, modern academia uses two different metrics of rationality, as defined by Schildermans in his evaluation of the history of the university and his proposal for its further evolution. Historically, universities have privileged the use of diplomatic reason, which developed out of medieval universities,73 by which Schildermans means a system of knowledge production “that tried to negotiate between different authorities and forge a precarious and always contestable agreement”.74 As a result, the system of knowledge production within universities concerned itself with the relationship between knowledge and culture and acted as a mediator between these forces to develop a line of rational inquiry and methodology that functioned internally. This rationality creates “coexistence amongst contradictory claims” and therefore differs from a critical or experimental use of reason that interrogates stable positionalities to see what lies behind them.75 Throughout Pratchett’s Discworld novels, the wizards of Unseen University almost exclusively practice this diplomatic use of reason. They reject calls to mystery, declaring it a waste of time, and even go so far as to avoid the core purpose of their university: teaching students. They prefer 72  My home institution of Carleton University alone has guidelines and policies for settler students to contact and work with Elders (https://carleton.ca/indigenous/cisce/requestfor-the-presence-of-elders-or-knowledge-keepers/), funds its own Centre for Indigenous Support and Community Engagement to foster safe spaces for Indigenous students to grapple with the tension between Indigenous and Western epistemological perspectives, and funds the Indigenous Education Council to design academic policies to better support Indigenous students and pluralize the university’s approach to knowledge generation. 73  Schildermans, Experiments in Decolonizing the University, p.58. 74  Schildermans, Experiments in Decolonizing the University, p.43. 75  Schildermans, Experiments in Decolonizing the University, p.44.

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to allow students to learn from dusty old tomes, and as a result, the university finds itself on precarious grounds. In this, Pratchett recognizes and satirizes the overuse of diplomatic reason in the Western university structure. Rather than using new methodologies and thinking of new ideas, the wizards of Unseen University are content to interrogate the old ideas and reject the new. While this satirizes the state of many universities, it does not reflect the current state of universities as they grow and evolve today. Critical theorists of pedagogics and decolonial academics instead today privilege the experimental and critical uses of reason. Their experimental reason “is not so much interested in stabilizing history as in bringing something new into the world”,76 where the methods and meanings of research are as closely interrogated as the material facts. This would negate the goal-oriented approach in pedagogy and instead focus on learning through surprise.77 As universities explore alternate methodologies and pedagogies as routes to the generation of knowledge, they are focusing less on the diplomatic use of reason and more on the critical and experimental uses of reason. By rethinking how learning itself works, academics such as Schildermans believe modern universities can fulfil the initial tasks of the modern research university: “teaching, research, and service to society—an educational, scientific, and societal task”.78

Absurdity and Entanglement: What Now? Throughout his dozens of fantasy Discworld novels, British novelist Terry Pratchett featured the wizards and miscellaneous staff of his fictional Unseen University: a guild and school where expert wizards educate young wizards. The university, through its architecture, strict rituals, and the very nature of magic, is absurd. It lacks a grounding even in the internal logic of its fantasy genre, and the characters within seem blind to the implications. This is because Pratchett uses the Unseen University to satirize his understanding of the modern English university. Unseen University has absurd architecture and pointless rituals, and its staff lack the desire to teach or research anything new. As a result, Pratchett paints a picture of the modern university that criticizes it right down to its core.

 Schildermans, Experiments in Decolonizing the University, p.58.  Rancière, “Un-What?” p.17. 78  Schildermans, Experiments in Decolonizing the University, p.135. 76 77

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Magic is slippery and impossible to fully control, and acts on the wielder as much as they act on it. As a result, this formed a negative critique of the positionality of knowledge as the corollary to magic within the academy, where knowledge conversely seems stable, objective, and possessable. However, wizards wield magic in the Discworld like an expert tool when convenient, and the unwillingness of the wizards in charge to try to attempt changes leaves the audience accepting this tension willingly. The wizards of Unseen University similarly are beholden to rituals that have no grounding in objective reality, and to which they themselves recognize the absurdity. But rather than grappling with this tension and trying to resolve it, the wizards simply shrug and commit regardless. Pratchett critiques and satirizes, but never prescribes. In this regard, the picture Pratchett paints of the university is incomplete. Throughout the last several decades, and briefly including during the time period in which Pratchett was still writing novels, decolonial academics have been examining critically the structure and pedagogy of the modern university. They have been deconstructing and recognizing that to completely critique they must prescribe as well, and have been thinking through an evolution of the modern university that decentres cultural hegemony in favour of an open approach to new knowledge. In the last decade, scholars of critical pedagogics have done even deeper work in imagining an ecology of study that denies the binaries and hierarchies of Western institutions and instead favours an entanglement of systems of knowledge. They reject goal-oriented pedagogy in favour of the experimental and are attempting to change the positionality of institutions to grant equal privilege to alternate ways of knowledge production. Crucially, the “they” I speak of is broad, diffuse, and struggling within the multidisciplinary hierarchies of the same modern institution they seek to change. This process is one of becoming, and requires continuous rethinking, unlearning, deconstruction, and reconstruction, the end results of which are as murky and slippery as the magic in Terry Pratchett’s books.

CHAPTER 3

A Well-Rounded Dick? Academia in  3rd Rock from the Sun Melissa Beattie

Judith: There’s no way to observe a society without intruding on it. One can’t help but leave footprints. […] You’re saying that you could drop out of the sky into some strange culture and walk amongst them unnoticed. Dick: Yes! [Pause] Hypothetically. —“Much Ado About Dick”, 3rd Rock from the Sun, 2.5

In order to learn about humanity, alien High Commander Dick Solomon (and the production team of 3rd Rock from the Sun [NBC 1996–2001]) seems to have thought that a university was the perfect place to do so. In the guise of a physics professor at the fictional Pendelton State University in central Ohio, he runs afoul of office politics and is a terrible teacher, confusing and berating his hapless students with information learnt from

M. Beattie (*) American University of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Harmes, R. Scully (eds.), Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32350-8_3

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being part of a space-faring species. Dick ultimately learns about humans, however, through his relationship with anthropologist (later briefly Dean) Dr Mary Albright and through experiencing and critiquing sociocultural norms, especially relating to gender in academia as well as outside of it.1 This chapter’s purpose is two-fold: it examines the series’ representation and critique of gender in academia through Dick and Mary’s diegetic experiences as well as contextualises it in STEM-professor Dick’s own education in humanity/-ties and the social sciences through his experiences. It thus illustrates both the importance of critique within academia with regard to gender (amongst other identities) and the importance of humanities and the social sciences in bringing about such changes.2 The chapter argues that, though imperfect, the series showcases the problems that still plague academia today as well as offering at least a general path to improvement. Developed by veteran writing team Bonnie and Terry Turner, 3rd Rock aired on NBC for 6 series, totalling 139 episodes. It follows the experiences of a team of four aliens: Dick, the High Commander (John Lithgow); Sally, the Security Officer (Kristen Johnston); Tommy, the Information Officer (Joseph Gordon-Levitt); and Harry, the transmitter (French Stewart). The team is on Earth for peaceful exploratory purposes and, as such, is interested in learning about humanity rather than engaging in any nefarious acts. There is no threat from the Solomons to detract from the comedy in the series which primarily results from the aliens’ misunderstanding some aspect of humanity and/or American/Western society and their attempts to respond to and/or learn from their mistakes. The diegetic positioning of the Solomons as benevolent innocents also allows them to engage in what would otherwise be objectionable behaviour (e.g., non-consensual touching, assault) without impacting the 1  On gender and academia, see, for instance: H.  Savigny, “Women, Know Your Limits: Cultural Sexism in Academia”, Gender and Education, 26: 7, 2014, pp.794–809; and K.  Cole and H.  Hassel (eds), Surviving Sexism in Academia: Strategies for Feminist Leadership. London: Routledge, 2017. 2  See, for example: L.  R. Pratt, “Liberal Education and the Idea of the Postmodern University”. Academe, 80: 6, 1994, pp.46–51; T.  L. Tsang, “A Quantitative Analysis Examining Differences Between US Humanities and STEM Students’ Propensity Toward Innovation”, Journal of Further and Higher Education, 43: 2, 2019, pp.149–165 [published online, 9 August 2017]; E.  K. Faulconer, Beverly Wood and John C.  Griffith, “Infusing Humanities in STEM Education: Student Opinions of Disciplinary Connections in an Introductory Chemistry Course”, Journal of Science Education and Technology, 29, https:// doi.org/10.1007/s10956-020-09819-7

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comedy as the characters engage in these activities unknowingly. This situation also allows for sociocultural critique as the aliens can either ask why certain things are norms or point out a given norm’s absurdity. Over the course of the series, Dick meets and falls in love with anthropologist Dr Mary Albright (Jane Curtain) with whom he shares an office. There is a multiplicity of episodes which engage with academia and its norms within the series; for the purposes of this chapter, however, I shall focus on a few representative examples to illustrate my points.

Humanities and “STEM” Writing as long ago as 1881, D. C. Gilman summarises the arguments as to the purpose of the university, many of which still hold true today: There are some who consider that the chief function of a university is the bestowal of academic degrees… without regard to instruction. There are others who argue that “the four faculties” (law, medicine, theology, and philosophy) must be organized for teaching; others assert that the union of all the higher educational agencies of a given region in one associated body will constitute a university. Eclectic courses and freedom of intellectual life and exertion are often spoken of as if here was the true distinction. Sometimes, “endowment for research” is advocated, as if that was the desideratum. It is not uncommon to hear that the success of a university is indicated by the number of students it brings together, or by the capital employed in university work. There are doubtless some who in their silence think that all attempt to discriminate between university and collegiate work is futile; the two names are for one thing. All these expressions are inadequate. The idea of the university, as it seems to me, consists in the Societas Magistrorum et Discipulorum; an association, by authority, of Masters, who are conspicuous in ability, learning, and devotion to study, for the intellectual guidance, in many subjects, of youthful Scholars who have been prepared for the freedom of investigation by prolonged discipline in literature and science.3

Thus, we see a variety of potential purposes for the university which are often set up as false binaries: teaching versus research, networking versus credentialing, the encouragement of thought versus vocational training, 3  D.  C. Gilman, “The Idea of the University”, The North American Review, 133: 299, 1881, pp.353–367.

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and so forth. These binaries are also seen today, especially in the context of the neoliberal higher education industry. L. R. Pratt argues, “Higher education is skewered on the debate between the value of a liberal education and new pressures for a performance-oriented, skills-based education”,4 which is tied to a variety of factors including budgets, changing student enrolment, and the overall market. “The liberal arts have… fallen under a double suspicion as both useless for getting a job and troublesome as centers of ideological oppression”. Despite Z. H. Bulaitis’ best efforts to turn away from studies and critiques of economic value of liberal education towards a study of non-­ economic value, she similarly notes there is a “wide community of scholars who are concerned by the changes to higher education”.5 We see elements of all of these concerns in 3rd Rock’s 1990s-era representation of academia. Yet in “The Physics of Being Dick” (3.21), Dick finds himself questioning the value of his area of study for many of the same reasons as the liberal arts are questioned: their lack of practical value and/or interest from or use for his students. “I shape young minds with the elegant laws of physics and what do I get? Nothing”. When an attempt at “razzle-­ dazzle” fails to encourage anyone’s interest (a lack of student recruitment and/or retention is shown to be a great concern for the university in “Why Dickie Can’t Teach”, 6.6), Dick decides to find something to do with more practical applications and popularity, like law enforcement. When Dick is able to trick a suspect into confessing through the use of the fictional “Couloumb’s Third Law”, he realises: Dick: That’s the wonderful thing about physics. No one understands it. Sally: So you can use your knowledge to bully people into submission! Dick: That’s the plan. As long as America’s educational system remains woefully inadequate, I rule.

Thus, the series connects the need for STEM knowledge with power in this scene, though clearly intended as satire. What is relevant, however, is that the rest of the episode is also setting Dick’s position in STEM against Mary’s position in the social sciences. The overall plot of the episode involves Sally and Harry getting jobs, and she chooses to become Mary’s  Pratt, “Liberal Education”, p.38.  Z. H. Bulaitis, Value and the Humanities: The Neoliberal University and Our Victorian Inheritance, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp.5–6. 4 5

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research assistant. There are two main aspects of academia with which this plotline engages. The first of these is the positioning of Humanities/Social Sciences versus STEM. D. W. Gleason develops five potential strategies for Humanities scholars (which, I would argue, are also applicable to Social Sciences): . Training ground: Humanities serve STEM 1 2. Critical vantage: Humanities critique STEM 3. Willing partnership: Humanities team up equitably with STEM 4. Open door: Humanities welcome STEM in 5. Separate spheres: Humanities ignore STEM.6 While there are advantages and disadvantages to each of these strategies, 3rd Rock primarily espouses the second of these through its character interactions. Gleason’s critical vantage approach uses Humanities methods on STEM content as “a form of intellectual correction”.7 This approach prioritises addressing problems and deficiencies in STEM such as sexism and bringing in “creativity, empathy, context, and narrative”.8 It is this collaboration between the humanities/social sciences and STEM which makes up the bulk of Dick’s learning experiences. Though their mission is best described as an anthropological participant-­observation study, as noted above, Dick is a physics professor; though his area of teaching seems more theoretical than practical or applied physics. His research is not addressed apart from relating to cosmology and/or astrophysics (which is unsurprising for an alien from a space-faring species) and is used only in the context of wanting to belittle one of his colleagues (see: “Dick v. Strudwick”, 4.21). In the context of teaching, Dick spends several years trying and failing to educate the same group of students. While action is a positive in “Why Dickie Can’t Teach” (6.6) by Tommy, on the basis that their team cannot change the societies in which they are based, Dick’s inability to teach appears as part of an overarching failure to understand some aspect of humanity. His students, like his colleagues (including Mary), often serve as his teachers with regard to these aspects. Dick (and/or other members 6  D. W. Gleason, “The Humanities Meet STEM: Five Approaches for Humanists”, Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 19: 2, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022218806730 7  Ibid. 8  Ibid.

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of his team) is then free to question and critique those aspects from an outside, often analytical or “universal” perspective. What this illustrates, however, is that expertise in a STEM field is not enough to understand, or, indeed, function in, society/-ties or humanity as a whole. Pratt notes, “In his essay on arch utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill saw a brilliant man whose deficiency of imagination closed him off from internal experience and sympathy with humankind. His description was of a person lacking those qualities a liberal education cultivates”.9 This broadly describes Dick and the other aliens at the beginning of their mission, with their development of empathy and understanding as part of their (informal) humanities education being part of the characters’ overall arcs. Another of the hallmarks of the Solomons is that they initially have very limited critical thinking skills with regard to humanity. This is due to their lack of cultural competency more than a lack of inherent critical skills; their ability to critique societal norms is both a key source of humour and sociocultural criticism over the six series. As the characters’ overall cultural competency increases, they are better able to engage in critical analysis. E.  K. Faulconer, Beverly Wood, and John C.  Griffith note that though critical analysis, creativity, self-reflection, flexibility, and adaptability are common to STEM and humanities, both “humanities disciplines… can offer additional perspectives for students”.10 This cultural competency is then derived in large part through the Solomons’ interactions with humans and their additional perspectives, especially Mary and Dick’s students. This focus upon critical thinking and its necessity points to the second way in which “The Physics of Being Dick” (3.21), along with many other episodes, engages with issues in academia: hierarchy. When Mary is (briefly) Dean of Arts and Sciences (“Paranoid Dick”, 4.14), she and Dick have this exchange: Dick: You’re the dean. And you’ve done an exemplary job. Mary: You think so? Dick: Yes, you’ve done nothing offensive. You haven’t caused a single ripple on the pond. No controversial proposals, no expensive cutting-edge teachers, no “innovative ideas” to shake up the status quo. You’ve been almost invisible.

 Pratt, “Liberal Education”, p.51.  Faulconer, Wood, and Griffith, “Infusing Humanities in STEM Education”; cf. Gleason “The Humanities Meet STEM”. 9

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This, coupled with multiple episodes in which Mary, Dick, and/or other faculty members are shown to be at odds with those above them in the academic hierarchy, show many of the predispositions to what Irving L. Janis and Paul Hart famously refer to as “groupthink”.11 Though both Janis and Hart examine groupthink in the context of government, D. B. Klein and C. Stern apply this concept to academia.12 Though they are writing for a conservative-libertarian think tank, they do accurately note: Both types of groups hold defective beliefs, and both tend toward concurrence seeking, self-validation, and exclusion of challenges to core beliefs. Finally, mechanisms in academe work to create an “in-group” that is insular, self-perpetuating, and self-reinforcing.

Two of the main predispositions for academic groupthink, self-­ censorship and the suppression of dissent, are clearly in evidence in the series.13 A useful example is, again, “The Physics of Being Dick” (3.21), in which Sally—in order to succeed as Mary’s research assistant—discovers that “No independent thought [is] required. In fact, it just gets in your way”. This self-censorship or unwillingness to criticise those above them in the hierarchy occurs often amongst the faculty as well. In “Dick Strikes Out” (5.16), Pendelton gets a new chancellor. Along the same lines as the neoliberal market concerns discussed above, Chancellor Duncan eliminates tenure and the majority of the research budget across anthropology, women’s studies, and theoretical physics. Mary, Women’s Studies professor Dr Judith Draper (Ilene Getz), and Dick’s rival physics professor Dr Vincent Strudwick (Ron West) complain about this to Dick when they are all gathered in Dick and Mary’s office. Dick agrees with their dismay but becomes confused when Duncan enters the office, and everyone is flattering him to his face but angry and insulting after the chancellor leaves. This disjunction in reactions culminates in Dick initially leading a strike, then refusing to go on strike to avoid losing his job, and then ultimately getting the rest of the faculty reinstated (albeit with none of their demands met). 11  Irving L. Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. 2d ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982; and Paul Hart, Groupthink in Government: A Study of Small Groups and Policy Failure. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 12  D. B. Klein and C. Stern, “Groupthink in Academia Majoritarian Departmental Politics and the Professional Pyramid”, The Independent Review, 13: 4, 2009, p.588. 13  Ibid., pp.596–7.

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This illustrates self-censorship and the suppression of dissent, but it also ends with nothing having changed. To some degree, this lack of change is a function of the series’ format. As an episodic sitcom rather than a serial format, there are very limited changes which can occur. While the characters can and do grow over the course of the six series, their overall situation is reset to zero by the end of each episode. But this also can serve to illustrate how academia, along with other institutions, can find itself unable to change. Innovation of any kind is either censored by the person who has the idea or suppressed by those above them. Staying in post becomes more important than teaching or research. Pendelton is a “third-rate” university but issues such as stagnation are evident in the higher education sector as a whole. That Dick and the rest of his family learn to “go along to get along”, as it were, rather than continue to dissent or critique, illustrates both their overall integration into humanity but also limits their capacity to interfere (which they are anyway forbidden to do as part of the rules of their mission). The footprints Judith references above are left on the Solomons rather than on humans and, in so doing, illustrate to the audience exactly what has gone wrong.

Gender in Academia Mary: You don’t understand. I’ve worked hard to be taken seriously. There was a time when I had a reputation. Dick: For excellence? Mary: [pause] Well, yes, but in a very specific category. When I was a young professor on the fast track there were things that I did. The dean. There was this very prestigious job opening. I didn’t get the job but I did get a nickname. Dr Mary Slutbunny. When a man has an office romance it doesn’t affect his career, but when a woman has one no one takes her seriously! (“Much Ado About Dick”, 2.5)

3rd Rock’s concept as a sitcom about alien visitors allowed it to critique a variety of sociocultural constructs, including sexual orientation, race, and gender, with a markedly inclusive and progressive perspective. While these critiques often involve multiple regular and guest characters, with regard to academia they most commonly involve Dick and his on-again/ off-again paramour Mary Albright. She is an anthropologist who appears

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to specialise in indigenous cultures, especially in North and Latin America, and whose doctoral thesis is related in some way to gender and sexual relationships (“Brain and Eggs”, 1.1). While both her research and teaching are more hinted at than featured in the series, the series often addressed Mary’s position in the academic society of Pendelton State University. When introducing their book on systemic discrimination in academia, Brett C. Stockdill and Mary Yu Danico state: The academy is often imagined as an idyllic place, neutral and untarnished by the ugly inequalities that mar the “outside world”. Yet the “ivory tower” is a part of the world and, like other institutions, is a site of oppression, resistance, and transformation.14

This confluence of sociocultural factors, no doubt, is one of the reasons the production team chose an academic institution as an occupational setting for Dick. As discussed above, however, both the diegetic and non-­ diegetic academies can be resistant to change. This insularity also impacts its ability to address gendered and other forms of discrimination.15 In the context of the series, most episodes relating to the critique of gender norms feature Sally as the main character. This includes episodes involving sexual harassment, dating, and other areas of life which disadvantage women in some way. That said, gender and academia do appear in various episodes. As noted above and in the later episode “Dick Puts the Id in Cupid” (5.11), it states that Mary was in a relationship with one of her professors when she was a student; Mary has had a dysfunctional relationship with her peers and mentors. While this can be quite common, as Kristine Larsen argues in her chapter of this volume, the impact on Mary has been damaging to her academic reputation. While the quote above illustrates that she is aware of the sexism inherent in these imbalanced relationships, she seems also to have believed that engaging in such affairs was the only way her career could advance.

14  Brett C. Stockdill and Mary Yu Danico, “The Ivory Tower Paradox: Higher Education as a Site of Oppression and Resistance”, in Brett C. Stockdill and Mary Yu Danico (eds). Transforming the Ivory Tower: Challenging Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in the Academy, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press: 2012, p.1. 15  See also: Kristine Larsen, “A Different Sort of Monster: Science Fiction Casts a Spotlight on the Problematic Power Dynamics of Graduate Programs”, CITE THE CHAPTER PP. WHEN WE HAVE PROOFS

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This is not the only instance of 3rd Rock engaging with sexism and academia. In “Sensitive Dick” (2.21), Dick is the subject of two rounds of complaints from his students, which leads to him having to appear before the university’s disciplinary committee. Though none of the complaints has anything to do with gender, the first question Professor Sutter (Harry Morgan) asks Dick is, “Where’d you grab her and how many times?” Though Judith, the chair of the committee, tells him, “It’s not that kind of hearing”, Sutter’s assumption implies that sexual harassment is the most common complaint brought to the committee. While it is certainly positive that the committee does hold hearings on harassment (as opposed to ignoring complaints), its penalties for academic staff who are found guilty involve first an official “admonishment”, then official “censure”, and then an official “sanctioning”, which features a 30-day suspension with pay. That Dick repeatedly asks after each of the listed penalties about a pay cut illustrates the dearth of any tangible consequences for harassment or any other student complaint. Thus, there is no real inducement for change in this way. The other means by which the series addresses gender and academia is through Mary’s storylines. Especially in the early episodes, Mary is characterised as being a heavy drinker and being promiscuous. While Mary views this characterisation negatively, as an outsider Dick does not consider these to be relevant to his view of her. From the outset of the series, Dick has fallen in love with Mary for her mind and personality, not just her appearance. As such, he often fails to understand why others view her negatively or why certain events of her past would be relevant to her career. In this, Mary can be contrasted with the Solomons’ landlady, Mrs Dubcek (Elmarie Wendel). She has, as Harry succinctly states in “Dick Soup for the Soul” (6.16), a reputation as a “gin-soaked good-time girl”, which broadly matches Mary’s reputation as a promiscuous heavy drinker. Both women are also of similar ages. Mrs Dubcek, however, is neither “punished” by the series (or any characters) nor is she derided. Though her alcohol consumption and history with men are both used for comedy (as is Mary’s), she is neither shamed nor ashamed of herself. We can see this as illustrating the restrictions on academic women (or professional women more generally) which women outside that sociocultural milieu are free to ignore. As a tenured professor, however, Mary is still within the web of discourses surrounding gender and academia. A representative example of this is in “Indecent Dick” (4.8), in which a photographer from a

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pornographic magazine comes to the university in order to take (consensual) nude pictures of female students to use in its pages. While much of the debate in the episode surrounds objectification versus a woman’s right to engage with her sexuality as she sees fit, the relevant plot point is that Mary had posed for nude pictures in her youth. Dick, though initially upset by this, upon seeing the images finds them beautiful rather than prurient and, as such, considers them art. As is typical of the lack of understanding shown by Dick with regard to gender and sex, he then shows them to his class, pointing out the use of light and shadow and other aesthetic elements. The male students are appreciative while Caryn (Danielle Nicolet) points out the inappropriateness of Dick’s actions, to which he tells her to “shut up”. Upon finding out about Dick’s actions, Mary is horrified, to Dick’s utter confusion. As this is the scene with the closing credits, the episode ends with her screaming and fleeing the room and there is no follow-up in any future episodes. This episode illustrates a number of relevant points. Though the alien Dick is more unaware of how his actions can impact Mary than a human would be, Maldonado and Drager note that men do not always recognise when they have engaged in sexist behaviour and, as such, do not recognise that their actions are offensive or harmful.16 Women, on the other hand, take such incidents as being “obviously true” cases of sexism.17 This is very clearly illustrated by the episode. While Dick’s lack of understanding or intent to cause harm would make it difficult to call his actions “peer” or “contra-power” sexual harassment, the impact of Dick’s actions is the same.18 Writing of the power imbalance inherent in the sexual harassment of professors by students, Glasser notes that “Women are often reduced to their physical appearance and sex appeal so, while the workplace and classroom should extend beyond the corporeal aspects of a person, women professors are still often sexualized within this space”.19 The male students with whom Dick shares the nude images of Mary respond in this way, though his student Caryn points out that what Dick is doing is 16   H.  Maldonado and J.  Draeger, “Surviving Sexism in Academia: Identifying, Understanding, and Responding to Sexism in Academia”, in Cole and Hassel (eds), Surviving Sexism in Academia, p.6. 17  Ibid. 18  See: Larsen, this volume. CITE THE CHAPTER PP. WHEN WE HAVE PROOFS 19  C. L. Glasser, “Catcalled in the Cafeteria: Managing and Teaching through Sexism from Students”, in Cole and Hassel (eds), Surviving Sexism in Academia, p.174.

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i­nappropriate. The key word in Glasser’s statement, which is in evidence in this example, is “reduced”, as Glasser states later in her chapter, “Sexism is about power—it is the act of positioning women as powerless”.20 The consequence of Dick’s actions, albeit unbeknownst to him due to his lack of cultural competency, is to reduce Mary’s authority and respect. The overall theme of this particular episode is the Solomons’ inability to understand what differentiates art (i.e. nudes) from pornography; while that debate is outside the scope of this chapter, Linda Williams notes that power and pleasure are often seen to have an inverse relationship for women, that wanting pleasure means that her power must be reduced.21 This is in contrast to power and pleasure with regard to men. While this overall debate is also outside the scope of this chapter, what is relevant is how acting counter to a gendered stereotype can have consequences for women in any workplace, including academia. Mary’s eventual promotion to the dean of Arts and Sciences (“Power Mad Dick”, 4.2) places Dick and the various supporting characters from humanities and STEM under her control. This leads to a variety of consequences for the characters and, more importantly, illustrates Mary’s tenuous position and/or lack of regard in the Pendelton academic community. Dick: You’ve lasted 6 months in a job that no one thought you could keep and even fewer thought you deserved. (“Paranoid Dick”, 4.14)

This overall plot development permits an examination of women in academic leadership roles, albeit most commonly through the lens of Dick and Mary’s relationship. For Dick, though he initially experiences and engages with newfound power and the flattery of others due to his relationship with Mary, the primary focus of the series is upon her lack of time for him. Thus, the focus is on Dick, not Mary. While this is unsurprising, as Dick is the lead character of the series, it does also relate to the points both Mary and Nina (Simbi Khali) make in “Indecent Dick” (4.8) with regard to how men make every situation with regard to women’s exercise of autonomy about themselves. H. Maldonado and J. Drager note the negative terms used for women in leadership roles who assert their authority (e.g., “bitchy,” “pushy,” and  Ibid., p.175.  L. Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, Los Angeles: UC Press, 1989. 20 21

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“bossy”), which are also noted by S.  S. Hinck Salma Ghanem, Ashley Hinck, and Sara Kitsch.22 A. Grigoryan notes, “In view of the social and political penalty that women pay for counter stereotypical behavior… success and likability are inversely correlated for women… Unfortunately, promotion decisions depend as much on a person’s likeability as competence”.23 By contrast, though Mary is still socioculturally penalised for her reputation for promiscuity and heavy drinking, being in a leadership role is not shown to exacerbate those penalties. While Dick praises Mary for not changing anything—avoiding what Ghanem, Hinck, and Kitsch call a “feminine approach”—she is not maligned. If anything, it is she who maligns Judith. Owing to a misunderstanding, people believe Judith is attempting to usurp Mary’s position.24 “That bitch wants my job!” Mary cries, Dick having told her that Judith was one of many people who did not believe she deserved to be Dean. This represents another common feature of academia. When writing about women in academia bullying other women, F. Sepler argues, “Girls learn to build intimacy with other girls by carefully gathering relational ‘points’. They do so by cultivating some while whispering, telling secrets and making fun of others”.25 This situation, fanned inadvertently by Dick, leads to them both breaking into Judith’s office to find evidence of their belief that Judith was operating against Mary. As it happens, Judith was not attempting to usurp or subvert Mary’s position, but the chancellor having caught her engaging in this crime demotes Mary back to her old job as a professor. However, just because the series did attempt a critique of gender in general and in academia more specifically, it is not the case that the series was free from stereotypes. Dick and his recurring rival Strudwick are both physics professors whilst Mary and her recurring colleague Judith are both 22  Maldonado and Drager, “Surviving Sexism in Academia”, p.6; Shelly Schaefer Hinck, Salma Ghanem, Ashley Hinck, and Sara Kitsch, “Exploring the Decision to Pursue a Career in Higher Education Administration: An Analysis of Gendered Constraints and Opportunities”, in Cole and Hassel (eds), Surviving Sexism in Academia, p.31. 23  A. Grigoryan, “‘You Are Too Blunt, Too Ambitious, Too Confident’: Cultural Messages that Undermine Women’s Paths to Advancement and Leadership in Academia and Beyond”, in Cole and Hassel (eds), Surviving Sexism in Academia, p.246. 24  Hinck, Ghanem, Hinck, and Kitsch, “Exploring the Decision to Pursue a Career in Higher Education Administration”, p.31 and K.  Cole, H.  Hassel and E.  E.Schell, “Remodeling Shared Governance: Feminist Decision Making and Resistance to Academic Neoliberalism”, in Cole and Hassel (eds), Surviving Sexism in Academia, pp.31 & 13–28. 25  F.  Sepler, “The Bullying We Don’t Talk About: Women Bullying Women in the Academy”, in Cole and Hassel (eds), Surviving Sexism in Academia, p.297.

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in the social sciences or humanities (anthropology and Women’s Studies respectively). While women are under-represented in STEM fields, the series did conform to that preconception that women were associated with humanities/social sciences and men with STEM. Though she is a well-­ developed regular character, the diegesis positions Mary as Dick’s love interest, with whom he engages in an on-again/off-again relationship. Thus, the perceptions and critiques of academia are from Dick’s perspective, not Mary’s, though she often applies a corrective measure to his misunderstandings aligning with Gleanson’s “critical vantage” approach as discussed above. Dick and Mary’s assistant Nina and Dick’s student Caryn, both Black women, are in subordinate positions (assistant and student) with Caryn’s intersectional feminism often overruled by Dick and/or her male classmates. The series does position Caryn as being correct in her perspectives relating to Dick and/or his male students being sexist or otherwise prejudiced and the series also positions Nina as being invaluable. However, the woman can be read as dismissing (or at least not engaging with) intersectional identities within academia. In addition, while the series did engage in sociocultural critique with regard to gender norms in general and did partly apply that to its representation of the academy, it did not engage particularly well with those norms specifically relating to gender and leadership. Instead, they remained focused upon Mary’s past promiscuity and heavy drinking as well as how her research and brief leadership impact her relationship with Dick. Had any of the production team had extensive experience in academia and its specific problems, then the portrayal might have been more thorough. That said, all representation is imperfect and incomplete, and the series is a commentary on “human” (here American/Western) society as a whole rather than a commentary on academia specifically. The coherence of tone and of more general social progressiveness is necessary across all plotlines and characters, not just the workplace which Dick and Mary share.

Conclusion 3rd Rock from the Sun illustrates the importance of humanities and social sciences in order to understand and function within human society/-ties. I have focused in particular upon how humanities and social sciences critique and correct STEM assumptions as well as how Dick and the rest of the Solomons use these to increase their critical thinking, cultural competency, and empathy with regard to humanity and American/Western

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society. I have also examined how the series shows both the problems within academia relating to gender as well as the importance of critiquing academia from within. The omnipresence of self-censorship, overt flattery, and the suppression of dissent within the series is one of the many reasons Pendelton State never changes or improves. Mary’s negative reputation, though based more around general gender stereotypes than those associated with academic leadership roles, along with her own self-doubt, plays a strong part in why she cannot successfully advance her career beyond a brief six months as Dean. Though the series’ representations of academia are imperfect and very much of their time, they show the value of fiction and humour as a force for subversion and sociocultural critique. Thus, humanity and the humanities/social sciences left many more footprints on the Solomons during their anthropological mission than they left on Earth, especially in turning the alien High Commander and STEM professor into a far more well-rounded Dick.

CHAPTER 4

“I Am a Doctor of Many Things”: Tracking the Doctor’s Relationship to the Academy Across Doctor Who Catriona Mills

WINSER: Are you trying to tell me that you actually achieved time travel and published nothing? THE DOCTOR: In Britain, no. WINSER: Where, then? THE DOCTOR: Elsewhere. Yes, yes, elsewhere. “The Claws of Axos” (1971)

From their title (the conferring of which remains something of a mystery) to their relationship with their companions, the titular Doctor of Doctor Who stands as a representative of traditional Western models of knowledge creation, including universities. Always didactic and frequently

C. Mills (*) University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Harmes, R. Scully (eds.), Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32350-8_4

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patronising, they treat travel through space and time as a pedagogical exercise.1 But their relationship to the academy is a changing and sometimes conflicted one. This chapter explores this relationship across the televised adventures of the original or “classic” series (1963–1989) and into the new series (2005–present). In its early years, Doctor Who’s stated ambition included explicitly educational material, although it has been argued that “the educational goal that was part of the earliest development of Doctor Who arguably came to very little”.2 Similarly, critics including Anne Harris and Elizabeth Evans have produced work on how Doctor Who can enhance teaching, particularly the teaching of science, where the focus is less on the text itself own and more on the text as a teaching tool.3 This chapter is not concerned with such meta-narrative relationships. Nor am I examining primary or secondary education, although Doctor Who has a strong history of secondary schools as a setting and teachers as focal characters, as Marcus Harmes has argued.4 Because Doctor Who is science fiction, scientist-characters, including those working within the academy, have also drawn scholarly attention, particularly by Lindy Orthia.5 I am not repeating this specific focus on scientists, nor am I focusing on medical doctors, although the Doctor’s ambivalent claims to a medical degree occasionally come into play. Rather, this chapter focuses on universities as sites of teaching and learning, and particularly on the dual presence of the academy and the Academy in Doctor Who, where “academy” refers to the (abstract) 1  Given the multiple regenerations and changing gender, this chapter uses they/them pronouns to refer to the Doctor in general. For specific regenerations, the pronouns follow that regeneration’s stated gender. 2  Marcus Harmes, “Education in the Fourth Dimension: Time Travel and Teachers in the TARDIS”, in Mark Readman (ed.), Teaching and Learning on Screen, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p.136. 3  Anne Harris, “Shape-shifting and Stories: Professionalism and Education with Doctor Who”, in Christine Jarvis and Patricia Gouthro (eds), Professional Education with Fiction Media, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp.205–228; Elizabeth Evans, “Learning with the Doctor: Pedagogic Strategies in Transmedia Doctor Who”, in Matt Hills (ed.), New Dimensions of Doctor Who, London, I.B. Tauris, 2013, pp.134–153. 4  Harmes, “Education”, p.136. 5  Lindy A.  Orthia, “How Does Science Fiction Television Shape Fans’ Relationships to Science? Results from a Survey of 575 Doctor Who Viewers”, Journal of Science Communication, 18: 4, 2019; Lindy A. Orthia and Rachel Morgain, “The Gendered Culture of Scientific Competence: A Study of Scientist Characters in Doctor Who 1963–2013”, Sex Roles, 75: 3–4, August 2016, pp.79–84.

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academy as metonym for academic scholarly endeavour and “Academy” to the Doctor’s alma mater, the Time Lord Academy on the planet of Gallifrey. To indicate when both terms are in play simultaneously, I employ the compound “a/Academy”. In particular, I am concerned with the relationship of the Doctor and their regular companions with academic learning and the academy as an institution. The chapter argues that this relationship is marked by periods of absence, ambivalence, or acceptance and that while various eras lean more strongly into one or another of these emotional undercurrents, all three are in play across the programme’s run, often concurrently. I begin with the tense relationship between the Doctor’s early regenerations and their home planet’s academic torpor, a relationship marked by absence which reaches its apex with the Third Doctor (1970–1974). From this basis, I argue that most subsequent Doctors adopted a more ambivalent approach to the a/Academy, beginning with the reluctance of the Fourth Doctor (1974–1981) to serve the needs of the Time Lords. Nevertheless, these traditional models remain a valued benchmark for the character, unlike their long-time adversary, the Master, who is more likely to work from within business, politics, or the civil service. In the new series (post-2005), particularly given the destruction of Gallifrey, the Doctor is more willing to step into these roles at will, particularly the Twelfth Doctor (2014–2017), who brought the process full circle. In adopting this focus on the a/Academy, I am leaning into gaps in the text: the Doctor, as a doctor, is defined against something that is, in practice, not particularly present in either the text or scholarship. This is the context of the term “absence”: absence not as in an object that does not exist, but an unspoken, unmapped object whose absence from the text is a form of presence. This chapter is reading both text and textual absences, by unravelling three concomitant strands within the programme: the nature of the a/Academy in Doctor Who; the Doctor’s and their companions’ relationship with the a/Academy; and renegade Time Lords and the a/Academy. This analysis is set against two external factors: the changing status and demographic shifts of higher education in the post-war UK and the commensurate demographic changes among Doctor Who’s writing and production staff. Although I am focusing on moments that particularly illuminate the programme’s relationship with academia, I balance this with an understanding that, while its importance and nature fluctuate, the a/Academy is a constant against which the Doctor behaves.

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“Doctor of Many Things” You may be a doctor, but I’m the Doctor. The definite article, you might say. “Robot” (1974)

Doctor Who first aired on the BBC on 23 November 1963, and reaches its sixtieth anniversary in November 2023. At 871 episodes (as of 23 October 2022), it is the longest-running science fiction television programme (notwithstanding a long hiatus between the original series’ cancellation in 1989 and the 2005 revival). The programme focuses on the travels in time and space of the titular Doctor, an alien Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, who travels with a succession of (often but not inevitably human) “companions” in a space-and-time-travel machine called the TARDIS, disguised as a Metropolitan Police telephone box. Although Doctor Who has always had a strong fan following, even during the hiatus, the 2005 revival of the programme catapulted it to a new level of fame and fandom. The programme’s success and longevity rests in part on a decision made in 1966: to replace the actor playing the Doctor, William Hartnell, but to retain the character of the Doctor. The First Doctor “regenerated” into a new body (played by Patrick Troughton) and has continued regularly to do so. Such regenerations usually (as here) have a prefix number: First Doctor, Second Doctor, and so on. The Doctor’s relationship with the a/ Academy, therefore, covers sixty years and almost 900 episodes, overseen by fifteen script editors, nine producers and, in the new series, three showrunners. The relationship also shifts with the varying personalities and tribulations of individual Doctors, including the so-called War Doctor who retroactively appeared between regenerations eight and nine but who, significantly for this chapter, is said to have rejected the title “Doctor” and is in turn rejected by subsequent regenerations (“The Name of the Doctor”, 2013). The one constant across regenerations (not even, in practice, excepting the “War Doctor”) is the academic title “Doctor”: the Doctor has been male and female, old and young, and while predominantly played by white actors (almost all white men), will be played by Rwandan-Scottish actor Ncuti Gatwa in a new regeneration. But they are always the Doctor. However, that raises a further question: Doctor who? And, we might add, Doctor what? The programme is as much recursive as discursive on the title “Doctor”. Harmes suggests that “traditional qualifications such as the Gallifreyan Academy or a medical degree are not the foundation of his educational

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status”, but the programme plays with this idea.6 The Doctor disclaims a medical degree in his first story, “An Unearthly Child” (1963), which implies that his title (if not self-bestowed) is a doctorate. In “The Moonbase” (1967), however, the Second Doctor claims that he did take a medical degree “once in Glasgow. 1888, I think. Lister”.7 Later in 1967, the same regeneration sidesteps a question about his title, while again disclaiming a medical degree in “The Enemy of the World”: ASTRID: Oh, you’re a doctor? THE DOCTOR: Well, not of any medical significance. ASTRID: Doctor of law? Philosophy? THE DOCTOR: Which law? Whose philosophies, eh?

The Fourth Doctor separates his expertise from that of companion (and Surgeon-Lieutenant in the Royal Navy) Harry Sullivan in “The Ark in Space” (1975), saying “My doctorate is purely honorary, and Harry here is only qualified to work on sailors”. In “Revenge of the Cybermen” (1975), conversely, he tells the space station crew who fear a plague, “My colleague is a doctor of medicine and I’m a doctor of many things”—a quotation that has become emblematic of the original series’ approach to the Doctor’s academic standing. In the new series, the recursions and diversions become even more significant. In “The God Complex” (2011), the Eleventh Doctor responds to the question, “You are a medical doctor, aren’t you? You haven’t just got a degree in cheese-making or something?” with “No! Well, yes, both, actually” (a mocking approach to academia that, as I will explore later, runs through the new series). In “Death in Heaven” (2014), companion Clara Oswald, impersonating the Doctor and intertextually revisiting “The Moonbase”, tells a group of Cybermen, “Well, my name isn’t Doctor, is it? I don’t even really have a doctorate. Well, Glasgow University, but then I accidentally graduated in the wrong century, so technically”. And in “The Tsuranga Conundrum” (2018), set on an alien ambulance, the Thirteenth Doctor responds to another question about whether she is a Doctor of Medicine with “Well, medicine, science, engineering, candyfloss, Lego, philosophy, music, problems, people, hope. Mostly hope”.  Harmes, “Education”, p.139.  Joseph Lister, incidentally, was in Glasgow from 1860 to 1869, but in London by 1888. See: Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine, New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017, p.194. 6 7

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This litany of specialisations reaches a level first of absurdity and then abstraction that undercuts the academic connotations of the title “Doctor” altogether. Although Orthia and de Kauwe evoke the Second Doctor, arguing, “Troughton’s Doctor buries the nature of his expertise in playful mystery, while Whittaker’s buries hers in outlandishness”, the more specific the Doctor becomes about their academic attainments, the more removed from an academic honorific the title seems.8 This process of recursion, diversion, and discursion also marks the programme’s approach to the a/Academy, particularly the Academy that, presumably, granted the Doctor his title: the Time Lord Academy on Gallifrey, an institution whose significance in the series’ mythos far outweighs actual references, let alone any actual appearance, on screen, and which runs through televisual epochs of absence, ambivalence, and acceptance.

Absence IAN: You’re a doctor, do something! THE DOCTOR: I'm not a Doctor of Medicine. “An Unearthly Child” (1963)

During the tenure of the Doctor’s first two regenerations, in particular, there is consistent absence from the a/Academy and, indeed, absence in general. The Doctor is frequently marked by what he is not: For example, he is an alien, but an exile from his home planet. Furthermore, although key elements of the programme’s mythos emerge early (notably the Daleks and the Cybermen), the Doctor’s personal mythos and that of his planet are late additions: the audience does not learn even the name of his planet until the final season of the Third Doctor. What information we have for the First and Second Doctors is as much a measure of absence as of presence. The title “Doctor” is the most notable example of this: “Doctor” is an honorific, not a name, and the audience is aware of the absence in its use alone, an absence of identity (Doctor Who?). That his other name in the First Doctor’s era (“Grandfather”) is also a title reinforces this. Furthermore, the Doctor’s clarifications often create further absences. When companion Ian Chesterton assumes that “Doctor” refers to a 8  Lindy A.  Orthia and Vanessa de Kauwe, “Lego, Candyfloss and Hope: What Kind of Scientist is Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor?”, in Marcus K.  Harmes and Lindy A.  Orthia (eds), Doctor Who and Science, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2021, p.112.

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medical degree, the Doctor responds, “I’m not a doctor of medicine”: he responds not with what he is, but with what he is not—the presence of another absence. Further, he and granddaughter Susan disagree about formal education, with the Doctor referring to her “ridiculous school” (“An Unearthly Child”, 1963). This absence from the academy (and framing of the a/Academy as a series of absences) is not a commensurate absence from research. The Doctor remains a keen research scientist, but the overall impression is one of private, amateur curiosity, not academic endeavour: like his costume, it is a gently eccentric but gentlemanly Edwardian affectation. The Second Doctor’s prevarications increase this sense of a relationship with the a/Academy marked more by absence, claiming first to have a medical degree (“The Moonbase”) and then not (“The Enemy of the World”, 1968); and refusing, in the latter story, to clarify his qualifications: his interlocutor runs through the options of science, philosophy, law, medicine, and divinity, before the Doctor states, “You’ll run out of doctors in a minute”. The Doctor’s sidestepping of the questions (never saying either yes or no, a series of absences in a conversation framed of yes/ no questions) creates an overall ambivalence around his qualifications, title, and relationship to the a/Academy. This ambivalence is in keeping with the broader educational context in which these episodes aired. The “Butler” Act, passed in 1944 but not enacted until after World War II, brought in broad changes to education in the UK, particularly in terms of its access by girls and the children of the working class. But these changes were still in their infancy when Doctor Who premiered in 1963.9 Tellingly, they had not had a marked effect on the Doctor Who production and writing staff in this period. Of Doctor Who’s seven script editors and three producers between 1963 and 1968, only Verity Lambert had gone on to higher education (a language course at the University of Paris). Several had attended independent boarding schools, but post-secondary education was focused on vocational schools such as the Central School of Speech and Drama (Innes Lloyd) or the London Academy of Music and the Dramatic Arts (LAMDA) (Donald Tosh, Derrick Sherwin). By far the most common pathway into the role in

9  See, for example: Duncan McIver and Patricia Rice, “Participation in Further Education in England and Wales: An Analysis of Post-war Trends”, Oxford Economic Papers, 53: 1, 2001, p.48.

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this period was through the theatre, primarily repertory companies (see Table 4.1). This would change in the late 1960s. The tenure of the Third Doctor marks a significant shift in the programme’s focus. In the Second Doctor’s final story, “The War Games” (1969), the Time Lords make their first appearance (outside the Doctor and Susan). Forced to call on their assistance, the Doctor in turn forces them to step outside their academic torpor. In return, the Time Lords condemn him to Earthly exile, disable the TARDIS, and force regeneration. Although he eventually repairs the TARDIS, the Doctor is significantly Earthbound for the first time since the pilot episode. As such, he intersects strongly and for the first time with human academia: sixteen of the Third Doctor’s twenty-five stories (64%) involve human academic researchers, usually explicitly addressed as “Doctor” or “Professor”.10 At the same time, his own a/Academic background solidifies. However, the absence that marked the first two Doctors still remains in part: the Doctor is still, as an exile and as an alien scientist, frequently disgruntled by or patronising of human academic endeavour, as much marked by absence as presence. This playing with absence and presence, as well as the underlying elements of ambivalence in the a/Academy, is focalised through the Third Doctor’s first companion, Liz Shaw. Liz is a Cambridge research scientist, seconded to UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, a quasi-­ military organisation investigating extra-terrestrial and paranormal threats) as scientific advisor before the arrival of the Third Doctor, and remaining as his “assistant”. Described by UNIT’s commander, Brigadier Lethbridge-­ Stewart as “an expert in meteorites; degrees in medicine, physics and a dozen other subjects”, Liz is reluctant to accept her secondment because, as she tells the Brigadier, “I have an important research program going ahead at Cambridge” (“Spearhead from Space”, 1970). Liz straddles the ambivalences in the Doctor’s own academic standing: she is both a medical doctor and trained in the sciences. Indeed, when she asks the Doctor, “What are you a doctor of, by the way?” he leans into these ambivalences tempered with a patronising attitude, replying, “Practically everything, my dear” (“Spearhead from Space”). But while Liz’s qualifications are 10  Orthia provides comprehensive decade-by-decade lists of the scientist characters, including aliens, in “Enlightenment Was the Choice: Doctor Who and the Democratisation of Science”, esp. pp.99, 109, 119 & 129. The figures in this chapter only include human academics.

Position

Producer

Script-­ editor

Script-­ editor

Producer

Person

Verity Lambert

David Whitaker

Dennis Spooner

John Wiles

Secondary

1965–1966

1964–1965 School (unidentified) in Barnes, south-west London 1965–1966

1963–1965 Roedean

Year/s University of Paris (language course). (Some sources erroneously identify the Sorbonne.)

Higher Secretarial college

Vocational

Professional footballer; Royal Air Force; stand-up comic Stage manager (theatre: South Africa)

Former actor/ playwright, repertory (inc. York Rep)

Other

Table 4.1  Educational backgrounds of select Doctor Who production staff, 1963–2023

(continued)

“What a Turn Up”, Times, 8 Aug. 1975 “The John Wiles Interview”, TARDIS, 5.6 (1981)

Obituary, The Times, 24 Nov. 2007 Richard Marson, Drama and Delight: The Life of Verity Lambert, Miwk, 2015 Doctor Who: The Early Years

Sources 4  “I AM A DOCTOR OF MANY THINGS”: TRACKING THE DOCTOR’S… 

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Script-­ editor

Script-­ editor

Peter Bryant

Victor Pemberton

1967

Highbury Grammar

1967, 1968–1969

Producer

Peter Bryant

1967–1968

1966–1967

Gerry Davis Script-­ editor

1965–1966 Clifton College, Bristol

Secondary

1966–1967; Ellesmere 1967–1968 College, Shropshire

Script-­ editor

Donald Tosh

Year/s

Innes Lloyd Producer

Position

Person

Table 4.1 (continued) Higher LAMBDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts) Central School of Speech and Drama

Vocational

Obituary, Times, 27 Aug. 1991

Obituary, Daily Telegraph, 10 Jan. 2020

Sources

Interview, TARDIS, 3.4-5 (1982) Obituary, Independent, 1 July 2006 Former actor Obituary, Independent, 1 July 2006 Fleet Street (mail Obituary, delivery), publicity (20th Herald Sun, 19 Century Fox), National Aug. 2017 Service (RAF)

Canadian television (CBC, Granada); studied opera in Italy. Former actor

Former actor/ behind-the-scenes, repertory (inc. the Connaught, Worthing); National Service (Army, Egypt and Cyprus) Former actor, repertory; Royal Navy

Other

78  C. MILLS

Script-­ editor

Script-­ editor

Producer

Producer

Script-­ editor

Producer

Derrick Sherwin

Terrance Dicks

Derrick Sherwin

Barry Letts

Robert Holmes

Philip Hinchcliffe

Downing College, Cambridge

1975–1977 Slough Grammar Pembroke College, Cambridge

1970–1975 Wyggeston Grammar 1974–1977

1969–1970

1968–1974 East Ham Grammar

1968

Hendon Police College

LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts)

LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts)

Royal Navy

Former actor, inc. repertory (Buckinghamshire) and television

Former actor, inc. repertory (Buckinghamshire) and television

(continued)

Obituary, Times, 6 Dec. 2018

Obituary, Times, 6 Dec. 2018 4  “I AM A DOCTOR OF MANY THINGS”: TRACKING THE DOCTOR’S… 

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Producer

Script-­ editor

Antony Root

1979–1980 Brentwood School 1980–1981

Script-­ editor Script-­ editor

John Nathan-­ Turner

1977–1980 Unconfirmed

Producer

Graham Williams Douglas Adams Christopher Bidmead

1981–1982 King’s College School, Cambridge

1980–1989 King Edward VI School

1977–1979 Queen Mary’s Grammar

Script-­ editor

Secondary

Anthony Read

Year/s

Position

Person

Table 4.1 (continued)

Christ’s College, Cambridge

Rejected a university place to pursue the theatre

St John’s, Cambridge

Higher

Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA)

Central School of Speech and Drama

Vocational

Nightclub stage manager; assistant stage manager, Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham; senior stage manager/ actor, Everyman Theatre, Chelmsford

Former stage manager (unconfirmed)

Other

Obituary, Times, 7 May 2002

Sources

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Steven Moffat Chris Chibnall

Russell T. Davies

Andrew Cartmel

1982–1986 Unconfirmed, but multiple sources indicate (without citation) that he completed sixth form Script-­ 1987–1989 Queen Mary editor University; University of Kent in Canterbury (postgraduate) Showrunner 2005–2010 Olchfa School Worcester & College, Oxford 2022– present Showrunner 2010–2017 Camphill High University of School Glasgow. Showrunner 2018–2022 St Mary’s College, Twickenham; University of Sheffield (MA)

Eric Saward Script-­ editor

See, for example, IMDB 4  “I AM A DOCTOR OF MANY THINGS”: TRACKING THE DOCTOR’S… 

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conspicuously present in the text, other characters conspicuously and repeatedly overlook them. She is, across her tenure, invariably referred to as “Miss Shaw”, rather than “Dr Shaw”. In this, she is part of a long tradition: Orthia and Morgain, assessing non-regular scientist characters in Doctor Who, note that “Women […] from the 1970s were less likely than men […] to be addressed by a scientific honorific […] or to be addressed by specialist scientific or non-scientific honorific” (“scientific” in this instance refers to titles such as “Doctor” or “Professor”, and so could be more broadly referred to as “academic honorifics”).11 Liz returned to academia off-screen between the Third Doctor’s first and second seasons—another example of academic absence in this period— replaced by espionage-trained Jo Grant, who failed general science at A level, in “Terror of the Autons” (1971). “Terror of the Autons” also introduces the Doctor’s long-time nemesis and fellow Time Lord, the Master. In this story, we learn both what the Doctor studied (or at least one component) and that he and the Master are academic rivals, when a visiting Time Lord arrives with a warning: THE DOCTOR: I refuse to be worried by a renegade like the Master. He’s a … he’s an unimaginative plodder. TIME LORD: His degree in cosmic science was of a higher class than yours. THE DOCTOR: Yes, well, I … I was a late bloomer.

A later story creates even closer intersections with the a/Academy, not least because it is the only classic series story where a renegade Time Lord impersonates an academic.12 “The Time Monster” (1972) sees the Master infiltrate the Newton Institute outside Cambridge, posing as Professor Thascalos (Greek for “master”), where his experiments in matter transference are overseen by Dr Ruth Ingram and research fellow Stuart Hyde. Ruth Ingram, unlike Liz Shaw, is persistently referred to as “Dr”, although the Master does at one point tell her that “There’s no need to worry your pretty little head”. But what is intriguing about this story is that the Master is exposed as a charlatan not on the grounds of his science, but because he cannot mimic academia’s institutional networks. Dr Percival, the i­ nstitute’s new director, notes, “How is it that I can find no trace of your academic  Orthia and Morgain, “The Gendered Culture of Scientific Competence”, pp.85–86.  I am deliberately excluding the Fourth Doctor story Shada, and the character Professor Chronotis. Shada is incomplete and, although released as an audio and an animated version, was never broadcast on television. 11 12

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career before you visited Athens University, Professor? How is it that you publish nothing?” This is the Master’s only attempt to disguise himself as an academic, perhaps because he is so easily exposed. All three of these points—companion Liz Shaw, the clarifying of the Doctor’s degree, and the Master’s academic imposture—occurred during Terrance Dicks’ tenure as script editor. Dicks, born in 1935 and ideally positioned to benefit from the post-war educational changes, was the first script editor to come through the university system (Downing College, Cambridge), rather than from theatre or radio (see Table 4.1). It would be reading too far to suggest that Dicks’ experience prompted this focus on higher education, but it certainly suggests a desire to reflect the demographic changes in which he—and much of Doctor Who’s audience—were participating, resulting in a Doctor whose Earthly manifestation of academia is less Edwardian amateur and more Oxbridge. But to return to “The Time Monster”: that it is Dr Percival, an administrator, and not the two scientists working directly with him, who recognises the Master’s imposture suggests that Doctor Who’s ambivalence about the a/Academy in this period lies as much in its administrative structures and preoccupations, something explored more explicitly from the Fourth Doctor’s tenure.

Ambivalence CHELA: He is a doctor. AMBRIL: Doctor? Of what? I’m sure the man has no academic standing whatsoever. “Snakedance” (1983)

Dicks’ tenure did not signal a comprehensive change to the demographics of the Doctor Who staff: the theatre and other vocational training remained a common pathway into script-editing and producing (see Table 4.1). But it did begin an increased focus on the a/Academy. The Fourth Doctor mentions the Academy by that name in “The Deadly Assassin” (1976), which developed a significant amount of Time Lord lore and ceremony. In the story, Cardinal Borusa recognises in journalist Runcible “one of my old pupils at Prydon Academy”. This limiting of the Academy to members of only one of the chapters which divide Gallifreyan society (Prydonian, to which the Doctor belongs) creates an ambivalent effect: these academies could reflect the house system of a public (private) school such as Eton or Harrow, or the collegiate system of Oxford or Cambridge. That the

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Doctor is later said to be “false to his Prydonian vows” adds a further element, especially combined with the title “cardinal”, implying that these academies are also akin to the chapters of a religious order, or indeed the fellowship of an Oxbridge college, which originally were religious foundations staffed by clerics. But their explicit purpose remains educational: Borusa dismisses Runcible by pointing out that “you had ample opportunity to ask me questions during your misspent years at the Academy”—a statement that could come from either house master or college tutor and which therefore fails to ameliorate the ambivalence of the Academy’s role. The Deadly Assassin and the following stories The Invasion of Time (1978) and The Key to Time series (1978–1979) cemented the Academy’s role and significance in the original series. By The Invasion of Time, the prefix “Pyrdon” has been dropped and Borusa identifies the Doctor as “my pupil at the Academy”. However, this does not reduce the Academy’s ambivalence. Indeed, the viewer learns that the Academy has a broad educational remit: the Doctor indicates that Andred, Commander of the Chancellery Guard, is a former student when he asks, “I don’t know what they teach you at the Academy these days, but if you can’t pull off a simple palace revolution, what can you pull off?” By funnelling people into politics (Borusa) and the army (Andred) as well as academic roles, it still operates as much as a public school as a university. Robot dog companion K9 reinforces this in “The Invasion of Time” when, told that the circuit he wishes to fuse “is part of the Academy. Instruction and investigation control”, he responds, “We will give them a day off school”. This changes with The Key to Time, six interlinked stories about the pursuit of the pieces of the titular key, which served as the programme’s sixteenth season (1978–1979). This season put the Doctor in constant contact with another member of his species, for the first time since Susan’s departure in 1964, and in a much closer relationship than even his interactions with the Master as the Third Doctor. Romanadvoratrelundar, played initially by Mary Tamm, and always addressed as “Romana”, is a young Academy graduate, assigned to the Doctor against his wishes. In Romana’s experience, the Academy crystallises as the academy: Romana notes in “The Ribos Operation” (1978) that she graduated with a triple first, as opposed to the Doctor, who “scrap[ed] through with fifty one percent at the second attempt” (echoing the Third Doctor’s claims of being a “late bloomer”). Her dialogue, particularly in this first story, is identifiable as recognisably modern, if science-fictional, academic jargon: she tells the Doctor that he is “suffering from a massive compensation syndrome” and

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later, taunted beyond endurance, notes, “I will not give way to feelings of psychofugal hostility”. The Doctor, meanwhile, suggests a generation gap between their Academy experiences, responding with “Is that the sort of rubbish they’re pouring into your head at the Academy?” The phrase “pouring into”, in particular, suggests academia as indoctrination rather than education. But, primarily, the combative relationship in these early Key to Time stories is one between academic distance and practical experience: “They don’t teach you anything useful at the Academy”, cautions the Doctor. “Gadgets and gimmickry. Never touch, never trust gimmicky gadgets.” To use Orthia and Morgain’s term, Romana is “field-naïve”.13 Romana, the first female scientist-companion since Liz Shaw, is the ideal vehicle for this changing of the Academy from its metamorphic role in “The Deadly Assassin” to something much more recognisable as Oxbridge. Romana, like Liz, is a career academic. In “The Ribos Operation”, she muses to the Doctor, “Do you know, I might even use your case in my thesis when I’m back on Gallifrey”. Her early focus remains academic: she solves an issue in “The Stones of Blood” (1978), for example, by recalling from “a lecture once at the Academy” that all Type 40 TARDISes have molecular stabilisers. But by the final story of the season, “The Armageddon Factor” (1979), she has come into sympathetic alignment with the Doctor’s emphasis on experience over (or at least in conjunction with) academia, asking him, “Didn’t they teach you anything at the Academy?” when she recognises a planet that he does not. Interaction with another academic, the human Professor Emilia Rumford in The Stones of Blood, enhances this. Professor Rumford’s field of study is the local standing stones, revealed as blood-eating alien lifeforms called Ogri. At the conclusion of the story, the following dialogue takes place: THE DOCTOR: Professor, you could write a monograph about it. EMILIA: Ah, yes, and make Idwal Morgan look a fool. ROMANA: Will you write everything that happened? EMILIA: Certainly not. I do have my academic reputation to consider.

Professor Rumford “builds and uses an alien technological gadget and spends substantial dialogue discussing technicalities of her own work, recounting key scientific debates in her area, and academically disputing

 Orthia and Morgain, “The Gendered Culture of Scientific Competence”, p.90.

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the work of her fellow (male) scientists”.14 But here she recalls the downfall of Professor Thascalos/The Master, because academia is not only research, but reputation, networks, and rivalry. “I do have my academic reputation to consider” are the final words for this story and a fitting summary of Romana’s early stories. Romana’s altered perspective coincides with her regeneration into Romana II (Lalla Ward), and with it, she drops all reference to the Academy, her dissertation, or academic jargon, and distances herself from Gallifrey by remaining in E-Space, outside the normal universe (N-Space) altogether. However, Doctor Who’s ambivalence about the a/Academy— its recognition of Romana’s education but its concurrent prioritising of field experience—continues. After Romana, intellectually engaged characters tend to be either divorced from academia, brought to value experience over (or at least in conjunction with) education, or both. For example, companion Adric, a denizen of E-Space whose most salient costume item is his gold-edged badge for mathematical proficiency, both enters and leaves the TARDIS because he cannot measure the disjunction between his education and his experience. In “Full Circle” (1980), his first story, despite no practical experience outside a crashed starliner, he has claimed to those who live and forage outside to have a better system for stealing fruit, only to be caught in a dangerous mistfall. And in his final story, “Earthshock” (1982), he dies trying to stop a starship from crashing into Earth, believing he, but not the Doctor, can override the systems. His final words in the programme—“Now I’ll never know if I was right”—reinforce his inability to obtain a balance between education and experience: unlike Romana, he remains field-naïve. Conversely, companion Nyssa, who has been educated in the scientifically advanced Empire of Traken, leaves the TARDIS to remain on a former plague ship, saying, “here I have a chance to put into practice the skills I learnt on Traken” (“Terminus”, 1983). Increasingly, companions in the later original series, while intelligent, are generally ambivalent to the a/Academy. Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown, companion to the Fifth and Sixth Doctors and a daughter of academics, is an undergraduate botany major at an unidentified American college, who nearly drowns in her first story fleeing the boredom of an archaeology dig, and who undercuts her own academic credentials, despite a clear interest in her field of study. Carefully picking alien plants in “Revelation of the  Orthia and Morgain, “The Gendered Culture of Scientific Competence”, p.91.

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Daleks” (1985), for example, she tells the Doctor, “When I get back to Earth, I’ve got to wow the college with something. My grades certainly won’t”. As with Liz Shaw, this ambivalence invites a correlation with external educational factors: McIver and Rice map dropping enrolments in higher education (and vocational post-compulsory education) in the early to mid-1980s; and Mayhew, Deer and Dua chart the steady erosion of public funding to universities across the 1980s—both factors of the educational policies of Margaret Thatcher’s government.15 The wealth of research-focused academics that people the Third Doctor’s tenure are less plausible in this environment, and it is doubly suggestive that one of the most prominent university-adjacent characters, Peri, is the daughter of academics, rather than a first-in-family attendee. Although a caricature of Thatcher appeared in this period—Helen A in “The Happiness Patrol” (1988)—her greatest impact is this erosion of the academy. In conjunction with this shift away from the academy, the Academy also falls from prominence in the series: references to it are scarce after The Key to Time stories, and those that are included emphasise the Doctor’s ambivalent attitude, as in “Four to Doomsday” (1982), when he responds to Monarch’s question “You possess an energy you do not understand?” with “Silly, isn’t it? Only my professor at the Academy seemed to understand it. Just goes to show how academic everything is”. The Sixth Doctor’s tenure introduces another renegade Time Lord (and Academy graduate) the Rani, a committed research scientist operating entirely outside the a/ Academy and its ethical research frameworks (like “Professor Thascalos”). In her two stories—“Mark of the Rani” (1985) and “Time and the Rani” (1987)—she removes sleep from an entire population of research subjects (to their detriment) and plans to manipulate evolution on a cosmic scale. This ambivalence culminates in the original series’ final companion, Ace. A working-class teenager expelled from high school, Ace meets the Doctor while she is working in fast food (albeit in space): as such, she is an unlikely candidate for higher education in Thatcher’s Britain. Throughout her time travelling with him, she refers to the Doctor as “Professor”, which, ironically, reinforces the absences of the a/Academy in this period by emphasising that their pedagogical relationship is outside the ­ a/ 15  Duncan McIver and Patricia Rice, “Participation in Further Education in England and Wales: An Analysis of Post-war Trends”, Oxford Economic Papers, 53: 1, 2001, p.48; Ken Mayhew, Cecile Deer, and Mehak Dua, “The Move to Mass Higher Education in the UK: Many Questions and Some Answers”, Oxford Review of Education, 30: 1, 2004, p.67.

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Academy. Ironically, Ace’s last connection with the a/Academy is both ambivalent and absent. Plans were in preparation for an episode where Ace would have enrolled in the Time Lord Academy when the BBC cancelled the programme in 1989: the story was eventually made as an audio adventure.16 The first human Time Lord remains an ambivalent but absent figure.

Acceptance BILL: Time Lords. That’s hilarious. Do you wear robes and big hats? THE DOCTOR: No. Er, big collars mostly. “Knock, Knock” (2017)

The new series has maintained the programme’s greatest absence: Gallifrey’s and the Time Lords’ extinction (the Doctor excepted) in the Last Great Time War, said to have occurred during the hiatus between classic and new series. The Academy has never been further removed from the text. “New” Doctor Who does create strong thematic connections to the original series: for example, new companion Rose, a working-class teenage shop assistant, invites comparisons with final original-series companion Ace. But the a/Academy is not one of those connections for the Ninth Doctor, a traumatised war veteran struggling with his culpability in the loss of his planet and species. Given these ties to the Thatcherite-era Who, however, this reads as another absence: the separation of the most working-class-coded regeneration from the a/Academy, especially given that all three new-series showrunners are tertiary educated (see Table 4.1). Retroactively, the regeneration who experienced this war, the War Doctor, is said to have abandoned the title “Doctor”, further emphasising the a/ Academic absence in this period. Only with the Tenth Doctor does the programme regain an ambivalent approach to the a/Academy. The new series, however, has a mocking undercurrent not particularly apparent in the original, and which is an artefact of the showrunners’ tertiary educations: an insider’s toying with academic absurdities. For example, in “The Shakespeare Code” (2007), the Doctor responds to William Shakespeare’s flirting with, “Oh, fifty-­ seven academics just punched the air”. Later, meeting River Song for the first time, he openly derides her specialisation, saying, “I’m a time 16  Dave Owens, “27 Up”, Doctor Who Magazine, 255, August 1997, p.12; Marc Platt, Thin Ice (The Lost Stories), Big Finish Productions, 2011.

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traveller. I point and laugh at archaeologists” (“Silence in the Library”, 2008). But simultaneously, this period of the programme is where writers rebuild the mythos of the Academy. In keeping with the a/Academic absence in the Ninth Doctor’s period, the Academy only recurs when the Tenth Doctor realises that he is, in fact, not the last of his species: when the Master reappears (and this new-series Master, notably, never infiltrates academia, but business, politics, and espionage). Here, we get the first description of the Academy in the new series: They used to call it the Shining World of the Seven Systems. And on the Continent of Wild Endeavour, in the Mountains of Solace and Solitude, there stood the Citadel of the Time Lords, the oldest and most mighty race in the universe, looking down on the galaxies below. Sworn never to interfere, only to watch. Children of Gallifrey, taken from their families at age of eight to enter the Academy. (“The Sound of Drums”, 2007)

This description, including the implication of involuntary Academy membership, evokes the Academy’s ambivalent status in the Fourth Doctor’s era: part public school, part military academy, part university, and part cloistered religious order. Simultaneously, connecting the Academy so closely to the Time Lord’s policy of non-interference reinforces its connection to the stereotypes of the academy: an ivory tower in space, “looking down on the galaxies below”. The Tenth Doctor’s tenure also introduces a character who comes to fruition during the Eleventh Doctor’s regeneration, and who evokes predecessors such as Romana and Liz Shaw: River Song. River, the Doctor’s wife and sometime travelling companion, is a professor of archaeology, with a doctorate from Luna University (“Let’s Kill Hitler”, 2011). Unlike Liz, she is repeatedly called “Doctor” or “Professor” and is also shown on screen in academic (not simply Academic) robes (“Closing Time”, 2011). Unlike Romana, she is anything but field-naïve: an archaeologist in the Indiana Jones mode, she melds academia and action, education and experience. For example, in her final story, “The Husbands of River Song” (2015), she uses a meteorite storm to escape from her captors and, when one asks how she could have predicted it, replies, “I’m an archaeologist from the future. I dug you up”. River appears more often as action heroine than research academic, but that action is always underpinned by her academic status: River knows when the meteorites strike because she did her research.

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The first episode of the Twelfth Doctor’s final season, “The Pilot” (2017), is the culmination of all the programme’s playful recursiveness around the a/Academy. The episode’s two threads involve an alien lifeform that travels through liquid and the Doctor’s tenure (for the past seventy years) in a university post, in which role he offers to tutor Bill Potts, a cafeteria worker who has been sneaking into his lectures. The episode uses “pilot” in two distinct ways: the enemy alien is the pilot of a spacecraft, but the term also echoes the “pilot” episode of television, a deliberate decision from showrunner Steven Moffat.17 As with the new series, however, “The Pilot” actively draws close ties to both the original series and the 2005 reboot. The Doctor’s relationship with Bill is reminiscent of his travels with his granddaughter Susan, whose photograph stands on his desk in this episode. Similarly, Bill’s opening monologue about serving chips in the university cafeteria is reminiscent of Rose Tyler, particularly in “School Reunion” (2006). However, apropos of both Susan and “School Reunion”, that is one connection this episode does not create: it does not return to school; rather, it embeds the Doctor within the a/ Academy for the first time in the series. Some ambivalence remains: the Doctor is clearly not a human academic and takes an iconoclastic approach to the a/Academy, as his lecture on physics and poetry indicates: BILL: No. I’m wondering what you’re supposed to be lecturing on. It’s like the university let you do whatever you like. One time, you were going to give a lecture on quantum physics. You talked about poetry. THE DOCTOR: Poetry, physics, same thing. BILL: How is it the same? THE DOCTOR: Because of the rhymes.

But this is the Doctor firmly ensconced in the ivory tower. Certainly, he is exploiting the university as a mean of imprisoning and monitoring Missy (the Master in her female regeneration), but he is also lecturing, serving as tutor, and insisting that Bill maintain a “first” average. Tellingly, just as the return of the Master meant the return of the Academy to the programme, the return of the Academy facilitates the return of the academy—or the return of Gallifrey, back from destruction and visited by the Twelfth Doctor two episodes earlier, in “Hell Bent” 17  Huw Fullerton, “Does this Doctor Who Series 10 Title Change Mean a Shake-up for the Series?” Radio Times, 13 March 2017, https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/ does-this-doctor-who-series-10-title-change-mean-a-shake-up-for-the-series/

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(2015). For this regeneration, the audience knows that this choice is one with deep roots. The Twelfth Doctor’s fourth story, “Listen” (2014), takes the audience to his childhood, where companion Clara overhears two people, probably his parents: MAN: He can’t just run away crying all the time if he wants to join the army. WOMAN: He doesn’t want to join the army. I keep telling you. MAN: Well, he’s never going to the Academy, is he, that boy? He’ll never make a Time Lord.

This is full circle, the Doctor’s experience bringing him back to an embracing, both literally and metaphorically, of the a/Academy.

Conclusion The Academy’s metamorphic form across Doctor Who allows it to operate more effectively as a metaphor for the academy: the Time Lords are ivory-­ towered academics, whose policy of non-interference is intellectual superiority and whose “looking down” on the galaxy is both literal and metaphorical. Doctor Who’s sixty-year relationship with the a/Academy moves through periods marked by absence, ambivalence, and finally acceptance, although these three categories intersect recursively and discursively in complex ways across the decades. As “The Pilot” indicates, the a/ Academy is a space into which the Doctor can sink at will, although he will never quite abandon his ambivalent attitude. The Doctor’s richly academic office in “The Pilot” is missing one item: a desk nameplate. With the episode’s—and indeed the programme’s—recursive playfulness around the absence, ambivalence, and acceptance of the a/Academy in Doctor Who, the audience can wonder what it would read: Doctor who?

CHAPTER 5

“Do What You Like with Him”: Sherlock Holmes’ Academic Training and How It Changed over Time Jochem Kotthaus

Adapting Sherlock Holmes With the publication of The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place (1927), Arthur Conan Doyle’s four decades of writing Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories came to an end. By this time, a stand-alone movie starring John Barrymore (Sherlock Holmes, 1922) and a long-running silent movie

I owe thanks to Peter Vignold, who read and discussed an earlier version, and my wife Nina Dorafschan, who, despite enough projects of her own, copy edited this chapter.

J. Kotthaus (*) University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Dortmund, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Harmes, R. Scully (eds.), Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32350-8_5

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series starring Eille Norwood,1 as well as several stage adaptations, had been produced. Maybe “Sherlock Holmes” was not yet the brand it is today, but the fame and durability of the character and its archetypes already had considerable momentum. Sherlock had made the jump from the pages of a book (or a magazine) to his physical embodiment. Even with Doyle contributing to various extents in the respective adaptations, this jump was ground-breaking in terms of the way it modernized Sherlock Holmes and transformed him according to the needs and whims of the production in which Holmes starred. While Holmes is an intellectual and academic child of the Victorian era, he and his stories proved to be transferable to other periods and times and their distinctive mindsets and epistemological logic with ease. Doyle himself transformed Holmes during his tenure as his prime author, losing the idea of him as a drug addict, a narcissist, a madman, his university’s Enfant terrible, and evolving him into a more grounded, conservative, and approachable character.2 Now, others twisted Holmes as well. The detective worked on the screen as well as on stage and in other historic settings. This trend continues until this day: adaptions stacked upon layers and layers of adaptions. With rising popularity and material produced in other media, it became more and more impossible to tell, what part and interpretation of the character could actually be attributed to Doyle and what became a folk tale. What becomes clear—and for what Sherlock Holmes as a fictional character and a media phenomenon may serve as a paradigm,— is our ability as consumers and producers of stories to transform them as needed in our epistemological approach to the world. This is Linda Hutcheon’s point in her theory of adaptation: “We tell—and show again and interact anew with—stories over and over again; in the process, they change with each repetition, and yet they are recognizably the same”.3 The great detective could be British, Russian, Asian, a comedian, a parody, a “high-functioning sociopath”, the caretaker of a bumbling fool named “Dr. Watson”, travelling to the United States or even living in current New York with a female physician called Joan. He could be a rodent even.4  Amanda Field, England‘s Secret Weapon: The Wartime Films of Sherlock Holmes, London: Middlesex University Press, 2009. 2  Benjamin Poore, Sherlock Holmes from Scree to Stage: Post-Millennial Adaptions in British Theatre, London: Palgrave, 2017. 3  Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, New York: Routledge, 2006, p.177. 4  Eve Titus, Basil of Baker Street, New  York: McGraw-Hill, 1958; John Musker, Ron Clements, Dave Michener, and Burny Mattinson (dirs), The Great Mouse Detective, Walt Disney Pictures, 1986. 1

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It is next to impossible to distinguish between “canon” and “extended universe” when it comes to Sherlock Holmes. The same is true for James Bond. Today it seems hardly feasible to read Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger (1959) and neither picture iconic actor Sean Connery as the protagonist nor compare the book’s plot and events to the movie.5 Quite unique for Doyle’s creation, however, is that it fell in the public domain. Contrary to the works of Ian Fleming or J.R.R.  Tolkien, with few restrictions and depending on the specifics of national law, everybody can legally use and adapt Doyle’s characters and setting. But even before, the vast adventures of the great detective had been and still are highly “glocalized”, adapted to the respective market’s preferences in taste, culture, meaning, viewing habits, desires for action, romance, or comedy.6 It can be argued that this emphasis is typical for all fiction even those that engage with academia as a setting in a stricter way—for example, The Chair (2021) or Higher Learning (1995). Rarely are we, the readers, treated with a backstory of exactly how the protagonist—and even more so the antagonist—is able to gain their knowledge. A supporting character might utter a line about “extensive training”; the faithful companion may remark that the protagonist spent years in the wilderness  or on “the streets”, strengthening body and mind. Not only is the university boring and does not make for good drama, but the protagonist’s knowledge is subordinate to the writers’ needs and whims. It can change on a moment’s notice if needed. This is even more so when focusing on academic knowledge. It is hard to explain how Batman gained his encyclopaedic knowledge while also becoming the world’s greatest martial artist. We never saw the writers of Star Trek spend much time on Spock conducting field studies in astrophysics or temporal anomalies (in fact he seemed to have spent much of his years at Vulcan Science Academy allowing himself to be 5  James Bond as another long-running media franchise made the jump from the pages of a novel to a film. Bond, too, is a character that serves as a “mobile signifier”. He will be transformed, albeit to a lesser degree, according to political and social changes as well as viewing habits, more or less an empty shell that embodies whatever the times or the producers need him to be. See: Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987. 6  Neil McCaw, “Adapting Holmes”, in Janice M. Allan and Christopher Pittard (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp.199–212. For the origins of “glocalization” refer to: Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity”, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (eds), Global Modernities, London: Sage, 1995, pp.25–44.

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bullied). One can always upgrade a protagonist if the story requires it. The same is true for Sherlock Holmes—at least to some extent. “All knowledge comes useful to the detective”, he muses in The Valley of Fear.7 But how one gained this knowledge remains a mystery. Holmes’ adaptions haven taken great liberties with the character and their fictional biographies. They are, one could argue, but mere shells—constituted by the knowledge of the readers and viewers rather than the writer’s effort to construct a coherent backstory. Doyle himself was rather  cavalier about this backstory. He gave the take-off clearance himself. When asked by William Gillette, the author and lead of one the earliest Sherlock Holmes stage adaptions, if he was content with marrying Holmes, a deed that was unthinkable in the realm of the canon of the original novels and short stories, Doyle replied wryly: “You may marry or murder or do what you like with him”.8 It should be noted that this happened in 1899, at a point in time when Doyle’s career as Holmes’ author was on a hiatus.  He had “killed off” Holmes in “The Final Problem” of 1893 and The Hound of the Baskervilles would not be published  until 1902. It should further be noted that Gillette was an American, going on to play Holmes on stage for the next three decades in Sherlock Holmes, or the Strange Case of Miss Faulkner. The image of Sherlock Holmes, how we as readers and viewers perceive him today as the epitome of all Britishness, is in part founded on an American stage actor. So, from Doyle’s perspective, the story of Sherlock Holmes ended. There may be no other protagonist so adaptive to the requirements of changing time and space. Here lies the great opportunity to perceive Sherlock Holmes less as a media event but as a cultural phenomenon. And by defining three crucial points in time, we are able to analyse the changing relation between media, higher education, and common knowledge. If those three are reciprocally entwined, and the theory of adaptation suggests exactly this, then the social construction of Holmes as a character tells us something about the way we view the world and maintain it at the

7  Arthur Conan Doyle, The Greatest Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, New York: Fall River Press, 2012, p.740. 8  Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1924, p.97.

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same time.9 Even more so, pointing out some crucial characteristics of the character’s progression, the transformation of knowledge as culturally founded and founding culture, simultaneously becomes clearer. In this chapter I will put this approach to the test and focus on the relation of the specific cognitive logic of everyday-life in regard to academic knowledge and institutions of higher education by concentrating on three different stages in the progression of Sherlock Holmes’ life as a fictional character: his Victorian origins; his midlife (crisis) as a conservative during the Second World War; and his current iteration as a post-modern figurehead.

Victorian Beginnings and Frontier Science Sherlock Holmes belongs to the first wave of “superheroes” in classical modernity.10 This era solidified the changes the age of reason brought about primarily in the wake of technical advancements. As a writer of adventure stories, H. Rider Haggard and his character Allan Quatermain preceded Holmes. King Solomon’s Mines appeared in 1887, two years before Sherlock Holmes’ first case, A Study in Scarlet. While both Englishmen serve as protagonists in very different genres—detective stories and adventure fiction (set primarily in England and Africa)—there are some striking similarities in the way they and their respective book series are written and developed over time. In terms of character development both Holmes and Quatermain are quite modern, as they are flawed and even broken. Holmes is a spoiled narcissist, a drug-user out of boredom, without much care for his fellow men. Quatermain, a big game hunter driven by ambition, leads a life going in endless circles and prone to homelessness. Written at its high point, this might be the embodiment of the era of (especially late) Victorian literature: Victorian novels move the reader, but on the verge of a new century, depictions of emotion developed in a

9  I decided against providing the conceptual framework that this assertion may require. At this time I can only point to some crucial and brilliant works: Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of The Life-World, 2 volumes, London: Northwestern University Press, 1974 & 1989); Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Society, London: Penguin, 1991; Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, Garden City: Doubleday, 1967. 10  On Holmes as superhero, see: Andrew R.  Bahlmann, The Mythology of the Superhero, Jefferson: McFarland, 2016; Marc DiPaolo, War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film, Jefferson: McFarland, 2011, esp. p.2.

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manner more complex and sophisticated.11 Characters became torn, wounded, contradictory, imperfect in ways G.A. Henty in England or Karl May in Germany yet failed to achieve. In current terms we would speak of the world-weary hero, even the anti-hero, whose good deeds are not untarnished by the questionable or even evil acts he or she performs. From a sociological point of view this construction of a protagonist depends on a change in modernity itself. Modernity is the conglomerate of industrialization and capitalism, as well as the intellectual and political freedoms encapsulated in the nation state.12 It developed as the more practical incarnation of the Enlightenment, highlighting the world of ideas—a transition from the agrarian and feudal state beginning in the Seventeenth century. Over time, options increased, freedom of choice set in, and “mechanical solidarity”, based on similarity and subjection to authority, was replaced by division of labour, resulting in “organic” solidarity and difference between actors. Yet, by the end of the Nineteenth century it became apparent that the promise of modernity, the promise of prosperity and freedom for everyone, was far from attainable.13 Industrialization led to more poverty and a widening divide between consolidated social classes, with only a few exceptions. In this framework it is hard not to understand Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as engagements with the duality and paradoxy of modernity’s promises of freedom and prosperity, and a reality that prevented social mobility, manifested authority and—to paraphrase Marx—lost all heart in an already heartless world.14 Wells’ narrator himself states that after the trauma of surviving the seemingly senseless and incomprehensible juggernaut of machinery from beyond this world, he “must confess the stress and danger of the time have left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity” on his mind.15 It must be emphasized that science, rationality or reason, the pillars of Enlightenment and modernity and 11  Francis O’Gorman, “A long deep sob of that mysterious wondrous happiness that is one with pain: Emotion in the Victorian Novel”, in Francis O’Gorman (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel, Malden: Blackwell, 2005, pp.253–270. 12  Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, London: Polity, 1996. 13  Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, London: Penguin, 1992. I am in debt to Giddens’ interpretation of Marx’s work. 14  Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, p.131. 15  H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, London: William Heinemann, 1898, p.302.

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diffused through the universities founded or reformed by Humbolt and others during the Enlightenment, do not remedy this situation. On the contrary. It is nature and chance that defeat the Martians. It is myth and religion that serve as allies in fight of Jonathan Harker, really just a petty solicitor and bureaucrat, against the godfather of all vampires, not medicine or the law of a university-trained scholar. And it is science that spawns the monster in Jekyll. So even if we can overcome modernity’s terror, its wounds will continue to fester. The darker, more volatile nature of modernity manifested in the character-­design of the late Victorian era’s novels. And in the same vein, it is hard not to see traces of globalization in these works. As the technical means to explore the world, by communication or by travel, increase, the world shrinks and expands at the same time. Places, events, people, and knowledge become interconnected, and literature mirrors this. Both Haggard and Doyle serialized their protagonists. Probably not intended as a serial story, over time the number of adventures increased, as did backstories, vices, number of relatives, former relationships, and secondary characters. Most obviously not all of this appeared in advance, and so-­ called “continuity errors” multiplied. It is indeed harder to keep track of one’s writings and storylines without the assistance of a computer and a good editor. Sequels were known in the Victorian literature, one of the most famous being Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) being the continuation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), but these hardly constituted what is known today as a “shared fictional universe”. In fact, it was Haggard who linked his Quatermain and She novels by having both protagonists’ storylines entwine in She and Allan (1921). As an afterthought, the novel effectively linked two series that had already run for decades by this time, acknowledging the existence of a wider and extended universe. This might be the starting point of what we today call “cross-over” and “shared (cinematic) universe” nowadays. Doyle used a different way of world-building. He has Watson chronicle his adventures with Holmes. And he occasionally has Watson refer to previous stories and events. In “The Musgrave Ritual”, Holmes mentions “The Gloria Scott”, and A Study in Scarlet by name. Thus, the stories comprise a tight and concise fictional world, in which all events are true and significant. Is Doyle’s Holmes laid out as an antidote to this brooding? While being flawed himself, his method is unlike everyone else’s. Whereas the protagonists’ upbringing, and their formal education at a school or university,

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hardly matter in most Victorian novels, Holmes used reason to solve the cases presented to him. Holmes expels human nature, the dirty, the amorphous by matters of reason and education. Humankind evolves by the use of knowledge; this is what separates us from the animals. Even more so, Holmes uses his scientific upbringing, his expertise in various academic disciplines—particularly the natural sciences such as chemistry—to battle the same evil conjured by those perpetrating the crime. Again, scientific development, real-life events, and their fictionalization mix perfectly. For the better part of the Nineteenth century what would develop into forensics gradually became more prominent in police work. Police solve cases and convict perpetrators on the strength of evidence. Thus, even without actual witnesses, procedure and progression of a crime could become evident. Detectives can reveal history and trace back past events step by step, implicating some and exonerating others.16 This dispensed with the need of torture or other brutal ways of extracting a confession. In this regard, forensics elevates the level of civilization immensely. Investigations into a crime are no longer bound to the threat of or actual destruction of the suspect’s body, but founded in logic and finding order. Even more so, police no longer needed a confession to convict someone of a crime at all. As modernity promised, humankind prevailed over nature, and the crime seemed part of a man’s animalistic, barbaric, and rampant character. Forensics and crime-fighting becomes part of civilization. Victorian science and literature try to generate a certain sense of evaluating the world, to order, to connect phenomena. But solving and fighting crime went one step further. I would argue that it represented one aspect of the Victorian attempt to replace religious authority with scientific rationality, a change and a tension reflected in Victorian higher education. Particular snapshots reveal this tension between these sources of authority. Protestors disrupted Charles Darwin’s award ceremony of an honorary degree, affronted by his evolutionary theories, and the protestors introduced a monkey in academic garb to the proceedings. Until the Nineteenth century, matriculating students at Oxford and Cambridge had to subscribe to the 39 Articles of the Church of England on matriculation. The curriculum of the university only gradually expanded beyond divinity to the natural and hard sciences. Fighting crime is fighting for the modern

16  Bridget Heos, Blood, bullets, and bones: The story of forensic science from Sherlock Holmes to DNA, New York: Balzer and Bray, 2016.

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utopia.17 If science can contain evil, if rationality trumps barbarism, then the opposite must be true as well: As evil and good, the devil and God insolubly connect; containing the one must amount to control over the other. The fight against evil therefore equals on more than one level the attempt to control everything transcendent. It is the epiphany of Victorian modernity: On the one hand we have the promise of reason, of science, and at the same time on the other hand the acknowledgement that this process is flawed. Both modernity and reciprocally human nature are not “built” for reason. Thus, the detectives in their various forms stand in the triumph of science in Victorian literature—and they still do today. It just makes for a better story to solve crime in Bohemia than to analyse the process of a three-year-long social research process in the origins of deviance of young adults in eastern Prussia. And it acknowledges the nature of modernity as a process with its detours and flaws. At least in his humble beginnings, the academic origins of Holmes’ knowledge did not matter most of the time. The first two chapters of A Study in Scarlet consist of us, the readers, getting to know Sherlock Holmes through the eyes and mind of John Watson. What we get here is an interesting contrast of a war veteran, wounded and recently discharged from the military who is a classically trained physician, and a madman, an eccentric, with a broad spectrum of interests, but also glaring deficiencies. As Watson states—for no reason but to amuse the readers—Holmes possesses no noteworthy knowledge of literature, philosophy, astronomy, hardly any in politics, but knows his way around British law and has extensive and profound attainments in chemistry, anatomy, and sensational literature.18 He also plays the violin and is an expert melee fighter. This indeed sounds like a jumble in characteristics and does even more so when Watson reports on his new roommate’s eccentric experiments with blood tests and beating of corpses in the laboratories of University College London. It might even come across as a piece of awkward writing and a little bit too “on the nose”. But it is not. Victorian England birthed in institutions such as Imperial College and University College. While change defines human history, we must be aware that transformations in the agrarian and feudal states were slow and tedious. In modernity, transitions and shifts in knowledge, technology, and social constellations developed 17  John Kucich, “Scientific Ascendancy”, in Patrick Brantlinger and William B.  Thesing (eds), Companion to the Victorian Novel, Malden: Blackwell, 2002, pp.119–138. 18  Doyle, The Greatest Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, pp.9–10.

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into the norm.19 In the Victorian era this discontinuation and its effects became the focus of its own elaborations. While before industrialization, cultural shifts, social mobility, epistemological evolution just happened, they resulted in changes so crucial that the time and necessity for reflection and elaboration arose. Structuring the world anew restores order. Again, the parallels to the development of the social, of technology, and science is obvious. Scientific knowledge improved, but as the system of classifying, and labelling still adhered to the old regime of fundamentally obsolete categories and academic subsumptions. The key to making sense of a new, industrialized, globalized world is the expulsion of religion. The shockwaves of Darwin’s expulsion of the Divine from the progression of nature initiated the need to restructure science altogether. This led to two connected developments. Academic disciplines were redefined in Doyle’s day and age: chemistry escaped from the shadow of physics; sociology and social sciences emerged, establishing the roots of the modern academic system.20 Sherlock Holmes in its original iteration is exactly this, the metaphor for a world that is chaotic and tries to establish order. Science became “natural” and was sanitized from theological influences.  University’s curricula expanded from divinity to other fields.  More  modern academic institutions came into existence. Thus, Watson’s attempt to sum up Sherlock relies heavily on an understanding of sciences and the academic system in his time. And Doyle’s transformation of Holmes must be understood in the same vein. The nature of Holmes as a wild child, resembling the restructuring of academia, wore out over the course of the next few decades and, in itself, became obsolete: academia’s conflicts subsided and gave way to a more ordered version of the university. Sherlock’s earlier experiments again are in the same vein: while scientific knowledge expanded, with every attainment it became more obvious how much about the world was unknown. As the universities were in upheaval, frontier and field experiments and discoveries prevailed. Not for nothing Holmes was a consulting detective as much as he was an outside or independent scholar. All this should not appear as an elaborate or distinct plan. Doyle himself did not care too much for establishing his protagonists’ academic  Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, London: Polity Press, 1990.  Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. 19 20

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backgrounds. Holmes might have studied chemistry at Oxford or Cambridge, but even compared to Watson he is far from being a classically bred academic. Even more so, interruption and detour marred his academic education. It is not even entirely sure if Holmes even graduated with a degree. As brilliant as he may be, compared to today’s modern standards he might even be an academic failure. He is the “perfect example of the Victorian dilettante scientist”21 who could not be bother to put in a paper or take an exam. Thus, it may seem like irony that it is Holmes who investigates a case of academic misconduct in The Adventure of the Three Students in one of the “great university towns”. For an institution of great academic tradition and reputation to call on Holmes marks in some ways a different engagement with academia. Published in 1904, almost two decades after A Study in Scarlet Doyle and his protagonist have become part of the establishment as represented by its ancient universities. Even more so, Doyle has Holmes navigate with great ease through his academic surroundings. But the way Doyle tells the story still is a sting: Holmes continues to work outside of the university’s system. Even more so, he works better because of this. It is the university in the person of “Hilton Soames, tutor and lecturer” at college who approaches him to prevent a scandal that would tarnish its reputation. And it is Holmes who solves the case within the hour, in a setting which leaves the institution helpless because of its traditions and consequent restrictions. Is this a callback to the glory days of the frontier science of the (late-) Victorian age? It sure seems like Doyle’s reckoning with a world, which is all stiff and rigid in its ancient traditions on the one hand and curiously keen formalities as attaining degrees on the other hand. As with most Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle does it in a humorous manner, but it certainly represents a certain change of season—evidence of another change in Holmes’ everchanging character.

Midlife Crisis: A Parody, but Not a Parody Before Johnny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes took to the streets of a major American city, (Elementary, CBS, 2012–2019), Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were on the case(s). Rathbone was the most classic modern 21  Michelle Birkby, “Built on a Deep Love” in Christopher Redmond (ed.), Sherlock Holmes is like: Sixty Comparisons for a Incomparable Character, Cabin John: Wildside Press, 2018, p.182.

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Holmes, and Bruce the most annoying and useless Watson, a foil for Rathbone’s straight man. 20th Century Fox produced the first two movies in the Rathbone and Bruce series, both released in 1939, and they are quite faithful adaptions of the Victorian setting. Fox then suspended their big-budget production due to the most unprecedented reason. While the United States assumed a neutral position in the beginning of World War II, they declared war on Japan after the attack in Pearl Harbor in December 1941. As a result, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. The arts reflect this remarkable shift in geopolitics. Beginning in 1942, Universal Pictures produced eleven more films with Rathbone. In a case of what is today called “rebooting”, a contemporary setting and thematic emphasis was introduced with the actors continuing to play the same characters. Holmes now fought Nazis and hunted spies, while still being a Victorian-era detective. In a way, this seems like a reasonable thing to do. The war was afoot in the movies as well. Fascism was a relevant and serious enemy, even if the Nazis did not threaten the United States in the way they did Britain. The public met external threats by a shift from more liberal to more conservative attitudes.22 Internal cohesion sets free resources needed to engage with an external enemy. A Victorian detective seems like the perfect foil for this.23 Yet, from a more detached and analytic point of view, things are not what they seemed. The cultural and intellectual leaders of the Victorian era attempted to create order in a time when religious thought as taught in English universities split from natural science and common knowledge in an ideal form, creating separate entities. If anything, this process itself is a revolution, establishing a different and unique epistemological approach. Change and its management were established on the inside, as an internal affair of a national state. Leaving that aside, labelling Holmes as a conservative because of his Victorian origins might serve as a perfect example of adaptation theory. Things are mixed up that do not necessarily belong together but, as viewers, we are able to experience them conclusively. From this point of view, it seems logical and consistent that the already limited information on Holmes’ academic background was all but phased 22  Paul R. Nail, Ian Mcgregor, April Drinkwater, and Garrett Steele, “Threat causes liberals to think like conservatives”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45: 4, 2009, pp.901–907. 23  Amanda Field, England‘s Secret Weapon: The Wartime Films of Sherlock Holmes, London: Middlesex University Press, 2009.

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out. Even more so, Watson’s biography as a medical doctor (not to speak of him being an intelligent ladies’ man) was abandoned as well. Watching the Universal films today without any previous knowledge, it would be hard to establish the exact field of Watson’s doctorate. He certainly did not save that many lives or even rely heavily on his medical knowledge in those pictures. There was a great deal of “movie science” present, but first and foremost it was applied to the war effort. Science and technology serve but one purpose: to help win the war. It would take a considerable amount of effort to find a more remote, detached, and twisted understanding of academic knowledge and an extension of the purpose of the university other than this. Thus, while Holmes, and particularly Watson, may seem like bad parodies of themselves, this can be considered a misapprehension, for both are involved in the most serious business: the fight against the Germans and their allies. With that, the university and higher education faded even more into the background. This golden age of Sherlock Holmes movies is most significant in terms of the flexibility which the protagonist and his sidekick proved to employ. Rathbone and Bruce effortlessly transformed and felt at home in different eras with different social and political contexts. Next to nothing changes regarding them or their relationship. The productions slightly updated their attitude towards crime, the way they dressed, their friendship, and even the sets they acted in, but still essentially the characters remained the same. Established film series joining the war effort were not unheard of: Tarzan defended his kingdom against Nazis; even Abbott and Costello somehow exposed Nazi scheming (in a most inane way); but the transposition and keying Doyle’s works experienced seems unique. One must ask if Holmes, his academic background as a scientist, his mannerisms, and attitude, serve as mere foils to whatever the script writer needs them to be. His academic background changed in whatever ways the story and the context need. The audience is not interested in higher education institutions, it engages with characters in an emotional way. And the character’s education appears as one of the least important aspects in regard to his or her personality.

The Golden Age of Knowledge Arthur Conan Doyle’s own nonchalant attitude towards adapting his original work surely stemmed from the fact that every use of his intellectual property earned him royalties without having to do any actual work. But

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it also highly pragmatic in another way and is founded on his academic background as a physician. Doyle attended the University of Edinburgh Medical School, the pre-eminent Scottish medical school, and the earliest established at any British university. Edinburgh predated the first English medical schools by more than a century. The Nineteenth-century Scottish university provided a much more no-nonsense education than the Anglican-dominated English counterparts. For a medical doctor the health of a patient is of utmost importance, whatever the means necessary to attain this goal. Doyle embodies this pragmatic, whatever-works mentality in sheer perfection. Watson’s awkward description of Holmes and his stocks of knowledge in A Study in Scarlet betray traces of Doyle’s own reality as a medical doctor in this elaboration. But most of all, Watson speaks to readers and their perception of attaining knowledge. Right at the start of his literature adventures, Holmes is in light of his arrogance humanized and made reachable. He is not merely  an intellectual, only highbrow to the point when it is still amusing. Holmes’ lack of a doctorate or any degree brings him closer the readers, who need someone to identify with. Someone who considering all his intellectual prowess gets down and dirty. Holmes embodies this very blue collar attitude. His madman’s approach to science, the field trips to the morgue, the chemical and medical self-tests suggest that Sherlock is still learning. Even more so, later iterations of Sherlock (2010–2017) and Elementary (2012–2019), hammer home this point. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock uses a variety of tools at hand to solve his cases, often the internet. The depiction resembles a melee-style fight; the direction is ripe with fast cuts, superimposed text, information on more information on a fury of information. This enables us, the audience, to understand Holmes’ way of thinking and perceiving, that are a far cry from the clean-cut deduction Doyle’s Holmes employed. This modern Holmes is a tortured man in his own way. The same goes for Johnny Lee Miller’s version of the character, a recovering addict, complete with his Brownstone’s humongous wall of craziness and a variety of experiments of disputable usefulness. These are the postmodern iterations of Sherlock Holmes, as imperfect and as far removed from any  academic knowledge as they  can be. BBC’s Sherlock’s co-creator Steven Moffat takes up the idea of humanizing his protagonist, relating to his knowledge not being academic in nature, being amorphic and situational: “We’re flattered by the idea that the mighty brain can be perfected. He wasn’t born

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with superdetective powers. He learned it”.24 Is this a farewell to nature being the foundation of a human’s biography or an allusion to the mentality of post-modernity that everything is possible, that all borders, boundaries, and limitations can be captured? A recognition of meritocratic ideology, in which social mobility is a personal responsibility? It most certainly could be. It is also a statement regarding the devaluation of institutionalized academic knowledge. Add Robert Downey Jr’s Holmes (2009 and 2011), who under the over-the-top direction of Guy Ritchie dwindles into a cartoon character but employs the same manic and nihilistic tendencies Sherlock and Elementary do. None of the great institutions are safe anymore from coming under scrutiny themselves, this triad of Doyle interpretations tells us. Everything is melee. Everything is frantic. And even if there is a long-hatched plan, the stories present it to us, the viewers, in such confusing and elaborate ways that it is hard to admire the deduction. More often than not, style and action are everything. Elementary and Ritchie’s two movies employ a very distinct visual style, especially compared to the leisurely pace and direction of the Basil Rathbone era. So much is happening simultaneously. There are short projections of future actions; calculations of what may or may not become true; the tiniest of flashbacks; extreme close-ups; information superimposed on the ongoing action that is impossible to actually read, prone to be surmised or “felt”, but not known; there is a computer-generated world being built that extends our reality. The visual style of this postmodern-­ age Sherlock Holmes goes beyond the experience of the empirical world by a long shot. Holmes’ adaptations have become part of a canon that in terms of visual direction is truly “post”-modern. This “reality” is just not possible. While the movies have always been a game of trickery, a suspension of disbelief always existed as well. We know that the picture is not reality, but we have learned to ignore whatever had to be done to achieve it. Today’s movies go beyond the possibility of a scene being real on a regular basis. Much of Ritchie’s movies is CGI-enhanced. By knowing that art employs this trickery and goes “post” modernity, knowledge as being reflexive is established.

24  Steven Moffat, quoted in: Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes, Boston: Mariner Books, 2016, p.273.

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In a sense, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes thus becomes one prime example of the way we deal with knowledge in reflexive modernity.25 As an audience we know that we know and how we do so. We are aware of our expectations, and they are reflexively accessible to us. Why is Holmes’ companion, a woman named “Joan”, clever? Because we know that the original partner’s name is “John”. Why is Moriarty being a woman amusing and astounding us? Because we know that in other adaptations the character tends to be a man. Why is Holmes as a recovering drug addict more interesting than his usual backstory? Because we have history with this character. We have expectations subverted. Without this knowledge of adaptations of adaptions, without a reflexive knowledge of knowledge, its origins, effects, and limitations, neither Elementary nor Sherlock would work as a series. Sherlock would be an unsettling and confusing piece of television, with a protagonist of questionable charm. There are hardly any redeeming qualities to Cumberbatch’s character—it is dependent on the audience itself watching the movie in an epistemological mode of “constant comparison”, perpetually contextualizing what is seen with what is to be expected and known.26 This leaves us with one final observation and conclusion concerning the status of academic knowledge and the university in particular in reflexive modernity’s Sherlock Holmes. Guy Ritchie’s hyperactive steampunk version, set (almost) correctly in its proper time and place, is full of meta-­ references, tongue-in-cheek remarks, and innuendo, which can only be understood, let alone found amusing, if we as viewers are aware of our own expectations and our knowledge of Sherlock Holmes and his multitude of adaptations.27 The first movie deals with the death and resurrection of supposed sorcerer Lord Blackwood. It works, because we know there is no magic and yet wonder how the villain accomplished his wondrous deeds. This way of storytelling adheres to our conviction that scientific knowledge is acceptable as the one and only foundation of the

25  Again, I decided against too much of a fundamental sociological discussion and must point ever so vaguely to: Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Polity, 1992; and Anthony Giddens, Runaway World, London: Polity 2002. 26  This is, of course, a reference to Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research, Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1967. 27  Benjamin Poore, Sherlock Holmes from Screen to Stage: Post-Millennial Adaptations in British Theatre, London: Palgrave, 2017, p.140.

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empirical world, distinguished sharply from everything transcendent.28 Yet, Ritchie feeds us a constant diet of hints of the supernatural, and we ask for a logical and sound explanation, because we know that this is how the world works. In the big finale, high above the Thames, Holmes puts together all the bits and pieces to Blackwood’s plan, and this, not the mostly generic fight between him and Sherlock, is what provides us with closure. This is playful in a way the 20th Century Fox/Universal Pictures series was unable to achieve. It turned around the logic of everyday life in a traditional modernity, eschewing the need for stability of knowledge in favour of an at times frantic sedimentation of experience—of the great detective and the social order itself. Neither Elementary nor Sherlock, and for sure not Ritchie’s version of Holmes, provide any great detail of the detective’s academic exploits. They remain unseen, because in reflexive modernity, assumptions must be “weak” and are bound to be changed. The academic certainties of traditional modernity, the strong belief in science and technical innovations being able to somehow change the world for the better by providing solutions to its problems, yielded to them being more of a feeling than a defendable fact. This might be an epiphany to the cognitive logic of reflexive modernity: The university or—better—academic knowledge is no longer relegated to institutions and organizations. Academic knowledge is an attainment, a way of thinking, rather than a degree on an office wall. This is why Cumberbatch’s Holmes fiddling about on his mobile rings so true: all the information is out there, and the true genius must not remember it all. He rather must know how to gather the information and to connect the bits and pieces.

Conclusion This chapter proposes that university and academic knowledge in movies as well as in novels are not a parody in a stricter understanding. Is fiction an adequate representation of academia, academic institutions, and scientific knowledge? It most certainly is neither of the above. I suggest that it represents aspects of common knowledge, sometimes strangely 28  I am well aware that this statement lacks some “punch” in regard to esoteric and conspiracy theorist knowledge. Please note that these groups, outside of their own bubble, suffer from a permanent need to justify their own attitudes and views of world. Without going into any detail at all: those fringes and exceptions to the rule confirm it nonetheless.

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accentuated, sometimes played for laughs, most of the time for drama. The depiction of science in popular film and television always serves a very specific purpose, reinforcing the context the story is set in. The devaluation, phasing out, or gross misinterpretation of the university as an institution, academic knowledge, and higher education is part of a bigger picture. This again says something about how “we”, at a certain point in time and space, understand issues. We adapt, we may “do what we like” with the original material—and exactly this is very telling as it says a lot about how our own knowledge is produced, maintained, and transformed.

CHAPTER 6

Women in the Ivory Tower: Historical Memory and the Heroic Educator in Mona Lisa Smile (2003) Ana Stevenson

Across the twentieth century, film became a popular mediator of academic cultures across different eras, geographies, and societies. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship emphasises that myths about teaching and learning in higher education depend upon assumptions that create powerful narratives with significant real-world consequences.1 Mike Newell’s Mona Lisa 1  Roy Fisher, Ann Harris, and Christine Jarvis, Education in Popular Culture: Telling Tales on Teachers and Learners, London: Routledge, 2008; Marcus Harmes, Henk Huijser, and Patrick Alan Danaher (eds.), Myths in Education, Learning and Teaching: Policies, Practices and Principles, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Mark Readman, ed. Teaching and Learning on Screen: Mediated Pedagogies, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

A. Stevenson (*) University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia International Studies Group, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Harmes, R. Scully (eds.), Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32350-8_6

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Smile (2003), a film set during the 1950s in the cloistered world of women’s collegiate education in the United States, constructs a historical memory of women entering the academy, both as staff and as students. The film’s historical, sociocultural, and pedagogical myths paint a picture of what popular culture renders both seen and unseen about women in the ivory tower. Starring Julia Roberts as Katherine Watson, Mona Lisa Smile follows the story of a new art history instructor at Wellesley College, an elite single-­ sex institution in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Roberts, the 2001 Academy Award Winner for Best Actress, led an ensemble cast in this rich historical role.2 The film’s narrative is animated by her character’s excitement about teaching young women and transforming their lives. As the film’s narrator, her student Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst), describes: “Katherine Watson didn’t come to Wellesley to fit in. She came because she wanted to make a difference”. Yet Katherine is surprised to find that the College staff do not teach these highly intelligent and exceptionally well-prepared young women, who are in awe of her own boldness and unconventionality, to think deeply and critically. Against the backdrop of her burgeoning relationship with a fellow instructor, it dismays Katherine to discover that many of her students are simply at university in preparation for marriage. Although Katherine quickly becomes a favourite amongst her students, the conservative world of their upbringing is at odds with her own values and lifestyle. Before she leaves Wellesley College, Katherine manages to change the life of the student she least expects. Mona Lisa Smile conveys a fictional historical narrative about an institution with particular significance for the history of women’s education. As the Wellesley College alumna and Smith College historian of higher education, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, wrote in the American Historical Review: “What makes this film about teaching unusual is that … a woman teaches and inspires female students”.3 Beyond film reviews in scholarly journals, the film has received limited scholarly attention. To contextualise Mona Lisa Smile socially, culturally, and pedagogically, this chapter explores the history of women’s higher education in the United States. It then examines the historical memory that the film constructs about women’s academic socialisation. Finally, this chapter considers the degree to which  Paul McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp.254–280.  Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Movie review: Mona Lisa Smile”, American Historical Review, 91: 3, 2004, p.1135. 2 3

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Mona Lisa Smile reinscribes what education scholar Marianne A. Larson describes as the “discourse of teacher centrality”: a trope that centres effective pedagogy around inspirational teachers, as individuals, without consideration of broader systemic issues in education.4 The film’s depiction of a heroic educator  whose characterisation channels Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has potential implications for higher education policy.

Wellesley College and Women’s Higher Education Wellesley College began with the explicit purpose of educating women. Originally founded as a female seminary in 1870, it welcomed its first students as a college in 1875 during the early years of the women’s suffrage movement. Wellesley’s most famous graduate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, obtained her Bachelor of Arts majoring in political science in 1969. Appointed Secretary of State (2009–13) under the Obama administration, Clinton was the first woman to become the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party in 2016.5 Wellesley remains one of the most prestigious liberal arts colleges in the United States. During the nineteenth century, women’s higher education challenged political and cultural attitudes towards women’s place in society. Popular culture circulated the opinions of medical professionals and critics who believed that higher learning would “unsex” women: higher education would undermine their destiny to become good wives and mothers, while potentially damaging their reproductive capacities.6 Some institutions of higher learning nonetheless began to admit those students who had previously been excluded on the basis of gender and race. The female seminary movement of the 1820s and 1830s emerged to connect women’s higher learning with the religious zeal of the Second Great Awakening.7 This Protestant religious revival influenced the antebellum era’s major social 4  Marianne A. Larsen, “Troubling the discourse of teacher centrality: A comparative perspective”, Journal of Education Policy, 25: 2, 2010, pp.207–231. 5  Karen Blumenthal, Hillary: A Biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton, New  York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 6  Lynn D.  Gordon, “The Gibson Girl Goes to College: Popular Culture and Women’s Higher Education in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920”, American Quarterly, 39; 2, 1987, pp.211–230. 7  Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s, 2nd ed., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984, 1993, pp.11–12.

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reform movements, including antislavery, temperance, and women’s rights. In 1837, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary offered women a liberal arts education. The coeducational Oberlin College first welcomed African American men from 1835 and then admitted women from 1837. Historian Andrea L. Turpin describes this educational ethos as “‘evangelical pragmatism’: the desire to educate as many people as possible, both male and female, as cheaply as possible, in order to equip them to evangelize the world and thus speed the coming of the millennial kingdom of God, a golden age of righteousness”.8 Wellesley College was one of a select few trailblazers in women’s higher education. Often modelled upon Mount Holyoke College, which gained collegiate status in 1888, additional institutions emerged following the Civil War (1861–65). In the north-eastern United States, Mount Holyoke and Wellesley became members of the Seven Sisters association of historically women’s colleges: Smith College (est. 1871), Bryn Mawr College (est. 1885), and Barnard College (est. 1889); Vassar College (est. 1861), which became coeducational in 1969; and Radcliffe College (est. 1879), which merged with Harvard University in 1999. Amongst historically Black colleges and universities in the South, Spelman College (est. 1881) was a prominent female seminary that gained collegiate status in 1924 and Bennett College (est. 1873) was a coeducational school that became a women’s college in 1926.9 Collectively, the Seven Sisters paralleled the male-only Ivy League in their tradition, prestige, and exclusivity. Women’s higher education established new visions for communities of higher learning. Initially, Wellesley College’s founders, Henry Fowle Durant and Pauline Durant, implemented a policy of only hiring women as teachers and college president. This placed teachers as a “surrogate mother”, always living and learning on campus with their students.10 According to historian Patricia A. Palmieri:

8  Andrea L. Turpin, A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion, and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837–1917, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016, pp.24–26. 9  Alicia C. Collins, “Black Women in the Academy: An Historical Overview”, in Reitumetse Obakeng Mabokela and Anna L. Green (eds), Sisters of the Academy: Emergent Black Women Scholars in Higher Education, Sterling: Stylus Publishing, 2001. 10  Horowitz, Alma Mater, pp.48, 182.

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Wellesley’s most radical feature was its dedication to the principle of education of women by women scholars. Wellesley was to be a “woman’s university”, equivalent to Harvard, presided over and staffed entirely by women.11

The young women who attended Wellesley remained among the privileged few gaining an exclusive education. Although students at women’s colleges often divided themselves into hierarchical cliques, Durant embraced the education of “calico girls” from middle-class backgrounds.12 During the Progressive era, Wellesley also began to admit African American, Asian, and Jewish women as students.13 Between the 1880s and the 1960s, approximately 500 African American women from elite families graduated from the Seven Sisters; although Wellesley was one of the colleges that admitted these women “in more than token numbers”, some still experienced racial discrimination and segregation.14 By the turn of the twentieth century, Wellesley College had become “a hothouse of reform”, including women’s education, enfranchisement, health, temperance, and religious activism.15 A tradition of women’s rights advocacy often accompanied women’s higher education, yet this did not always lead students into professional careers. Since the Seven Sisters taught rhetoric as a subject, young women were effectively being “trained in an essential activity of participatory democracy: the practice of informed discourse”.16 While the curriculum was intended to be as rigorous as the Ivy League, home economics often featured at the Seven Sisters and historically Black women’s colleges.17 11  Patricia A.  Palmieri, “Here Was Fellowship: A Social Portrait of Academic Women at Wellesley College, 1895–1920”, History of Education Quarterly, 23: 2, 1983, p.196. 12  Horowitz, Alma Mater, pp.152–153, 53 & 85; Horowitz, “Movie review”, p.1135. 13  Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990, pp.46–48. 14  Linda M. Perkins, “The African American Female Elite: The Early History of African American Women in the Seven Sister Colleges, 1880–1960”, Harvard Educational Review, 67: 4, 1997, pp.720, 723–726. 15  Palmieri, “Here Was Fellowship”, pp. 206–207. 16  Kathryn M. Conway, “Woman Suffrage and the History of Rhetoric at the Seven Sisters Colleges, 1865–1919”, in Andrea A. Lunsford (ed.), Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, p.204. 17  Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education for American Women, New  York: Harper, 1959, pp.89–90; Carol Anderson Darling, “An evolving historical paradigm: From ‘home economics’ to ‘family and consumer sciences’”, Journal of Consumer Studies & Home Economics, 19: 4, 1995, pp.367–379; Collins, “Black Women in the Academy”, pp.32–33.

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Longitudinal data highlighted that, although college women married later, less frequently, and had fewer children than their peers, family and traditional sex roles remained central to many graduates’ lives.18 Historian Joyce Antler classified Wellesley’s class of 1897 into three categories: single daughters, some of whom combined family responsibilities with a paid vocation, such as teaching; wives, a minority of whom had a brief career window prior to marriage; and independents, who, married or single, pursued careers as physicians, writers, social reformers, librarians, and teachers.19 Many women’s colleges would begin to develop dynamic research cultures, especially in the social sciences, across the first decades of the twentieth century.20 At Wellesley College, faculty women came to regard their additional pastoral responsibilities as depriving time from their own scholarship. Additionally, influential ideas increasingly considered physical proximity to students as undermining of personal privacy. Although many faculty women remained unmarried, same-sex attachments were common within the homosocial setting of women’s colleges. At the behest of faculty women, staff boarding houses were gradually built farther away from the residence halls to offer greater social autonomy.21 Thus, collegiate traditions shifted in response to broader transformations in higher education and society. The complex history of women’s higher education offers the scenery against which Mona Lisa Smile’s narrative is painted. Alongside the expansion of higher education, the turn-of-the-century “reform imperative” at women’s colleges waned following the Great Depression and the Second World War.22 Many college women entered higher education between the 1940s and 1960s with dreams of professional or artistic careers, yet continued to graduate with aspirations directed towards marriage and the  Gordon, Gender and Higher Education, pp.30–33, 196–200.  Joyce Antler, “‘After College, What?’: New Graduates and the Family Claim”, American Quarterly, 32: 4, 1980, pp.409–434. 20  Mary Ann Dzuback, “Research at Women’s Colleges, 1890–1940”, in Margaret A. Nash (ed.), Women’s Higher Education in the United States, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 21  Horowitz, Alma Mater, pp.48, 53–55, 179–197. For female friendship, same-sex attachments, and “Boston Marriages”, see: Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The female world of love and ritual: Relations between women in nineteenth-century America”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1: 1, 1975, pp.1–29; Palmieri, “Here Was Fellowship”, pp.205–206; Horowitz, Alma Mata, pp.188–193. 22  Gordon, Gender and Higher Education, p.196. 18 19

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family.23 Women represented 30.2% of all university students by 1950, with 12% enrolled at women’s colleges.24 Across the 1950s, some Wellesley College students continued in the tradition of advocating for women’s rights and went on to pursue professional careers; others did not. In 1962, artist and educator Agnes A. Abbott suggested that Wellesley was proud of graduates who had become artists but even more appreciative of those who had used their education to become aesthetes and philanthropists.25 This is the paradox that the character of Katherine Watson encounters when she arrives as the new art history instructor.

Historical Memory of Women in the Ivory Tower Mona Lisa Smile inspires reflection about the construction of historical memory in popular culture as the film provoked controversy about the history of Wellesley College. The cornerstone of its narrative is to envision Wellesley as “the most conservative college in the nation”, under the leadership of a president and administrators who welcome neither modern art nor modern pedagogies. Alumnae would reject these claims, telling the New York Times that Wellesley was not a bastion of conservatism and did indeed teach modern art during the 1950s.26 Upon the film’s release in December 2003, fifty years after the fictional narrative is set, Wellesley College President Diane Chapman Walsh asserted that this “Hollywood fantasy … made no claim to historical accuracy”.27 Film reviewers for high-­ profile newspapers similarly accepted that the film likely comprised significant historical latitude.28 Wellesley’s purported conservatism thus emerges as a central plot device: a “foil” that enables Katherine Watson to be framed as a “bohemian from California” who moves east to disrupt New 23  Babette Faehmel, College Women in the Nuclear Age: Cultural Literacy and Female Identity, 1940–1960, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2011. 24  Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education, pp.6, 49. 25  Agnes A. Abbot, “The Department of Art at Wellesley College”, Art Journal, 21: 4, 1962, pp.264–268. 26   Marian Burros, “Critique From 50’s Wellesley Grads”, New York Times, 29 December 2003. 27  Diana Chapman Walsh, “Message from the President to Wellesley College alumnae concerning the film, Mona Lisa Smile”, Wellesley College, 9 January 2004, at: http://web.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/President/DCW/Announcements/monalisasmile.html 28   Stephen Hunter, “‘Mona Lisa Smile’: Liberating Lessons”, Washington Post, 19 December 2003; Elizabeth M.  Tamny, “History Versus Her Story”, Chicago Reader, 15 January 2004, at: https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/history-versus-her-story/

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England’s staid educational orthodoxies.29 How, then, can the film’s historical memory be interpreted in the early 2000s and in the wake of #MeTooAcademia during the 2010s? Set across the northern hemisphere’s academic year, between the fall of 1953 and spring of 1954, Mona Lisa Smile romanticises life on an autumnal campus surrounded by picturesque historical buildings. All outdoor filming took place on Wellesley College’s highly cinematic grounds.30 A great lover of beauty, Henry Fowle Durant had been committed to building a beautiful campus that increasingly became defined by architectural luxury and grandeur.31 The main character and the audience discover this campus together, both positioned as outsiders. As the insider Betty Warren narrates: “Katherine Watson … made up in brains what she lacked in pedigree”. The product of a progressive higher education in California, Katherine finds herself enamoured by the history and theatricality of Wellesley’s rituals and traditions.32 Not yet “Dr Watson”, she is a graduate student who is in the process of completing her dissertation about modern art, focused on Picasso, despite never having travelled to Europe.33 As Katherine meets other faculty and staff members, she encounters a conservative campus culture. The speech, elocution, and poise instructor Nancy Abbey (Marcia Gay Harden) has established an incongruous career teaching the tenets of housewifery following a failed wartime romance. Her situation is pitiable, not because she is employed or remains unmarried but because she leads a solitary lifestyle in the women’s quarters. Unmarried women lodge together in staff housing that does not permit male visitors but remains separate from student accommodations. The school nurse, Amanda Armstrong (Juliet Stevenson), is quietly mourning the recent passing of her companion, Josephine. The institution fires Armstrong for making diaphragms available to students. A contraceptive medical device, the use of which required fitting and clinical instruction,  Horowitz, “Movie review”, p.1135; Walsh, “Message”.  Walsh, “Message”; “Wellesley College Is Among the Stars of the Film, ‘Mona Lisa Smile’”, Wellesley College, 3 December 2003, at: http://web.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/ Releases/2003/120303.html 31  Horowitz, Alma Mata, pp.42, 49–53. 32  For rituals at women’s colleges, see: Horowitz, Alma Mata, pp.173–178. 33  The film is not entirely clear about whether Katherine is completing her PhD at a fictional institution called Oakland State University, or whether her elite students are mocking her education at “Oakland State”. This is redolent of the romanticisation of the Ivy League and prejudices about different educational cultures in popular culture. 29 30

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the diaphragm was not widely available and, in most contexts, illegal, until the decision in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965.34 People tacitly tolerate Armstrong’s sexuality, while discussing it in hushed tones, but her distribution of contraceptives to unmarried college women is depicted as highly transgressive. Mona Lisa Smile imagines the student body as mostly WASPs: White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant women from highly privileged social backgrounds. As the Los Angeles Times reflected, Betty Warren is the “WASP conservative”; Joan Brandwyn (Julia Stiles) is the “brainy WASP goddess”; and Giselle Levy (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is “a very unorthodox Jew, the token exotic”.35 Wealth does not protect Giselle from ethnic slurs: Betty’s mother, Mrs Warren (Donna Mitchell), openly describes her as a “kike”. The film itself premiered at a historical moment when WASPs, as an ethnic majority, were entering relative demographic decline across North America.36 Only a single African American and Asian American student appear, extremely indistinctly, in montages of Watson’s lectures. Wellesley College published historical and contemporary enrolment data upon the film’s release, indicating that fewer than 1% of students in the 1953–54 school year had been African American, and 2.6% had been international students from 30 countries.37 Alumna also recalled the casual attire many students wore to class, in contradistinction to the prim twinsets and pearls depicted in the film.38 While Mona Lisa Smile implicitly captured the era’s ethnocentrism and racism, its historical memory of an enclave of rich, elegant WASP women may not wholly have embodied the student experience. Academic socialisation at women’s colleges remained distinctive from other institutions of higher learning. Well into the twentieth century, women’s colleges were the few academic settings where women outnumbered men.39 One of the only faculty men in Mona Lisa Smile is the Italian 34  Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America, Urbana: University of Illinois Press [1974], 2002, pp.217–218, 289. 35  Manohla Dargis, “Movie Review; Fuzzy feminism and smart women”, Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2003. 36  Eric Kaufmann, “The Decline of the WASP in the United States and Canada”, in Eric Kaufmann (ed.), Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities, London: Routledge, 2004. 37  “Wellesley College Is Among the Stars of the Film”. 38  Burros, “Critique From 50’s Wellesley Grads”. 39  Palmieri, “Here Was Fellowship”, p.195.

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instructor, Bill Dunbar (Dominic West). Described by Nancy as “a big war hero” who “thinks he’s something special”, students and staff admire the charismatic Bill due to rumours about being stationed in Europe during the Second World War. Beyond extended scenes of the art history and Italian classrooms, the film depicts the practical subjects that sought to inculcate the femininity expected of privileged women during the 1950s. During synchronised swimming in their physical education class, for example, the young women are reminded to smile. Abbey teaches the art of household management, instructing: “A few years from now, your sole responsibility will be taking care of your husband and children. The grade that matters most is the grade he [i.e., your husband] gives you”. Astonished by these revelations, Katherine describes Wellesley as “a finishing school disguised as a college”. The importance of higher learning and life experience are equally central to Mona Lisa Smile. As Katherine becomes aware that many of her students aspire towards marriage alone, she encourages them to follow both their educational and professional dreams. Personally, Katherine values the worlds of art and the mind over domesticity: her career aspirations determine her decisions without negating her gender or sexuality. Indeed, the film enables the possibility that Katherine had an affair with William Holden, one of the most famous Hollywood actors of the 1950s.40 While supportive of her students’ romances, Katherine challenges them not to limit their aspirations in both an educative and mentorial capacity. This focus made the film distinctive from other 2000s films about higher education, which focused principally on the social and extramural aspects of college life rather than teaching and learning.41 The star persona that Julia Roberts developed across the 1990s heralded her characterisation of Katherine Watson as an academic career woman exploring romance. Roberts rose to fame after her portrayal of an idealistic sex worker who falls for her client, an older man, in Garry 40  This may allude to the “extradiegetic text” that is Roberts’s professional and personal life, including her much-publicised romances with fellow film stars. R. Barton Palmer, “Love Hurts, but Not Too Much: Julia Roberts’s Scenes of Suffering”, in Rebecca Bell-Metereau and Colleen Glenn (eds), Star Bodies and the Erotics of Suffering, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015, p.289. 41  Tamara Yakaboski and Saran Donahoo, “Hollywood’s Representations of College Women and the Implications for Housing and Residence Life Professionals”, Journal of College & University Student Housing, 41: 2, 2015, pp.44–61.

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Marshall’s blockbuster Pretty Woman (1990), followed by a series of dramatic thrillers and romantic comedies that gained both critical acclaim and commercial success.42 Her films developed a multi-layered intertextuality, some of which amounted to self-referential commentary about Roberts’s own life and career.43 In Alan J. Pakula’s The Pelican Brief (1993), Roberts starred as a brilliant law student who uncovers a significant political conspiracy while having an affair with her professor. Both P. J. Hogan’s My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) and Marshall’s Runaway Bride (1999) depicted modern women with professional confidence but deep uncertainties about romantic commitment. Roberts then portrayed a world-­ famous film star whose life paralleled the actor’s own most directly in Roger Michell’s Notting Hill (1999). Humorously and seriously, this film explored a myth with a long history: the comparison between actresses and prostitution.44 Her character, Anna Scott, plays an art critic in one of this film’s diegetic movies; and Anna later gifts the original of Marc Chagall’s 1912 artwork La Mariée to her real-world beau, William Thacker (Hugh Grant). Each successive film thus foreshadowed future intertextuality. The romantic subplots in Mona Lisa Smile also reveal changing assumptions about power, romance, and sexual misconduct in the ivory tower. In 2003, Wellesley College alumna recollected that “several [of us] remember seductive male professors, like the professor of Italian in the movie”.45 Similarly, one film reviewer reflected: “Dominic West makes a strong impression as the philandering Romance Languages teacher”.46 In the wake of the #MeToo movement, however, the film’s historical memory must be reinterpreted in terms of #MeTooAcademia. Since 2017, countless exposés have revealed the extent to which a culture of sexual  McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, pp.254–267.  Palmer, “Love Hurts”, pp.288–308. 44  Kirsten Pullen, Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 45  Burros, “Critique From 50’s Wellesley Grads”. Given the demography of Wellesley College, same-sex relationships between staff and students were certainly possible. During the earlier history of women’s colleges, Horowitz suggests: “Most committed [female] friends were peers. But occasionally they crossed the line between faculty and students”. Horowitz, Alma Mata, p.191. 46  Colin Covert, “’50s sense; Rich period detail frames the femme drama of ‘Mona Lisa Smile’”, Star Tribune, 19 December 2003. 42 43

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harassment and assault, largely perpetrated by white male professors, persists in academia.47 As family therapy scholar Killian Kyle reflected caustically in a 2017 retrospective: “Is a 2003 film sending the message that job satisfaction for female academics would rise with just a kiss on the lips from a male colleague? Does the film nostalgically pine for the good old days when real men caught their colleagues with a kiss[?]”.48 Early in the film, Nancy states to Katherine that Bill Dunbar “sleeps with the students”. While neither woman is impressed with this behaviour, they consider the circumstances to be unfortunate and even unavoidable. Not only does Dunbar have a reputation for seducing students; the previous spring he began a sexual relationship with Giselle, who enters Watson’s art history class. The film portrays Giselle, who is the beneficiary of the college nurse’s contraceptives, as a provocative, empowered, and sexually knowledgeable young woman. That she knows her own mind and is in tune with her sexuality provides the rationale for framing the liaison as forbidden love with an older man. Although Dunbar has tried to break it off, it is Giselle who continues to pursue him. Implicitly, this characterisation channelled various aspects of the younger Roberts in Pretty Woman, The Pelican Brief, and Notting Hill. Film reviews described Giselle as a “sexually adventurous undergrad” and “sexual sophisticate” or a “class tart” and “the whore of Mensa”.49 Mona Lisa Smile offers significant moral latitude based on the consensual nature of the relationship and the adulthood of both parties, with no consideration accorded to the fundamental imbalance of power between student and professor.50 In contrast, Katherine and Bill are fellow instructors who share progressive attitudes towards women’s higher education. Katherine quickly becomes aware of Bill’s probable liaison with Giselle; she reveals displeasure but refrains from intervening or even commenting directly. Although his interest in Katherine makes Giselle jealous, it also offers an  Jennifer L. Airey, “#MeToo”, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 37: 1, 2018, pp.7–13.  Killian Kyle, “Mona Lisa Smile, Wit, and Teacher’s Pet: Three Depictions of Female Academics”, Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, 29: 4, 2017, p.227. 49  Covert, “’50s sense”; Hunter, “‘Mona Lisa Smile’”; Michael Wilmington, “Forced ‘Smile’; Cliches and sentiment bog down Julia Roberts in ‘Mona Lisa Smile’”, Chicago Tribune, 19 December 2003; Lisa Schwarzbaum, “Julia Roberts inspires a band of unenlightened gals. Ho hum: Mona Lisa Smile (Film)”, Entertainment Weekly, 19 December 2003. 50  Michele A.  Paludi (ed.) Ivory Power: Sexual Harassment on Campus, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990; Corrinne Harol and Teresa Zackodnik, “Consenting to conflict”, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 38: 1, 2019, pp.205–214. 47 48

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unanticipated glimpse of feminist solidarity in a patriarchal world. At Betty’s lavish wedding reception, one student describes Katherine as “too old” for Bill, whereas Giselle considers her “too smart”. Just as Bill attempts to woo Katherine by styling the band’s rendition of Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa” (1950) as “our song”, Giselle asks him to dance. The film does not depict embarrassment or animosity between the women; the only sense of moral judgement is aimed at Bill himself. As student and instructor leave for the dancefloor, Katherine smirks to herself, with the singer crooning of “that Mona Lisa strangeness in your smile”.51 An affair begins after Bill gifts Katherine a stereoscope featuring the Old Masters, including Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (ca. 1503). Katherine jokes that he is a “philandering Italian professor”, but she also insists: “No students”. This suggests that Katherine accepts Bill’s behaviour on some level but that he should exercise self-restraint—at least while they are together. Despite countless colleagues previously having disregarded Bill’s involvement with students, college administrators exhibit disapprobation towards this fraternisation between staff. The romance fades when Bill’s heroic wartime past is exposed as a sham. Katherine is “so perfect”, whereas Bill is untrustworthy; his dalliances with students anticipate his unsuitability but are not the dominating factor. The influence of women’s liberation across the decades is palpable in Mona Lisa Smile. By 2003, women had established themselves in academia to a far greater extent than during the 1950s, yet disparities with men still remained in post-PhD employment patterns, family formation, and disciplinary integration.52 Despite the concerns of alumna and President Walsh, the film’s historical memory of Wellesley College’s campus, traditions, accommodation, demography, curriculum, and careers had grounding in the historical record. The film’s narrative of forbidden love, however, would effectively undermine genuine concerns about the professoriate’s abuse of power. In this historical memory, the faculty women emerge as silent bystanders and the enablers of predatory men.

51  Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, “Mona Lisa”, Capitol, 1950, Internet Archive, https:// archive.org/details/78_mona-lisa_nat-king-cole-les-baxter-jay-livingston-ray-evans_ gbia0017135a/Mona+Lisa+-+Nat+_King_+Cole+-+Les+Baxter-restored.flac 52  Nicholas H. Wolfinger, Mary Ann Mason, and Marc Goulden, “Problems in the pipeline: Gender, marriage, and fertility in the ivory tower”, The Journal of Higher Education, 79: 4, 2008, pp.388–405.

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Teacher Centrality, Pedagogy, and Pastoral Care The representation of teaching in popular culture relies on myths and stereotypes that contribute to the status of teaching as a profession. One powerful manifestation is the good teacher stereotype, which “advances the notion of the teacher as hero who is completely dedicated to students”.53 As early as the 1950s, popular culture about female superheroes with schoolteacher alter-egos began to conflate women’s teaching with heroism that espoused an educative social function.54 Later epitomised by Miss Honey (Embeth Davidtz) in Danny DeVito’s film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1996), the good teacher and heroic educator exist alongside broader political and sociocultural myths that envision individual teachers as the key to students’ educational success.55 What constitutes good teaching, however, is always subjective, culturally contingent, and has implications within and beyond the classroom. Education scholar Marianne A. Larsen describes these popular culture trends in terms of the “discourse of teacher centrality”: a character archetype that connects student learning to the individual achievements of inspirational teachers. From the female seminary movement to the Seven Sisters, the idealised nineteenth-century schoolmistress was initially a historical figure.56 Based upon stereotypes of the schoolmistress who becomes her students’ moral exemplar, this gendered archetype characterises women as selfless, caring educators, who demonstrate complete dedication to their students. Always willing to make a special effort for her students, she is sensitive to their varying needs and seeks to inculcate the moral values essential for survival beyond the classroom. Yet celebrating the transformative influence of individual teachers, Larson contends, effectively overlooks broader systematic failures that undermine such educational goals. The discourse of teacher centrality enables blame to be cast upon teachers, rather than institutions if, and when, students do not meet expectations.57 53  Marianne A. Larsen, “Teachers, Stereotypes of”, in E. Provenzo and J. P. Renault (eds), Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education, Vol. II, Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008, pp.765–767. 54  Andrew L.  Grunzke, Education and the Female Superhero: Slayers, Cyborgs, Sorority Sisters, and Schoolteachers, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. 55  Fisher, Harris, and Jarvis, Education in Popular Culture, pp.23–44. 56  Horowitz, Alma Mata, pp.9–27. 57  Larsen, “Troubling the discourse of teacher centrality”, pp.207–213.

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Film reviewers envisaged the characterisation of Katherine Watson and the star persona of Julia Roberts in terms of the tenets of teacher centrality. “Anyone who’s ever been moved by a teacher to dream a slightly bigger dream”, the Washington Post concluded, “ought to love the film, for it gets at a truer model of teacher’s inspiration”.58 Certainly, Mona Lisa Smile represents its art history instructor as a selfless, caring, and heroic educator who displays complete personal dedication to her college students but is equally demanding and has high expectations. This portrayal was particularly powerful because it paralleled the “on-screen brand” that Roberts had established between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. According to film scholar Paul McDonald, this star persona had been “formed around successive enactments of feisty sweetness, playing characters who are kind, amiable, friendly, considerate, pleasant and delightful, while equally determined, strong-willed, brave, energetic and (politely) aggressive”.59 The Chicago Tribune concurred, with the film reviewer revealing himself to be “partial to this kind of story—and to Roberts’ kind of teacher who really does exist and makes a difference”.60 The discipline of art history provided further foundations for this character’s intertextual idealisation. Mona Lisa Smile came out in 2003, the year approximated to be the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s sixteenth-century portrait. Originally, historian Donald Sassoon observes, the Mona Lisa’s major innovation was its subject’s pose: the contrapposto. While not the most celebrated Old Master, artists considered da Vinci’s technique—especially sfumato—to be phenomenal and his subject beautiful. The Mona Lisa gained greater distinction amongst a more democratic audience once ensconced in Paris’s Musée du Louvre from 1793. When the Romantics encountered the subject’s smile some newly imagined a mysterious, enigmatic gaze that encapsulated the emerging myth of the femme fatale. Only across the twentieth century, Sassoon argues, did the artwork gain the status of a true global icon.61 Roberts’s global film star persona echoed the multiplicity of meanings attributed to the da Vinci across the centuries. During the 1990s, film critics had considered her smile to be the “signature feature” of the “Roberts  Hunter, “‘Mona Lisa Smile’”.  McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, p.254. 60  Wilmington, “Forced ‘Smile’”. 61  Donald Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa: The Making of a Global Icon, New  York: Harcourt, 2001. 58 59

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brand”, functioning as “a condensed statement of her star visibility”.62 As Katherine Watson, Roberts becomes the Mona Lisa of Mona Lisa Smile. The subject and object of fascination, staff and students alike perceive Katherine as “perfect”, “strange”, and ultimately unknowable. The character of Bill Dunbar even “nicknames her Mona Lisa for her inscrutable expression”, the Chicago Reader film reviewer reflected, “but for the rest of the film Roberts is laughing and smiling hugely as always”.63 Describing da Vinci’s Mona Lisa as “the lady with the mystic smile”, Cole’s classic refrain in the film’s wedding scene similarly asks: “Are you warm, are you real Mona Lisa? / Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?”64 The Mona Lisa does not feature as a site of textual deconstruction in the film, yet its transcendence of high art and popular culture is precisely what Watson brings to the classroom. Her pedagogy demonstrates the inherently political nature of teaching in higher education, especially in the humanities.65 The didactic style she plans for her first lecture backfires because her privileged students are extremely well prepared for class, so much so that they know their art history syllabus backwards. This deeply unsettles and embarrasses Katherine, resulting in a poor peer review from faculty administrators. Yet she realises quickly that her students’ knowledge of art history is without significant depth or flexibility. For her next lecture, Watson abandons the old syllabus and employs a more assertive pedagogy. Newly confronting her students with examples of modern art, she asks: “Is it any good?” The new syllabus, Watson announces, will be very different from the previous one, exploring questions such as: “What is art? What makes it good, or bad, and who decides?” These questions implicitly focus on the operation of power in both education and culture, an approach that would become a hallmark of critical pedagogues such as Paulo Freire in subsequent decades.66 Watson’s new pedagogies seek to develop active learning, applied art criticism, and critical thinking. In the classroom, she challenges her students, saying: “Look beyond the paint. Let us try to open our minds to a new idea”. Through constant questioning and dynamic class discussion, an excursion to the unveiling of Jackson Pollack’s modern classic Number  McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, pp.212, 216.  Tamny, “History Versus Her Story”. 64  Livingston and Evans, “Mona Lisa”. 65  Fisher, Harris, and Jarvis, Education in Popular Culture, p.28. 66  Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Herder and Herder, 1970. 62 63

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1 (Lavender Mist) (1950) and practical engagement with a Paint-by-­ Numbers of Vincent van Gogh’s Still Life: Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers (1888) exemplifies the approach. Given Wellesley College’s tradition of training women artists, one film reviewer reflected: “It’s worth noting that nowhere in this movie do we see any artwork by women”.67 Despite this striking absence, the students respond to the inquisitive, dynamic, and social classroom that Watson creates. Gradually, she encourages her students to develop their own artistic interpretations rather than reiterate derivative analyses grounded in existing art criticism or scholarship. Watson seeks to inculcate specific moral values and habits into her students as per the discourse of teacher centrality, yet her proto-feminist ideals emerge as both unfamiliar and confronting. Challenging her students to look beyond the delimiting sex roles of 1950s American culture, the process of unlearning cultural expectations about womanhood excites some and leaves others deeply uneasy.68 Giselle Levy is so inspired by her new art history instructor that she hopes she and Katherine share a physical resemblance. In contrast, Betty Warren writes a college newspaper editorial asserting that Watson’s teachings undermine the stereotypically feminine “roles we were born to fulfill”. Watson turns this into a teachable moment, reorientating her students’ burgeoning critical analyses towards the representation of women in 1950s popular culture, asking: “What will the future scholars see when they study us? The portrait of women today?” These pedagogies gradually ingratiate Katherine to the young women, who increasingly consider her to be an object of fascination and inspiration. The professional consequence, however, is that her teaching is constantly under review for being too modern and transgressive. There are many films about literature and music teachers because, like art history, these disciplines foster narratives about students’ self-discovery and personal development through commitment and dedication.69 The mentoring that Katherine offers becomes pivotal in her students’ identity formation and personal development as young women. Although Roberts undertook the role just as her symbolic influence and commercial value as an actor was about to decline, her character “becomes an inspirational figure to a group of young women”:  Tamny, “History Versus Her Story”.  Later generations of college students sometimes envisaged feminist pedagogies as bringing an unwarranted political agenda to the classroom. Dale M. Bauer, “The Other ‘F’ Word: The Feminist in the Classroom”, College English, 52: 4, 1990, pp.385–396. 69  Fisher, Harris, and Jarvis, Education in Popular Culture, pp.29–32. 67 68

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While the character’s influence is primarily pedagogic, the role cast Roberts as a maternal figure: not only does she steer her students to learn “progressive” life lessons but as those roles were played by a new breed of ­up-and-­coming young female performers.… Roberts assumed the status of matriarchal-star.70

This character has some maternal qualities, but Katherine more fully personifies the knowledgeable older sister. When she attends an annual dormitory ritual in which a faculty member drinks with the young women, for example, it becomes a kiss-and-tell about romance, affairs, and marriage. It is notable, therefore, that Roberts is only between ten and fifteen years older than her co-stars.71 Consequently, Watson becomes engaged in a high level of pastoral care when her students are most emotionally vulnerable. Some film reviewers found this characterisation far too earnest, as The New  Yorker noted: “Katherine involves herself in the lives of her students”.72 Yet this occurs, at least partially, because the young women’s mothers do not share their worldview. Mrs Warren upholds the feminine decorum of the 1950s to the extent that she is unsympathetic to Betty’s new husband’s extramarital affair. Regarding a photographic reproduction of the Mona Lisa in a book, Betty asks her mother: “She’s smiling. Is she happy? … She looks happy, so what does it matter?” Promoting the couple’s reconciliation, Mrs Warren advises: “You don’t wash your dirty laundry in public”. To Katherine’s approval, Betty instead files for divorce and develops post-­ graduation plans to pursue law school and become Giselle’s housemate in New York City. It is in these composite contexts—pedagogical and pastoral—that Watson embodies the good teacher and heroic educator. Watson is most contented when her students, having grown as young women, can interpret and critically analyse both classical and modern art in an informed and thoughtful manner. The faculty administrators, however, describe Watson’s pedagogies as “a little unorthodox for Wellesley”, insisting that she must incorporate “a little less modern art” for her contract to be renewed. Instead, Watson chooses to leave Wellesley College and finally travel abroad to gain first-hand experience of European art. This mirrors reality,  McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, pp.226–227.  Ibid., p.229. 72  David Denby, “Star Season; The Current Cinema”, The New Yorker, 79; 1, 2003, p.169. 70 71

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as historically, when instructors at women’s colleges reached a point of burnout due to their heavy teaching, pastoral, and scholarly responsibilities, they, too, travelled to Europe.73 The discourse of teacher centrality, Larsen contends, contributes to public policy that justifies the de-professionalisation and de-politicisation of teachers’ work.74 Accordingly, Watson begins at Wellesley College on a one-year teaching contract. Constantly facing unsympathetic college administrators with no interest in dynamic pedagogies or curricula, her teaching practice and syllabi are under constant review. Watson’s commitment to “making a difference” results in an intensifying level of pastoral care, placing her at risk of burnout. Despite her investment in completing her doctoral thesis, Watson does not appear to have enough sustained time to engage with her research. In the process, she, too, overlooks the operation of power within the college’s sexual cultures. Watson rejects a highly conditional contract renewal due to its harsh conditions, including a pre-­ approved syllabus and lesson plans. Only a single cohort of art history students are the beneficiaries of her transformational learning and teaching in Mona Lisa Smile due to the conditions of her labour.

Conclusion: “The Lady with the Mystic Smile” Popular culture’s educational myths influence perceptions of the historical, sociocultural, and pedagogical experience of higher education. The depiction of Wellesley College in Mona Lisa Smile had greater fidelity to the historical record than many 1950s alumna would concede. The uses of historical memory, however, illuminate what is seen and unseen about the experiences of women in the ivory tower, as both staff and students. The star persona of Julia Roberts, including a smile that channels myths about Leonardo da Vinci’s global icon, ensures that Katherine Watson becomes the feisty embodiment of the feminised discourse of teacher centrality for higher education. Roberts had “both the discipline and warmth an inspiring teacher requires”, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reflected: “You can believe that she would inspire her students to wonder whether Leonardo’s most famous subject was smiling because she was happy, or because it was expected of her”.75  Horowitz, Alma Mata, p.184.  Larsen, “Troubling the discourse of teacher centrality”, pp.207–213. 75  Covert, “’50s sense”. 73 74

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Exploring educational myths about the good teacher and heroic educator illuminates the features of the unseen university. Mona Lisa Smile romanticised—and thus normalised—the abuse of power between instructors and college students, imagining as forbidden love what may now be perceived as sexual misconduct. The film’s depiction of contingent employment also anticipated the increase in non-tenure track positions, or the “adjunctification” of higher education, in the twenty-first century.76 Direct consideration of the unseen university’s real-world consequences, as imagined through historical memory, could generate transformation in higher education policy. Instead, legitimate critique too easily becomes subsumed within narratives of individual teachers who single-handedly change students’ lives.

76  Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott, The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

CHAPTER 7

Gods and Monsters in the Ruined University: Filmic Teachers and Their Moral Pedagogies from The Faculty to  Higher Learning Susan Hopkins

Playing God: Fantasy Versus Reality This chapter explores the classed and gendered narratives and ideologies, and their political and moral pedagogies, of selected film case studies centred on filmic teachers and university professors from the 1970s to the 2010s. The chapter also examines critically how particular popular myths about teaching and education are reproduced in these film narratives, because, as Harmes, Huijser and Danaher suggest, popular stereotypes and (mis)conceptions about teaching and education can be both powerful and disempowering as “something mythic also crosses into areas of faith

S. Hopkins (*) University of Southern Queensland, Springfield, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Harmes, R. Scully (eds.), Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32350-8_7

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and belief”.1 Indeed, several filmic scenes under analysis here construct the university professor as a kind of idealized, charismatic, embodied god-like figure; representing a stark contrast to the common realities of most teaching academics in the contemporary, digital, neoliberal university. As we shall see, popular images of the honoured, eccentric, but privileged professor enjoying his [sic] “cushy” tenure in an elitist “ivory tower”, sheltered in beautiful historic buildings draped in ivy, are far removed from the precarious, lived experiences of the typically female academics who deliver most of the teaching online, in democratised, rationalised and restructured universities.2 Hence, these film scenes and narratives not only reveal classed and gendered moral judgements of “good” and “bad” teachers, but also trace the shifting socio-cultural climate of commercialism and corporatisation around universities in the 1990s and into the 2000s, which has fundamentally altered perceptions of the “good” university.3 Moreover, while popular entertainment frequently focuses on the sexual and social relationships of fantasy professors inhabiting symbolic architectures of tradition and elitism, in reality, the digital, neoliberal university is increasingly a “toxic” and “desocialised environment” of digital surveillance, isolation and competition rather than collegiality.4 As Dervin rightly points out, myths of learning and teaching are not “innocent” but rather “naturalize certain norms” and reveal unequal power relationships between people and social groups within the academy.5 Thus, deconstructing the myths of the academy, whether they be political or politically correct beliefs and assumptions, is vitally important to moving beyond oppressive stereotypes and power hierarchies towards rethinking the very idea of the university and its purpose.6 1  Marcus K. Harmes, Henk Huijser & Patrick Alan Danaher, “Demythologizing Teaching and Learning in Education: Towards a Research Agenda”, in Marcus K.  Harmes, Henk Huijser & Patrick Alan Danaher (eds), Myths in Education, Learning and Teaching: Policies, Practices and Principles, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp.1–14. 2  See: J.  Butler, Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence, Verso: New  York, 2004; Rosalind Gill & Ngaire Donaghue, “Resilience, Apps and Reluctant Individualism: Technologies of Self in the Neoliberal Academy”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 54, 2016, p.92; Raewyn Connell, The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why it’s Time for Radical Change, London: Zed Books, 2019, p.48. 3  Connell, The Good University, 2019. 4  Gill & Donaghue, “Resilience, Apps and Reluctant Individualism”, p.97. 5  Fred Dervin, Foreword to Harmes, Huijser & Danaher, Myths in Education, Learning and Teaching, p. xiii. 6  Ibid.

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The representative case studies provided in this chapter are subject to critical, textual analysis, exposing the popular mythologies, moral accountancy, fears or fantasies visualised within a wide range of popular mainstream films including, Marathon Man (1976), Oxford Blues (1984), Gross Misconduct (1993), Higher Learning (1994), Good Will Hunting (1997), The Faculty (1998), Bad Teacher (2011), The Riot Club (2014), The Social Network (2010) and Cheat (2018). These films were chosen not only because they present a clear picture of the shifting roles and representations of teachers and professors over time, but because their cultural influences continue to this day, through their postcinematic, post-heritage media “second life” screenings online and through streaming platforms.7 The method deployed here is predominantly a framing analysis of the moral evaluations and key themes which emerge from close study of the feature film scripts (dialogue) and language, visual elements and arrangements of scenes, including the key phrases and attention-arresting headlines used in the movie posters and film trailers.8 The chapter also includes an archetypal analysis (underpinned by feminist philosophical and psycho-­analytical theoretical frameworks), which critically examines the gendered filmic construction of the professor as a kind of “Sage” figure who acts as a metaphorical midwife to the “Hero” or natural genius protagonist who is on a quest of selftransformation through “higher learning”.9 This chapter also includes an autoethnographic element in historical context, as it compares and contrasts the moral universe of the filmic professor and his antiquated Ivy League “habitus” to the personal and political lived realities of being a female, enabling education practitioner in a regional Australian university in neoliberal times.10 Since the 1990s 7  See: Neil Ewen, “ ‘Talk to Each Other Like It’s 1995’: Mapping Nostalgia for the 1990s in Contemporary Media Culture”, Television & New Media, 21: 6, 2020, pp. 574–580. 8  See: Robert. M.  Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm”, Journal of Communication, 43: 4, 1993, pp.  51–58; Robert M.  Entman, “Framing Bias: Media in the Distribution of Power”, Journal of Communication, 57, 2005, pp. 163–173. 9  See: Carl Jung, Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster, London: Routledge Classics, 2005. 10  See Carolyn Ellis, The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004; Pierre Bourdieu & J. C. Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, London: Sage, 1977; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London, UK: Routledge, 1986; Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital”, in J. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood, 1986, pp. 241–258.

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(although originating in the 1980s), neoliberalist reforms, digitisation, increasing workloads and the time-space compression of late (academic) capitalism have so altered the experience of everyday teaching and learning in universities that such filmic mythologies of the honoured Sage scholar now seem not only antiquated but almost farcical.11 Despite or rather because of these historical and cultural shifts, however, popular cultural representations of academics provide a revealing retrospective on how the work of academics has changed and their status and agency eroded within the contemporary, restructured or “ruined” university.12 Ironically, due in part to raised aspirations and expectations of higher learning around the world, and its imagined capacity for social mobility and self-transformation, the dream of the sacred and ancient “beautiful” university, crowned by neo-Gothic architecture and deep gardens, has been popularised, in part though popular culture.13 Forever associated with traditional Oxford/Cambridge images and iconography, badges and crests, historic buildings and grounds, the common mise-en-scene of the university film works through fears and fantasies about social class and the access to privilege promised in such upper-class signifiers of the beautiful campus. Meanwhile, most actual academics increasingly work in the everywhere and nowhere space of online learning, as mostly disembodied providers of education as customer service, rather than honoured Sages strutting the lecture theatre, in part because most universities face increasing financial constraints, competition, digitisation and perpetual change. Hence, this chapter will also explore why the elitist, enchanted or fantasy “academy” populated by magical students or young “heroes”, is more fashionable and seductive than ever in the realm of popular culture, even and especially in contemporary times of common rationalism, massification and democratisation of higher education.

11  D.  Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990; D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 12  See: Martin Andrew, “Behind Voluntary Redundancy in Universities: The Stories Behind the Story”, Australian Universities Review, 62: 2, 2020, p.14; Connell, The Good University, 2019. 13  See: Simon Marginson, Higher Education and the Common Good, Carlton: Melbourne University Publishing, 2016.

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Pain as Pedagogy: Marathon Man (1976) and Professor Bisenthal’s Seminar In the 1976 thriller, Marathon Man, Dustin Hoffman plays Thomas “Babe” Levy, a PhD student in history at Columbia University who is also training as a marathon runner. While the film is about overcoming pain, it also contains a pivotal scene titled “Professor Bisenthal’s Seminar” which could be termed “pain as pedagogy”. We learn that victim-survivor protagonist Levy is even smarter than the average Columbia PhD student when, lost and running late, he asks another student for directions to Bisenthal’s class. The student is impressed that Levy is among the 4 students (the elite of the cohort of elites) who is “picked” out of 200 other applicants for Bisenthal’s seminar. The narrative set-up is a reminder that privilege and university study, especially postgraduate study, are inextricably linked in the popular imagination. We learn that such high expectations are a mixed blessing, however, when the professor greets Levy with an edge of sarcasm (“come, won’t you join us” spoken with sarcastic inflections) and immediately interrogates him in front of the class about his dissertation. Disappointed with his students, and determined to challenge them, Bisenthal (played by Fritz Weaver) berates his class and sermonises about declining standards: There is a shortage of natural resources. There is a shortage of breathable air, there’s even a shortage of adequate claret, but there’s no shortage of historians. We grind you out like linked sausages. It’s called progress. Well I say, let us hush this cry of progress until ten thousand years have passed … Hope you all flunk. Dismissed! (Professor Bisenthal, Marathon Man)

To be against “progress”, in the modern digital university would be regarded as risky, if not morally “wrong”. Yet, in this classic film text, the fictitious postgraduate students nonetheless respect the cantankerous Bisenthal as an archetypal Knower or Sage with an unassailable claim to authority. They also respect his provocative and aggressive approach to teaching as a kind of theatre of high challenge and even humiliation. Hero Levy is afraid of Bisenthal but also drawn to him via an (unconscious) desire for a guide on the perilous, psychological journey ahead.14 As misguided as it might seem to a twenty-first-century teacher, Bisenthal  Jung, Four Archetypes.

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a­ pparently sees his teaching as a moral (and masculine) project to push, provoke and pressurise his students to bring out the best in them, even if it makes them feel uncomfortable and threatened. Moreover, he feels free to offer unsolicited and unfavourable judgements on their personal and family lives. When he directs Levy to wait after class, we know there is a powerful and seductive narrative myth at play. Levy is to undertake a dangerous and almost spiritual quest of self-overcoming and he will need the older, insightful guide or god figure to tell him the unvarnished truth: Come. Sit. I knew your father. Your father got his doctorate at Columbia. You can’t fill his footsteps I’m sorry to say. You’re writing about a period in history that destroyed your father. But we are talking about an objective doctoral thesis it must not be turned into a hysterical crusade, that’s not the way to clear him. You may go. (Professor Bisenthal, Marathon Man)

Professor Bisenthal is clearly a man of his times who impresses his own authority, values and beliefs on his students with little consideration for their “feelings” or self-esteem. The filmic professor’s positioning as a righteous and ruthless god-like figure in the scene is clearly an outdated even abusive kind of pedagogy. His demeanour of barely suppressed anger and frustrated disappointment is far removed from the happy enthusiasm expected of the modern, managed and (self)disciplined academic worker. Similarly, it is difficult to imagine even a disgruntled academic so freely and publicly disparaging his [sic] own programme in this way today. Yet, within this 1970s narrative, it is the professor’s dissent and complaint about academic standards that sets him up as a source of integrity and moral authority within the universe of the film. Nonetheless, the narrative constructs him as an archetypal, older, insightful man or “Sage” character who, in encouraging Levy to let go of the past, offers both wise advice and a warning of what is to come in the form of future “villains” and “tricksters” in the filmic thriller narrative.15 It is difficult to imagine a provocative Professor Bisenthal (or his notions of objective historical truth) thriving or even surviving in the real world of the contemporary corporatized university (especially in my home context of Australia). The new modern academic, beholden to the still-new (corporatized) academy would hardly dare to risk the profits and reputation of  Ibid.

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an employer, and her own precarious financial security, in the manner of the entitled, arrogant, and outspoken (yet loveable) Professor Bisenthal. Even if she wanted to, the ordinary (or disposable) regional Australian academic worker would hardly dare to risk negative student evaluations (or in the case of casual workers, their employment contract) by confronting and embarrassing a valued student-client in such a theatrical manner, let alone offering unsolicited personal advice. Yet, in films about universities, including Cheat, The Social Network, The Riot Club, Legally Blonde and Marathon Man—shot in elite American and British institutions, such as Harvard, Columbia, Cambridge or Oxford—there is frequently such a scene which sets up the narrative. Akin to the common nightmare of being late for an exam, this customary early scene in university film narratives has the genius/prodigy Hero figure dashing through the beautiful campus in search of the lost seminar. The beautiful buildings and grounds not only serve to construct the landscape of privilege, but they also provide the necessary symbolic architecture to construct and support the god-like professor character in his element of tradition and prestige. The powerful professor calls out the student by name when he arrives late and shames him, then challenges the student with difficult, provocative or confronting questions. It is a common scene in films about universities because it helps to construct in visual shorthand the identity of both the misunderstood hero on a quest for self-growth and higher learning and the identity of the powerful awe-inspiring professor who guides this journey. It is a scene that, through the eyes of a female, enabling education practitioner in a regional Australian university at least, appears quite farcical and antiquated. Nonetheless, it remains a seductive fantasy for teachers and students alike; one that haunts and highlights the growing gap between the romanticised academy and the real university, or between the powerful “god professor” of the past and the disempowered, academic worker of today. It may be tempting to imagine an aristocratic, white, male, middle-aged Professor Bisenthal, with his specialized knowledge of classics and history, and his unrelenting drive for “truth” over and above “feelings”, as a relic of the long past or a dinosaur of the age of elitism and white privilege.16 It is worth noting, however, that even filmic professors with less-traditional 16  On the nonexistence of a “golden age” for academia (except for elite, white males), see: Hannah Forsyth, A History of the Modern Australian University, Sydney: NewSouth, 2014, esp. chapters 4 and 5.

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identity positionings seem to share the same traditional teaching style or “empty-vessel pedagogy” of teacher as the Knower who pours knowledge into the minds of receptive students. In the 1995 American film Higher Learning, for example, the African American, Professor Phipps (Laurence Fishburne) is passionate about identity politics and encourages his students to “invent their own ideology”. Yet, he also presents as another distant god professor figure who imposes his moral-political authority on his students in a challenging, if not threatening, way: This course will be like everything else in life. It will be what you make of it. I am not a babysitter. Ladies and gentlemen do not waste my time. (Professor Phipps, Higher Learning)

Professor Phipps also begins his first class of the semester by calling out students who have not paid their student fees and throwing them out of his class—a completely humiliating and classist version of an ice-breaking activity that would be unthinkable to most academics. Yet, within the universe of the film, Professor Phipps is also constructed as an intelligent, wise and respected figure: a scholarly guide for the first-term freshmen and also an apparent mouthpiece for the political views of the writer/director and the film’s exhortation to “question the knowledge”. More recently, the American film, The Social Network (2010) also deployed the figure of the traditional, uncompromising god-like male professor in a familiar early scene, wherein the student protagonist is running late to his first lecture. Part of what makes The Social Network such a beautiful (and award-winning) film to look at is its use of the beautiful campus visual motif and landscape: the film includes frequent shots of the snow-­ covered Harvard yard and statues, rowing teams on the river in the morning light, and imposing gothic architecture which speaks to heroic ambitions. Yet, it doesn’t take long for the young “punk genius” Hero of the film, Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) to get up and walk out of his computer science class, even after his teacher has drawn a high-­ challenge maths problem on the whiteboard. Just as Professor Phipps does not tolerate students falling asleep in his class (and actually wakes them up), the computer science professor of The Social Network does not tolerate students leaving early and thus names and shames the hero: Ah! I see we have our first surrender. Don’t worry Mr Zuckerberg, brighter men than you have tried and failed this class. (The Social Network)

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Again, the gap between filmic fantasy and lived realty is ridiculously wide, at least for most female, early career, casual or enabling education academics who would hardly tersely chastise students for leaving early (assuming the students turn up to an on-campus class in the first place), when so much emphasis is placed on providing comfort, flexibility and support to student-clients in the modern, market-oriented, student-centred workplace. Nonetheless, this recurring scene is a useful device in the archetypal narrative for it introduces the next seductive and persistent myth of education: the fantasy of the natural genius. And so, Zuckerberg tosses the correct answer back over his shoulder: he always knew the answer to the theorem; he already has all the answers.

Sage and Savant? Good Will Hunting (1997) and the Myth of the Natural Genius Good Will Hunting (1997) is an American psychological drama that draws upon the powerful myth of the natural genius learner guided by a wise Sage: a myth of learning and teaching which lurks behind much popular fantasy about the elite university and its purpose. Matt Damon plays the troubled young genius Will Hunting, guided by two university teachers, Professor Lambeau (played by Stellan Skarsgård) who teaches mathematics and Dr Maguire (Robin Williams) who teaches psychology. Like most mythic (and male) fantasy professors, Lambeau holds his packed lecture theatre audiences in thrall and strides across the beautiful campus, scarf flying, like a master of the academic universe. And when a young female student asks him a question about a maths problem on the weekend, he tells her to relax and meet him later for drinks. Will Hunting reveals himself to be the enchanted genius hero when he solves a difficult mathematical theorem Professor Lambeau has left on a hallway chalkboard in order to challenge his elite postgraduate students on the MIT campus. While Lambeau has other talented students from low socio-economic backgrounds, it is the appearance of a self-taught, natural genius that brings purpose to his work, and he immediately sets about sorting out Will’s complex personal problems. Lambeau introduces Will to psychology professor Maguire, who lavishes emotional labour upon Will, teaching him about life and love and guiding Will on a journey of self-growth. Several therapy sessions later, Savant and Sage hug and cry together in a narrative climax which would make Oprah (or any other

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popular proponent of the talking cure) proud. In this take on the old narrative and mythology, the wise Sage is thus also a healer and protector, who passes on his memories to the young hero as part of his “education”. Dr Maguire has a caring and committed teaching style or “pedagogy of care” (see Motta & Bennett, 2018) which many contemporary academics, especially those in the field of enabling education, would recognise and regard highly. The more difficult question that is never addressed in this film, however, is what price the teacher might pay for expending all this (apparently unpaid) time and emotional labour talking to, caring for, and searching the soul of one lost student—and a troublesome and arrogant student at that.17 Part of the mythology of education is the assumption that the “good” teacher thrives on this often unpaid and devalued outpouring of emotional labour and is even energised and validated by it. This can be a disempowering stereotype, and an impossible ideal to live up to, at least for the “ordinary” modern academic who is typically managing increasing numbers of diverse students with diverse needs under growing time pressures and with limited emotional and financial resources at her disposal. There is little recognition in this filmic fantasy world that the “good” teacher might also have a family to care for (except when the ghost of Maguire’s dead wife is invoked), perhaps because the teachers here are preoccupied playing the role of surrogate father for Will (thus fulfilling another popular university fantasy of teacher-as-parent). Ironically for a self-growth story, Good Will Hunting also reflects another persistent but disempowering myth about learning: that intelligence or high IQ is natural, innate and inevitable rather than socially-, politically-, and historically constructed. Through the caring character of Dr Maguire, Robin Williams also acts out the old myth, which intersects with spiritual beliefs, of teacher as saviour and redeemer. Other films of the 1990s activate this myth about (secondary school) teachers, such as Dangerous Minds (1995) featuring Michelle Pfeiffer as a caring, white saviour who sets out to “save” her mostly Black and Hispanic students “from their lives”. Such patronising and simplistic filmic fantasies of teacher as counsellor-saviour often fail to recognise the real risks involved in sharing confidences and emotions with students and instead romanticises what can too easily turn sour and even career-ending for the well-intentioned academic. The promotional text or cover “blurb” for the classic 17  See: A.  R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

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teacher-as-saviour film Stand & Deliver (1988) describes a “real-life hero” secondary school teacher who “cajoles, pushes, threatens”, as well as inspires, his low socio-economic status students to raise their grades. Yet in the real world, rather than being applauded (“you’ll stand and cheer”), such high-challenge teaching approaches, designed to make students uncomfortable, could easily tip over into accusations of misconduct, even and especially in the contemporary student-centred, corporatized university. Indeed, new political-moral anxieties about disgruntled young university students who are too close and too empowered are dramatized and symbolically worked through, in the thriller genre, with films such as Gross Misconduct (1993) and Cheat (2018).

The Harassed Professor: From Gross Misconduct (1993) to Cheat (2018) The Australian thriller film, Gross Misconduct (1993) shot mostly at the University of Melbourne, tells the morality tale of philosophy Professor Justin Thorne (Jimmy Smits) who is (almost) seduced by one of his young female students, Jennifer Carter (Naomi Watts). The Jennifer character is so determined, confident and sexually aggressive that the film seems to tap into reactionary cultural paranoia about female upward social mobility and popular “girl power” discourses of the 1990s.18 Hence at first glance the film seems a titillating university-based tale of sexual misconduct in the Fatal Attraction formula, and playing off the old stereotype of the lecherous professor undone by a manipulative, young femme fatale. It soon morphs, however, into a more disturbing cautionary tale of an academic who finds scarce remedy when falsely accused of sexual assault and culminates in a courtroom speech about how difficult it is to disprove such allegations. Thus, the film also invites a disciplining gaze in viewing audiences and offers the voyeuristic viewing pleasures of watching the larger-­ than-­life lecturer, who must be punished for his sins (vanity, non-conformity, sexual desire) and symbolically cut down to size. Hence, the charismatic and handsome Thorne receives a warning from colleagues early in the film he should have heeded: “All your students 18  See: Susan Hopkins, “Poison Ivy, Wild Things and Other Erotic Teen Thrillers of the 1990s: The Class-Shamed ‘Evil’ Other of Hypersexualized Girl Power”, in: Stephanie Patrick and Mythili Rajiva (eds), The Forgotten Victims of Sexual Violence in Film, Television and New Media: Turning to the Margins, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, pp.25–46

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think you are God, but just you watch it Justin, all your colleagues are as envious as hell … There’s nothing we academics hate more than a popular teacher”. Certainly, the fictitious Professor Thorne does take risks with his reputation and goes places the ordinary, less-secure, new academic would fear to tread. He invites students into his home for private tutorials and plays the saxophone in a night club his students frequent (using his work title as his stage name). Like other mythic and charismatic filmic professors, he is most at home, however, performing on the lecture theatre stage in “real” space and time. In the pivotal early on-campus lecture scene, Professor Thorne sermonises about sex and art while presenting students with an explicit slide show of Greeks engaged in erotic acts; he even touches his enthralled female students on the hands for emphasis as he works the room like an evangelical preacher. In short, even in the 1990s, such behaviours would be controversial; today this would be career suicide, no matter how positive his student evaluations of teaching might be. “Still, having students fall in love with you is one of the hazards of the job”, Thorne is told by a colleague at the obligatory academic wine and cheese networking event (“He’s being very clever, sucking up to the Vice Chancellor”). Popularity turns very problematic for Professor Thorne when he finds himself the victim of upwards harassment from his obsessed student and learns the hard way that some mud always sticks in a cultural and economic environment wherein universities are extremely risk-averse (to any possible bad publicity), and difficult or embarrassing teachers are easily replaced. The female professor in the UK series Cheat (2019) learns a similar lesson when an obsessed student harasses her falsely accuses her of bullying and stalking. Like Professor Thorne, she finds her career and her personal life in ruins when falsely accused and needs to defend her reputation to management. Also, like Thorne, she finds herself at an immediate disadvantage in a political and corporate environment which assumes that the teacher must always be the most powerful and in-control person in the room and thus the one doing all the extra-curricular bullying, stalking and harassing. In the opening scenes, the life of early career lecturer Leah Dale (Katherine Kelly) seems picture perfect, as she bicycles around the beautiful campus (which looks to be Cambridge) over ancient bridges, down tree-lined streets and past rowers on the river. Yet, through Leah we learn that, even in elite universities, it can be difficult for women to step into the traditional role of Sage-Professor-God figure, in part due to persistent gendered assumptions that female teachers must be more caring,

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empathetic, and “soft” on standards. Unlike the esteemed African American Professor Phipps, from Higher Learning, who is respected and revered for reminding his students “I am not a babysitter”, early career female lecturer Leah is apparently expected to suppress her own emotions whilst simultaneously supporting and managing difficult, if not mentally ill, young students. Certainly, some of Leah’s privileged and entitled students seem very reluctant to accept her authority as teacher at all. Leah makes a powerful enemy when she embarrasses an assertive young female student for being late (“Rose, nice of you to join us”), then reads out her essay, accusing her of plagiarism, in front of the whole tutorial group. An accelerating spiral of accusations and counter-accusations ensues until it is Leah who is facing disciplinary action by the university, after caught stalking on a surveillance camera (and must again report to management). “Playing God” it seems, is not without its pitfalls, just as watching the mighty fall is not without its schadenfreude viewing pleasures. Who amongst the cohort of regional academics in a crowded labour market would dare to risk offending a disgruntled and failing student-client in such a direct way in the face of corporate management and marketing which implicitly suggests the customer is always right? For the emotionally immature, oversensitive, and overwrought young Rose (Molly Windsor), however, there are only gods and monsters and nothing in between. Meanwhile, in the real world, real academics with human flaws and frailties find themselves caught between increasing pressures from management above and increasing demands from students below. The sexually aggressive and manipulative young “cheat”, Rose, feels quite entitled not to accept her failing grade and even sleeps with Leah’s husband to teach the lecturer a lesson. Yet, the most jarring moment in the drama is when Leah changes the student’s grade with a pencil and hands it to an administrative assistant who happily enters the grades for her: a luxury few early career academics would be afforded in the real-world, neoliberal, digital university. Moreover, few real-world early career or casual workers in regional or new universities—already under workload and time pressures—would have the reserves of emotional or financial resources required to protect themselves if so falsely accused and put on trial as the hapless, fictitious professors of Gross Misconduct (1993) and Cheat (2018). Filmic fictitious students, like Rose and Jennifer, represent an updating of old, populist representations of youthful femininity and workplace harassment, and do at least incorporate postfeminist representations of young women as

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empowered, active, sexual subjects.19 Filmic female “good” teachers, however, must still be compliant and accommodating within the traditional gender roles of selfless, supportive colleague and tireless, nurturing mother-figure. The monstrous-feminine “bad” teacher on the other hand, who pleases herself, uses crass language, wears tight clothing, displays emotional outbursts and other “embarrassing” behaviours, is the classed and gendered subject of both comedy and horror as we shall see in the analysis of the films below.

Monstrous Teachers: From The Faculty (1998) to Bad Teacher (2011) From the opening credits of Bad Teacher, which feature photographic stills of teachers throughout the ages poised at their chalkboards, this teen-oriented, Hollywood film plays with common gendered expectations about good and bad teachers to comic effect. Bad teacher Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) is not only frequently ruthless, rude, hungover and sexually aggressive but is drawn in sharp contrast to her good teacher colleagues who, in keeping with stereotypes, wear glasses, sensible shoes and cardigans; are diligent, dumpy and can’t dance. Beneath this running joke is the gendered assumption that “good” teachers do not express or incite sexual desire; indeed, they are hardly conscious of their own needs at all. On the other hand, bad teacher Elizabeth literally runs the other way when she spots a student crying in the hallway and embezzles from the seventh-grade carwash in order to pay for her own cosmetic surgery. As a comically bad teacher, Elizabeth is more interested in transforming herself than helping her students to grow and refuses to engage in unpaid (or even paid) roles requiring emotional labour and nurturing. Similarly, in the teen horror The Faculty, we know when a “good” teacher becomes possessed, infected or body snatched by the invading aliens when she starts to dress and behave in a confident and sexually aggressive way. Apparently for young viewers, the very notion that

19  See: Susan Hopkins, “M*A*S*H*e*d and Harassed? Nurse Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan as Gendered Hate Object”, n Marcus K. Harmes, Barbara Harmes, and Meredith A.  Harmes (eds), The Nurse in Popular Media: Critical Essays, Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2021, pp.69–92; Hopkins, “Poison Ivy, Wild Things and Other Erotic Teen Thrillers of the 1990s”.

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teachers might have a sexual life is, in itself, alien and grotesque.20 Again, moral-political assumptions and lessons are taught in these films about teaching, with the feminized body of the “good” teacher nurturing students as the selfless, surrogate parent and embodying the scholarly, virtuous life of the mind (as opposed to the devalued and faithless life of the sinning, sexualized—typically working-class—body). It is also worth noting that the students and teachers of both Bad Teacher and The Faculty use popular culture to make sense of their own experiences and roles within the post-modern, intertextual, filmic universe. In Bad Teacher, for example, Elizabeth Halsey, shows her students a video about a good teacher (Stand and Deliver, 1988) because she prefers to fall asleep on her desk in the first class rather than perform the taxing role of good teacher herself. Similarly, in The Faculty, the students use their intertextual knowledge of science fiction films with explicit reference to the films The Body Snatchers, The Thing and Alien to defeat the extra-­ terrestrial squid creature that takes over their school. As the geek and loner of the narrative quips: “I thought I was the only alien in this school”. As the film’s promotional trailer puts it: “Like teenagers everywhere, they struggle with parents who don’t get it and teachers who never had it”. As in the film Bad Teacher, the price for being a good teacher is being both frumpy and “brain-dead” (literally): “These six students are about to discover their teachers really are from another planet”. It is no accident then, that the ultimate alien of The Faculty resembles that same, grotesque, monstrous-feminine Barbara Creed (1993) identified in her feminist analysis of the film Alien.21

Oxford Dreaming and the Classed University: Class (1983), Oxford Blues (1984) and The Riot Club (2014) Another common visual and audio characteristic of these popular texts about the imaginary academy is the extent to which the campus itself is a kind of character in the film; brought into being through particular landscapes, accents and iconography. These films dwell on the architecture, including the “symbolic architecture” of older universities which confer  Jack Black and Co. play with this notion in: Richard Linklater (dir.), School of Rock, 2003.  See: Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, New  York: Columbia University Press, 1982. 20 21

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elite status and privilege upon their students.22 Much of the visualisation of these classed traditions, dreams, and aspirations centres on English universities, Oxford and Cambridge (or “Oxbridge”) which even Hollywood represents as a spiritual home of the world’s educated elite. Even as far away as Australia, images in popular imagination and university marketing often hark back to an imagined lost and golden age of Oxford: its ancient buildings characterised as the ‘dreaming spires’, manicured gardens, and capacity to produce “gentlemanly” alumni or, as Kuper calls them, “The Chumocracy”.23 Elite Australian universities (and schools, although using the great Public Schools of Eton, Harrow, and Rugby as their models), have sought to imitate and appropriate “the spells and enchantments” of Oxford and Cambridge; their graduates, their religious and academic traditions, and iconography.24 Just as in the real world, the promise of power, status and social mobility (evident in crests and Latin mottos) have been adopted by the more prestigious private schools so too the fictious magical schools of Harry Potter and Vampire Academy are rife with blue or black blazers with English school crests and ancient religious traditions and visual motifs, as well as gothic architectural settings.25 As Synott and Symes have pointed out, the crest is often a key symbol in the “signifying practices” of elite educational institutions as it lends a certain legitimacy, status and identity to the student and the school, suggesting the kind of social class, belief system and moral climate educational consumers wish to be associated with. It is a visualisation of elite, ruling-class traditions which are often religious as well as academic. As Synott and Symes suggest, academy mottos: “are a variety of moral stenography, proffering a belief system in precis”.26 Universities too have drawn on this historical and traditional approach to “imagineering” with prestige symbols, slogans and mottos in order to 22  P. Corrigan, “In/forming Schooling”, in David W. Livingtone and contributors (eds), Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power, London: Macmillan, 1989; John Synott & Colin Symes, “The Genealogy of the School: An Iconography of Badges and Mottos”, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 16: 2, 1995, pp. 139–152. 23  Simon Kuper, Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, London: Profile, 2022. 24  Anthony Sampson, The Changing Anatomy of Britain, London: Random House, 1982, pp.164, 167, cited in Kuper, Chums, 2022, n.p. 25  Synott & Symes, “The Genealogy of the School”. 26  Synott & Symes, “The Genealogy of the School”, p.145.

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position their programmes and educational goods in an increasingly crowded educational marketplace.27 As much as the real academy has been transformed or “ruined” by corporatisation and marketisation, romantic visions of Oxbridge remain and seduce a new generation beset with its own class anxieties and desires for positional advantages.28 Hence, even the supernaturally strong and ambitious girl power protagonists of Vampire Academy (2013) wear blue or black blazers with badges and crests within the gothic architecture (real and symbolic) of the fictitious “St. Vladimir’s Academy”. Moreover, they are mentored by a caring and supportive “good” teacher (Miss Carp) who patiently facilitates the self-growth of her blood-sucking young students. Meanwhile, at “Vernon Academy”, Andrew McCarthy wears his own blazer with badges and crests on his American social mobility journey out of Pittsburgh, in the coming-of-age film Class (1983). Like the young, white, male protagonists of Oxford Blues (1984) and The Riot Club (2014), the moral-political question for key characters in these films is how far to sell one’s soul and betray one’s own values in the interests of social mobility, self-growth and acceptance into privileged upper class-ness. As film is a visual medium, it is perhaps not surprising that the status markers—or in Bourdieu’s terms, “cultural capital”—of the characters is expressed not only through language, dress and mannerisms, but in the symbolic architecture and enchantments of Oxbridge landscapes.29 Moreover, it is perhaps not surprising that the good teachers and professors speak in the “reassuringly Oxonian tones” of the British Tory “Chumocracy”, even in films aimed at US audiences.30 As the theatrical trailer for Oxford Blues (1984) starring Rob Lowe, suggests: “he went to Oxford to meet a girl but he got something even more important; the chance to be a winner!” These 1980s film worlds relegate women to the role of supportive girlfriend or lust object for the red-blooded (heterosexual) American (white) boy (young man) who “cons his way into Oxford University” and thus deals symbolically with class anxieties through elite education combined with American entrepreneurialism. The characteristically 1980s dream of 27   Colin Symes & Susan Hopkins, “Universities Inc.: Caveat Emptor”, Australian Universities’ Review, 37: 2, 1994, pp.47–51. 28  See: Andrew, “Behind voluntary redundancy in universities”, p.14; Connell, The Good University, 2019. 29  Bourdieu, Distinction; Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital”. 30  Kuper, Chums.

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being a “winner” at least reveals the fundamental truth behind the ­romantic Oxbridge façade: that higher learning was always a positional good won through positional competition between winners and losers, insiders and outsiders, the elite and those who must service them.31 In the pivotal, early scenes of The Riot Club (2014), the camera lingers and looms over the landscapes and ancient buildings of an idyllic, quintessentially English Oxford, where over-dressed young gentlemen in long coats ride their bicycles through quaint lanes to the sound of tolling bells. Much of the film is about scene setting, as the camera emphasises upper-­ class coded markers of inherited wealth and privilege, like fine art, custom tailoring, luxury cars, and imposing architecture. It is a setting most Australian (and British) university students could only dream of and, indeed, this is essentially a story about a very exclusive club, a kind of elite within the elite, a hidden “unseen” ranking behind the explicit “seen” university rankings: “We’re at the top university in the world, and so are 20,000 other people but there are only ten in the Riot Club—the top ten!” Regional students do get a mention, however, in a particularly nauseating scene where the older Oxonian master advises the (white, male) young hero against associating with the wrong crowd of aspirational “boot-strapping regionals”. Thus, the film does a good job of reminding us not only of the limits of social mobility through education rhetoric, but of the more predictable pipeline from Eton or Winchester to Oxford, and through to Conservative politics.32 This promise of an inside track, or positional advantage on the pathway to wealth and privilege, has also been emulated and marketed, to a greater or lesser extent, by Australian private schools and corporatized, marketized universities.33 The few teaching or learning scenes that occur within the filmic universe of The Riot Club portray a Socratic debate over coffee and papers between two students and one lecturer in his comfortable office, with not a computer or smart device in sight. Most contemporary female, casual, or new teaching academics in regional universities could only dream of such a staff-to-student ratio, let alone such a personalised (almost intimate) learning environment. The film is about the hidden curriculum of the Oxford elite who need not use or be used by new teaching and  See: Marginson, Higher Education and the Common Good, p.203.  Kuper, Chums. 33  Symes & Hopkins, “Universities Inc.: Caveat Emptor”; Synott & Symes, ‘The Genealogy of the School”. 31 32

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learning technologies of massification, if they so choose. The cosy, book-­ lined office, old-fashioned chalkboards, and leather armchairs, are visual reminders in the film that the true elite will always be protected from the march of progress, the ideology of machines, the “mathematisation of the world”, the labours of the post-Fordist digital assembly line, or the potential challenges of a depersonalised, online learning space.34 While most real academics and universities are currently subject to change at an unprecedented rate and scale, the film seems to conclude that nothing will really change for the Oxford elites, sheltered within their ancient traditions and secure social networks. Little wonder, then, that the more things change, the more Oxford appears as a seductive, glamourous and “magical place” in the memory or imaginations of actual or aspiring academic workers.35

Conclusions: Good-Bye, Professor Bisenthal Ironically, while the corporatized “new academy” is more market-oriented and “real-world” engaged than ever (and tired teachers tend diligently to their always-on, digital learning systems of customer service), filmic fantasies of the university still look back to a lost age when god-like Sage figures roamed the campus in search of proteges and apprentices. Moreover, the mise-en-scene of these films freeze in a time when there was a solid campus, made of stone and pillars, high towers and historic buildings, to roam and rule. More akin to the alien body snatchers portrayed in The Faculty, real teachers are typically too fatigued and time poor to play Sage midwife and attentive counsellor to the troubled savants of Good Will Hunting and other mythological (young, white, male) “Hero” archetypes. Even with smaller teacher-student ratios, questions would be asked about female academics who asked such probing questions about the personal lives of their students as the teacher-saviour who “cajoles, pushes, threatens” diverse students to Stand and Deliver. Overworked, insecure and under surveillance, the new academic is unlikely to enjoy the same freedoms and deference reserved for the awe-inspiring, filmic professors of our popular imagination and collective memories. 34  See: N. Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, New York: Vintage, 1993; A. Lloyd, Labour Markets and Identity on the Post-Industrial Assembly Line, Burlington: Ashgate, 2013. See also: Susan Hopkins, “Computer says no? Limitations of tech-focused transitions to higher education for Australian LSES students”, Teaching in Higher Education: Critical Perspectives, 24 May 2021, doi:10.1080/13562517.2021.1931837. 35  Kuper, Chums, p.13.

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As Weber and Mitchell pointed out, academics and aspiring academics are often drawn to films about larger-than-life Hero teachers and professors because in our actual, everyday working lives we are more often criticised than romanticised by the public and parents.36 We would rather see ourselves as “agents rather than mere technicians” of teaching and learning.37 Yet, as Weber and Mitchell have documented, images of heroic teacher-saviours tend to be male, while anti-hero teachers are more often female. Overall, however, the “good” teacher is also expected to be “compassionate and self-sacrificing, living for and through her students”.38 I have argued that such gendered stereotypes live on in enabling programmes at regional Australian universities where successful student completions, retentions and transitions increasingly rely on the paid (and at times unpaid) emotional labour of mostly female, early career or casual teaching academics.39 Yet, as Ahmed has argued, the time has come for a feminist rethinking of the “cultural politics of emotion” and who pays the price for the performativity of care in the contemporary neoliberal, digital university.40 Behind the mosaic of film images and narratives presented in this chapter, there is another story of just how much academia and academics have changed over the past forty years, and not always for the better. Far from being Sage or god figures of filmic fantasy, the digital and emotional labour demanded of the modern managed and (self)disciplined academic is more characteristic of dehumanised customer service environments, wherein the customer is more often right, and workers (like machine parts) are replaceable. This chapter is no argument for preserving the power of elite universities and certainly presents no defence for the social 36  Sandra Weber & Claudia Mitchell, That’s Funny You Don’t Look Like A Teacher! Routledge, London, 1995, p.107. 37  Henry A. Giroux, cited in: Weber & Mitchell, That’s Funny, p.133. 38  Weber & Mitchell, That’s Funny, p.107. 39  See: N. L. Crawford and S. Johns, “An academic’s role? Supporting student wellbeing in pre-university enabling programs. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 15: 3, 2018. Retrieved from https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol15/iss3/2; S.  C. Motta & A. Bennett, “Pedagogies of care, care-full epistemological practice and ‘other’ caring subjectivities in enabling education”, Teaching in Higher Education, 23: 5, 2018, pp. 631–646, doi:10.1080/13562517.2018.1465911. 40  Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, New York: Routledge 2015.

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privilege and outdated, even abusive pedagogies they may have reproduced and romanticised. It is, rather, an argument for rethinking that very idea of the “good” university or the “good” teacher which still haunts the everyday practice of “ordinary”, real academics in order to bring about more realistic but equitable and empowering outcomes for all.

CHAPTER 8

A Different Sort of Monster: Science Fiction Casts a Spotlight on the Problematic Power Dynamics of Graduate Programs Kristine Larsen

The power relationship between a graduate student and their faculty advisor (or ‘supervisor’ in the Anglo-Australian context) is unique within the academy; the mentor being responsible for their student’s training, funding, and introduction to the larger academic community. In turn, the student provides services to their mentor, as a teaching and/or research assistant. The result is a hierarchical relationship that “is intentionally asymmetrical and institutionalized within the academy”.1 When the mentor fails to live up to their end of the bargain, or otherwise discredits  Sara L. Young and Kimberly K. Wiley, “Erasure: Why faculty sexual misconduct is prevalent and how we could prevent it”, Journal of Public Affairs, 27: 3, 2021, p. 278. 1

K. Larsen (*) Earth and Space Sciences, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Harmes, R. Scully (eds.), Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32350-8_8

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themselves within the academy through inappropriate behaviour, the graduate student is often in danger of becoming collateral damage, as seen in Netflix’s satirical look at university humanities departments The Chair (2021). While plots of science fiction films are fantastical by design, the relationships between characters ground the viewer in a relatable reality. This means that screenwriters craft characters and relationships that are familiar to the viewer; however, when the protagonists are science professors and their graduate students, Hollywood’s frame of reference is stereotypes and sensational news stories about skeletons in the academy’s closet. Such skeletons focus on two types of abuse perpetrated on graduate students: sexual harassment “and negligence”.2 A 2018 study named fived factors that increase the likelihood of sexual harassment in science, engineering, and medical programs: male domination of the work environment; a hierarchical power structure; “perceived tolerance for sexual harassment”; policies that focus on protecting the institution rather than potential victims; and an “uninformed leadership on campus”.3 While STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields have consciously tried to raise participation by women at all levels, these fields continue to be male-dominated, especially in particular disciplines such as physics and engineering. Even in areas where women have achieved demographic parity in graduate school (e.g. biology), they are “vastly underrepresented at the faculty level”.4 The disconnect between numbers of female graduate students and faculty is yet another sign of the persistence of the so-called leaky pipeline in STEM.5 While the reasons for women leaving the field are myriad, negative experiences in graduate school certainly play a role, leading to a vicious circle where the male-dominated environment remains so.

2  Ariel H.  Kim and Meimei Xu, “‘An Open Secret’: Harvard Graduate Students Decry Harassment, Neglect from Faculty”, The Harvard Crimson, May 26, 2022, at: https:// www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/5/26/graduate-students-power-dynamics/ 3  National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2018, pp. 3–4. 4  National Academies, Sexual Harassment, 54. 5  Linda Calhoun, Shruthi Jayaram, and Natasha Madorsky, “Leaky Pipeline or Broken Scaffolding? Supporting Women’s Leadership in STEM”, Stanford Social Innovation Review, June 1, 2002, at: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/leaky_pipelines_or_broken_scaffolding_ supporting_womens_leadership_in_stem

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Science fiction media not only warns us against the scientific abuses of the mad scientist but the monstrous abuses of the predatory science professor (and some graduate students). Using the power dynamics highlighted in The Chair as a starting point, I examine depictions of problematic interactions between faculty mentor and science grad students, and between graduate students themselves, in science fiction works ranging in time from Prince of Darkness (1987) and Jurassic Park (1993) to Timeline (2003), Magma: Volcanic Disaster (2006), Legion of the Dead (2005), and Decay (2012). There are connections to sensational real-world examples of sexism and sexual harassment in the academy. This analysis demonstrates that pop culture reflects expectations of widespread sexism and sexual harassment in graduate school, in the process unintentionally normalizing it for the audience.

The Chair (2021) and Power Relationships in the Academy The six-episode Netflix series The Chair follows the short reign of the first female chair of the English Department of a fictional private college, highlighting issues of racism and sexism.6 Ji-Yoon Kim (Sandra Oh) suffers through an uncomfortable shoulder squeeze by her dean and a suggestive invitation by a Speedos-clad celebrity guest lecturer (David Duchovny, portraying himself) to appreciate the size of a locally grown carrot, but she and a female colleague in turn ogle shirtless male students working out in the gym. All these behaviours could fall under the umbrella of sexual harassment if part of a persistent, pervasive behaviour. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine describes sexual harassment as discriminatory behaviour that falls under three classes: (1) gender harassment (verbal and nonverbal behaviours that convey hostility, objectification, or second-class status about members of one gender); (2) unwanted sexual attention (verbal or physical unwelcome sexual advances, which can include assault); and (3) sexual coercion (when favourable professional or education treatment is conditioned on sexual activity).7 As Melissa Beattie notes in her essay ‘A Well-rounded Dick?: Academia in 3rd Rock from the Sun’ (elsewhere in this volume), the prevalence of sexual 6  Josh Terry, “We Asked Actual Academics to Review Netflix’s ‘The Chair’”, CBR, August 25, 2021, at: https://www.cbr.com/the-chairs-season-1-flaw-bill/. 7  National Academies, Sexual Harassment, 18.

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harassment in the Academy is openly referenced in that comedy series; when extra-terrestrial-in-disguise astrophysics professor Dick Solomon is brought before the university disciplinary committee, it is automatically assumed that he had been physically assaulting students.8 Research demonstrates that graduate students experience sexual harassment at alarming rates: for example, 38% of female graduate students in a 2015 University of Oregon study reported experiencing sexual harassment by faculty/ staff.9 Graduate students are not only more likely to experience sexual harassment due to the unique power dynamic of graduate school, but because they often work in close proximity with their advisors (and other individuals) in small, isolated spaces, frequently outside normal business hours, as well as electronically and at informal social events, spaces that “have unclear boundaries”.10 Graduate students are also in danger of other kinds of abuse of boundaries: for example, a teaching assistant being forced into the position of “parenting” an ineffective mentor, because failures on the part of the mentor can have a deleterious impact on the academic trajectory of the student, as portrayed most effectively in The Chair. Ji-Yoon Kim has taken over the position of chair from widower Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass), a toxic love-interest whose personal and academic lives are spiralling out of control. While reviewers note that much of Ji-Yoon’s time is spent “parenting” Bill, the bulk of this responsibility falls to his graduate student and teaching assistant, Lila Ramos (Mallory Low).11 When a hungover Bill is grossly late for the first day of classes (despite Lila’s urgent texting), she keeps her composure, passing out the class materials she had conscientiously printed out in preparation and subtly handing a flustered and technically inept Bill his MacBook adaptor. When he accidentally projects an intimate video of his then-very pregnant, half-naked wife onto the classroom screen, Lila rushes in to save him from himself as students begin  Reference the chapter here at proof.  Marina N. Rosenthal, Alec M. Smidt, and Jennifer J. Freyd, “Still Second Class: Sexual Harassment of Graduate Students”, Psychology of Women Quarterly, 40: 3, 2016, p. 364. 10   Brittnie E.  Bloom, Cierra Raine Sorin, Jennifer A.  Wagman, and Laury Oaks, “Employees, Advisees, and Emerging Scholars: A Qualitative Analysis of Graduate Students’ Roles and Experiences of Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment on College Campuses”, Sexuality and Culture, 25, 2021, p. 1655. 11  Kevin Dettmar, “What The Chair Gets Unexpectedly Right About the Ivory Tower”, The Atlantic, September 2, 2021, at: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/ 2021/09/netflixs-chair-celebrates-common-professor/619946/ 8 9

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recording the video on their phones. Bill semi-coherently introduces his saviour to the class as “Lila. She is writing a brilliant dissertation”; whispering to her “Which I will finish reading soon”, further signalling to the audience his negligence as a mentor.12 While Lila does her best to prevent her mentor from failing his students (including herself), his satirical Nazi salute during a lecture on absurdism threatens her academic future as well as his own. Lila rightly worries that Bill’s future letters of recommendation will be useless, as happened to her friend whose advisor was accused of sexual harassment. When the university seeks to fire Bill, Lila finds herself in an untenable situation, yet still writes a letter of support for her advisor. It is only at this point that Ji-Yoon seeks to find another advisor for Lila, a colleague who had already proven derelict in providing timely feedback to her early on. Such negligence is unfortunately common in graduate school, and changing advisors so late in a student’s project is not as simple as The Chair seems to suggest, leaving students in difficult situations.13 The Chair highlights a final problematic power trope in academia. The “forbidden fruit trope” of a student–professor relationship is less likely to be romanticized in the #MeToo era, being fraught with issues of grooming, coercion, and unequal power.14 While it is never suggested that there is a romantic relationship between Bill and Lila, loaded language is used by school newspaper reporter Charlotte Lo (Sarah Lo) in asking Lila “What made you pursue [my emphasis] Bill Dobson as a mentor in the first place?”15 While the aforementioned University of Oregon survey found that 38% of female graduate students had been sexually harassed by faculty/staff, the same research found that 58% of female respondents (and 39% of males) had been sexually harassed by other students.16 Therefore, while “power” sexual harassment typically garners the most attention, “peer” sexual harassment as well as “contra-power” sexual 12  Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, “Brilliant Mistake”, Daniel Gray Longino (dir.), The Chair, season 1, episode 1, aired August 20, 2021, Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/ watch/81237823 13  Kim and Xu, “An Open Secret”. 14  Renaldo Matadeen, “How The Chair Subverts the Dubious Trope of Teacher-Student Romances”, CBR, August 24, 2021, at: https://www.cbr.com/netflix-chairsubverts-teacher-student-romance-trope/ 15  Richard Robbins, Amanda Peet, and Annie Julia Wyman, “Don’t Kill Bill”, Daniel Gray Longino (dir.), The Chair, season 1, episode 4, aired August 20, 2021, Netflix, https:// www.netflix.com/watch/81237827 16  Rosenthal, Smidt, and Freyd, “Still Second Class”, 364.

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harassment (in which the victim has more institutional power than the perpetrator) must not be ignored.17 For example, a random survey of over 500 professors found that a quarter of both males and females reported experiencing one or more examples of unwanted sexual attention from students in the previous year.18 While incidents of flirting and sexual comments were similarly common with male and female professors—and female professors were twice as likely to be “ogled”—male professors were far more likely to receive sexual advances or requests for a date as well as students misinterpreting faculty attentiveness for sexual interest.19 Seen in this light, the persistent attention paid to Bill by would-be student Dafna Eisenstadt (Ella Rubin) takes on a darker tone. Dafna comes upon Bill rushing to class in the first episode and gives him a ride to campus, using the opportunity not only to mention that she is on the wait-list for his popular class, but that he is considered a “household god” in her family (which includes a Board of Trustees member), shoving her well-worn personal copy of one of his books into his hands for him to sign. While Bill is initially uncomfortable with the situation, he relents, and when he quotes a line of poetry, she completes it (from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot). Dafna afterwards leaves a highly symbolic peach pie at his doorstep with a personal note quoting the related suggestive line from the poem, admitting to her friend that she finds Bill “smart. And sad. And hot”.20 In the final episode, Dafna’s apparent pursuit of Bill comes to a head when she visits his home unannounced. While Bill tries to dissuade what he and the audience believe to be her romantic overtures, she reveals that she is only interested in his literary connections, presumptively asking him to read her first novel before she submits it to his publisher.21 While the plotline is 17  Katharine A. Benson, “Comments on Crocker’s ‘An Analysis of University Definitions of Sexual Harassment’”, Signs, 9: 3, 1984, p. 517. 18  Claudia Lampman, “Women Faculty at Risk: U.S. Professors Report on their Experiences with Student Incivility, Bullying, Aggression, and Sexual Attention”, NASPA Journal About Women in Higher Education, 5: 2, 2012, p.  184, at: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/njawhe-2012-1108/html 19  Lampman, “Women Faculty”, 195. 20  Amanda Peet, Richard Robbins, and Annie Julia Wyman, “The Faculty Party”, Daniel Gray Longino (dir.), The Chair, season 1, episode 2, aired August 20, 2021, at: Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/81237825 21  Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, “The Chair”, Daniel Gray Longino (dir.), The Chair, season 1, episode 6, aired August 20, 2021, Netflix, at: https://www.netflix.com/ watch/81237829

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played for laughs, potential contra-power sexual harassment is no more a laughing matter than peer harassment or power harassment, as the following films demonstrate.

Mentors and Menaces in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1993) and Timeline (1999) The Chair highlights the dysfunctional nature of Lila and Bill’s student– mentor relationship when Bill is late on the second day of classes as well; Ji-Yoon finding him asleep on the couch in her office after Lila alerts her. Ji-Yoon chastises him for having an incomplete syllabus (as noted by the once again detail-oriented Lila), warning Bill that he needs to get his act together because his current high enrolments are only due to his reputation. The ability of a superstar professor to get away with unprofessional behaviour is depicted as akin to a superpower in some media. For example, in an iconic scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), swashbuckling archaeologist Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is teaching a college class to starry-eyed coeds, including one who has the words “LOVE YOU” written on her eyelids.22 While Jones’ reaction suggests that he considers this unwelcome attention, the original script suggests that he has sexual relationships with his students.23 Even more troubling is the past sexual relationship with his mentor’s much younger daughter Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen). While in the film she was about age 17, in the official novelization she is two years younger, suggesting that Indiana is a statutory rapist.24 In real-world universities, the so-called whisper culture would alert female students to Indiana’s proclivities: a secret hidden in plain sight. Notably, it took a decade of sexual harassment allegations at University of California, Berkeley, to bring to light the predatory behaviour of superstar planet-hunter Geoff Marcy in 2015, coupled with allegations of similar

22   This specific scene is available on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CR7Kh77aNnU 23  James Egan, “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Raiders Of The Lost Ark”, What Culture, April 3, 2022, at: https://whatculture.com/film/20-things-you-didnt-knowabout-raiders-of-the-lost-ark?page=10 24  Egan, “20 Things;” Christopher Gates, “The Most Terrible Things Indiana Jones Has Ever Done,” Looper, February 23, 2018, https://www.looper.com/78616/terriblethings-indiana-jones-ever-done/

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prior transgressions at his previous institution.25 But the Marcy incident was not an isolated case in science. Caltech astrophysicist Christian Ott was placed on unpaid leave for sexual harassment of graduate students, and University of Chicago molecular biologist Jason Lieb resigned rather than be sanctioned for sexual harassment.26 It was, therefore, not surprising when actress Laura Dern reflected in 2022 (related to the release of Jurassic World: Dominion) that the 20-year age gap between herself and co-star Sam Neill now seemed inappropriate when reflecting on their characters’ relationship in the 1993 film Jurassic Park (the actors’ ages being then 26 and 46, respectively), especially in light of the shifting nature of the characters’ personal and professional relationships in the adaptation of Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel to the big screen.27 In the novel, there is no romantic tension between graduate student Ellie Sattler and her advisor, widower Alan Grant; with Sattler engaged to marry “some nice doctor in Chicago”.28 However, the “twenty-four and darkly tanned” Sattler is first introduced to the readers in a moment of sexual harassment, when she is openly ogled by EPA official Bob Morris (to the rather disconcerting amusement of her thesis advisor).29 While Sattler is clearly Grant’s junior in age and academic standing, he treats her as a valued scientific colleague, in contrast to mathematician Ian Malcolm’s unapologetic sexual harassment. For example, when they first meet, Ian offers in a condescending tone: “You’re extremely pretty, Dr. Sattler … I could look at your legs all day”.30 In the transition from novel to film, it was decided to make Sattler and Grant both academic colleagues and bring in sexual tension. For example, in the 1992 screenplay rewrite by Maria Scotch Marmo, Ellie Sattler is in her late twenties, has her PhD, and, by today’s understanding of the term, engages in what can be interpreted as sexual harassment of her male colleague through repeated sexual 25  Sarah Scoles, “Astronomers are Finally Doing Something About Sexual Harassment”, The Atlantic, January 6, 2016, at: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/ gender-discrimination-astronomy/422817/ 26  Emily Conover, “APS Addresses Sexual Harassment Scandals”, APS News, 25: 3, 2016, p. 1, at: https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201603/harassment.cfm 27  Anthony Lund, “Laura Dern Addresses ‘Inappropriate’ Age Gap With Jurassic Park Co-Star Sam Neill”, Movie Web, May 23, 2022, at: https://movieweb.com/laura-dernaddresses-inappropriate-age-gap-with-jurassic-park-sam-neill/ 28  Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park, New York: Ballantine Books, 2015, p. 262. 29  Crichton, Jurassic Park, 36. 30  Crichton, Jurassic Park, 80.

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innuendo and non-consensual physical contact (such as grabbing his hand when she is scared, and sleeping with her head on his shoulder).31 In the final draft, written by David Koepp, a consensual romantic relationship is established between the two palaeontologists from the early scenes, for example, sharing an embrace and kiss.32 In the final film, the nature of relationship is downplayed, resulting in the womanizing Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) asking Grant, “Dr Sattler, she’s not like, available, is she?” Grant’s visible uneasiness leads Malcom quickly to apologize, “Yeah, I’m sorry, you two are …”; to which Grant simply offers “Yeah,” Sattler spoken of in the sense of property between the two men.33 Problematic sexual relationships between graduate students are in the 2003 film adaptation of another Michael Crichton novel Timeline (1999). Unbeknownst to Assistant Professor André Marek (Gerard Butler) and graduate students Chris Hughes (Paul Walker) and Kate Erickson (Frances O’Connor), the corporate financier of their archaeological excavation of a site from the Hundred Years’ War has developed time travel into the past. When the scientists excavate a bifocal lens belonging to their missing mentor, Professor Johnson, and a handwritten message from the fourteenth-­ century pleading for help, the trio travel back in time to rescue him. In the past, Marek falls in love with medieval noblewoman Lady Claire (Anne Friel) and elects to remain with her rather than return to modern times with his co-workers. Significant changes took place in the characterizations of two main female characters, Claire and Kate, in the transition from the written page to the screen; with the film disappointingly painting both as little more than damsels in distress in need of rescuing and protecting by strong men (Marek and Chris, respectively).34 As in the case with Jurassic Park, unwanted sexual attention is a matter of course in the novel, as if it were an expectation of the reader for men to treat the female graduate students this way. Described as “ash-blond, blue-­ eyed, and darkly tanned”, Kate is notably “not a pretty girl—as her mother, a homecoming queen at UC, had so often told her—but she had a fresh, 31  Maria S. Marmo, Jurassic Park, screenplay re-write, March 14, 1992, at: http://www. dailyscript.com/scripts/jurassicpark_script_early_3_92.html 32  David Koepp, Jurassic Park, final draft screenplay, December 11, 1992, at: http://www. dailyscript.com/scripts/jurassicpark_script_final_12_92.html 33  Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg (dir.), 1993; HBO, 2022, HD. 34  Kristine Larsen, “Heroine or Damsel in Distress: Traversing the Parallel Universes of Timeline’s Kate Erickson”, MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, 5: 1, 2021, pp.  26–39, at: https://publish.lib.umd.edu/?journal=scifi&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=461

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all-American quality that men found attractive”; leading several members of the archaeological team to have had “made a pass early on”.35 The fact that this included Marek, an assistant professor, labels it as both peer harassment and power harassment. After his girlfriend dumps him, noted womanizer and fellow graduate student Chris Hughes sets his sights on Kate, who instantly rejects his advances. However, a romance nonetheless slowly develops between the couple after they go into the past: this modern woman seeming to fall into more medieval tropes of chivalric romantic expectations. In an intermediate version of the screenplay written by George Nolfi, Chris and Kate’s relationship is quite different from both the novel and the film. The couple first appear in bed, after a night of lovemaking. Kate (aged 29) is Professor “Johnston’s” graduate student, completing her PhD under his supervision. Chris (aged 21) is an undergraduate working on the dig, and Johnston’s stepson. As Kate is his direct supervisor on the site, their relationship is stressed by the difference in age as well as conflicts of interest. While Chris wants to continue their relationship, Kate breaks it off, guiltily, concerned about her advisor finding out about their affair.36 However, as the time machine’s countdown progresses, Chris professes his forbidden love for his former girlfriend; she tears-up and returns his affection, signally that she has succumbed to his pressure to renew their relationship. Again, while the intention is for this to be a consensual relationship, one could read darker subtones of contra-power harassment into it, not only given his persistence but the possibility of the relationship becoming an issue with her advisor, his stepfather. In the film, Chris is the son of Professor Johnston (Billy Connolly), and his sole interest in his father’s dig site is to be close to the object of his infatuation: Kate. When Chris brings Kate a beer at the site one night, Kate politely makes small talk, and when Chris offers that he is “not really all that interested in the past”, there is an uncomfortable moment in which he stares at her like a lovesick puppy dog and she responds by looking away, clearly uncomfortable with his affection.37 While his advances had been rejected in this early scene, Chris clasps Kate’s hand as the time machine powers up, giving her comfort during the vividly painful process.  Michael Crichton, Timeline, New York: Ballantine Books, 2003, pp. 68, 88.  George Nolfi, Timeline, screenplay, October 25, 2000, pp. 3–5, at: http://www.scifiscripts.com/scripts/timeline%20(1-2)2.pdf 37  Timeline, Richard Donner (dir.), 2003; Filmrise, 2022, HD. 35 36

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Again, as in the novel, Kate increasingly comes to rely on Chris in the past, playing the part of the stereotypical damsel in distress, and coming to accept that the persistent advances of a man is what she really wants. In this way, both the original novels and adaptations of Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Timeline send troubling messages to their audience in terms of normalizing behaviour that is sexual harassment.

Fraternizing in the Field: Legion of the Dead (2005) and Magma (2006) Not only are close-quarter laboratories spaces that can foster abuses of graduate students, but as Crichton’s works demonstrate, objectification and harassment also occur in the field. A 2013 survey found that the majority of respondents had “personally experienced sexual harassment” associated with field sites (70% of women and 40% of men).38 Interestingly, superiors most often victimized women while peers victimized men. Recall that the two main types of abuse lobbied against graduate students are harassment and neglect, but there is a third type that has been reported in the literature: the treatment of students as personal servants, sometimes going so far as supervisors expecting not only additional academic work outside of their contract (e.g. grading courses for which they are not the teaching assistant, writing letters of recommendation in the professor’s name), but free childcare, housework, and other personal chores done by their graduate students.39 An extreme case of this—as well as a predatory sexual harasser—is illustrated in the 2005 film Legion of the Dead. An ancient Egyptian burial chamber is discovered in Southern California, belonging to the evil Aneh-Tet (Claudia Lynx), priestess of Set, god of chaos and evil. International superstar professor Ari Ben-David (Rhett Giles) seeks to resurrect her in order to reap the benefit of her powers to grant eternal life, willingly sacrificing the lives of his expendable graduate students to help her recoup her life force at their expense. One of her first victims is a less-famous colleague, Professor Bryan Swartek (Zach Galligan), who is no less guilty of graduate student abuse, but in his case of a sexual nature. 38  Kathryn B.  H. Clancy, Robin G.  Nelson, Julienne N.  Rutherford, and Katie Hinde, “Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault”, PLoS ONE, 9: 7, 2014, p. 4, at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102172 39  Kim and Xu, “An Open Secret”.

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Swartek appears early in the film, when graduate student Molly Kirnan (Courtney Clonch) arrives at the site at his invitation, firmly rebuking his attempt at a hug with crossed arms. In the crypt, Bryan introduces the historical linguistics specialist to the famed Ben-David, whom Molly knows well and admires by reputation. Ben-David is less than impressed, until Molly corrects the expert’s translation of a section of hieroglyphs. Later Molly is alone in the crypt shooting a video for later analysis when Bryan walks in and startles her. Noting that they are alone, he wants to “talk about el-Amarna”, referencing a famous Egyptian archaeological site on the Nile. Bryan curtly rebuffs Molly’s curt belief that there is “nothing to talk about”, but they are interrupted by the entrance of graduate student Carter (Chad Collins).40 Bryan asks Carter to give Molly a ride back to the motel, leaving all three of them visibly uncomfortable. On the tense ride to the motel, we learn Carter had made his affections known to Molly the previous summer in el-Amarna; while she had also been romantically interested in Carter, she instead had a one-night stand with Bryan, an event she calls “a mistake. His wife had just left him. He reached out to me. I was drunk”. When she offers in her defence, “Haven’t you ever slept with somebody and then regretted it?” Carter snarks, “Hope you got a good grade at least”.41 The involvement of alcohol with and her regret after the event aside (see below), it is worth noting that Bryan had instigated the sexual contact and had afterwards expected that the relationship would continue (apparently on his terms), reflecting the unbalanced power dynamic between professor and graduate student. In such cases, there is sometimes a “quid-pro-quo” arrangement where there is an expectation of sex in exchange for a grade (or other tangible academic benefit). By blaming Molly, Carter is also possibly insinuating that the event involved contra-power harassment, where the student is the harasser, as sexual harassment of male faculty often involves students offering to provide sexual favours in exchange for grades.42 In this case, Bryan is clearly the victimizer. Later that night, Molly returns to the crypt to review certain inscriptions and a security guard catches her, who brings her to Bryan’s tent despite her protests. Bryan  Legion of the Dead, Paul Bales (dir.), 2005; Pluto TV, 2022, HD.  Legion of the Dead. 42  Colleen Flaherty, “‘Contra-power’ harassment of professors by students isn’t that common, but it’s a real problem”, Inside Higher Ed, March 5, 2018, at: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/05/contra-power-harassment-professors-students-isntcommon-its-real 40 41

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once again uses the solitude of the site to try and “finish our conversation”, reaching out to caress her face. Molly very intentionally moves out of reach and clearly tells him to stop. Bryan throws in her face that she “didn’t have a problem with it last summer”; clearly missing the point of freely given consent. Molly names their previous encounter “a mistake”, again explaining that she had been drunk, which Bryan turns against her: “So that means you don’t have to take responsibility for what happened?” Molly is forced to defend herself from this psychological abuse, noting “I respect you so much, and you’ve done so much for me, but I just want our relationship to stay professional”. The insinuation is she owes Bryan sex in exchange for what he had—and continues—to do for Molly’s academic career. Molly leaves and Bryan calls another female student, Kara (Amanda Ward), asking her to “come up to the site tonight and help me finish the typology for the artifacts”.43 Fortunately for Kara, she turns down the predatory harasser, for the newly resurrected Aneh-Tet enters the tent and kills Bryan. The next morning several students drive up to the tent, including Kara, who offers to wake up the professor, to her male colleague’s amusement; the insinuation being that Swartek’s taste for female graduate students is a secret hidden in plain sight, like Marcy, Ott, and Lieb in our real world, although Hollywood finds such serial predators humorous rather than horrifying. While Carter’s insinuation of contra-harassment in the case of Molly and Bryan is patently false, Magma: Volcanic Disaster (2006) highlights an uncomfortably ambiguous. A controversial hypothesis concerning apocalyptic volcanic activity is first ignored, and then co-opted by an unscrupulous director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), leading Professor Peter Shepherd (Xander Berkeley) and his graduate students to rush to gather evidence and save the world. Shepherd, a dynamic, passionate college lecturer, is approached by exuberant graduate student Brianna Chapman (Amy Jo Johnson) after one such lecture. Explaining that she had shifted from his lab to geochemistry, she desperately wants to join his upcoming research expedition to Iceland, at the recommendation of Shepherd’s teaching assistant, CJ (David O’Donnell). CJ’s problematic womanizing is telegraphed to the audience in this scene when Shepherd makes a note that Brianna is “definitely his type”. When the professor relents for Brianna to join them for the experience alone (without funding, credit, or future recommendations), she squeals like a young  Legion of the Dead.

43

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schoolgirl, and gushes, “I could hug you right now” something that Shepherd warns her against.44 The next day at the airfield CJ explains to his fellow graduate students that Brianna is “amazing; she’s smart, she’s funny, she’s cool”, to which Kai (Vladimir Mihaylov) remarks that CJ had also described her as “a Hottie McNaughty”.45 After Shepherd (mildly) admonishes against CJ using his position to gain sexual favours from fellow students, graduate student Jacques (Ruscan Vidinliev) congratulates CJ for “doing your part in putting the T and A back in being a TA”. When Brianna arrives, the three male students obviously ogle her, with Kai noting that CJ was not kidding about his assessment of her physical attributes. While the sexual objectification of Brianna, and the insinuation of CJ as a serial sexual predator (even involving undergraduates) are troubling, it is Brianna’s relationship with Shepherd that takes centre stage. At the Iceland field site, Brianna asks CJ about Shepherd in a way that leads CJ to simply respond “He’s married”, openly disappointing Brianna.46 CJ then adds that (as in the case of Bryan Swartek in Legion of the Dead) Shepherd is separated from his wife, Natalie (Reiko Aylesworth), a park ranger at Yellowstone, due to his dedication to field work in obscure locations. On a flight, after rescue from the unexpectedly active volcano, Shepherd is seen fingering his wedding ring, worn on a chain around his neck, and looking at Natalie’s photo. Brianna approaches and comments on how pretty his wife is. She admits that CJ had explained the situation to her, which makes Shepherd visibly uncomfortable. Brianna asks if he wants to talk about it, presuming much of the power dynamic in their relationship in the process, including her ability to help in his marital affairs (advising him to phone Natalie and apologize). Shepherd and his graduate students are investigating another volcano, in Ecuador, when they learn that Shepherd’s mentor, the originator of the Exodus hypothesis, has died in an eruption at Mt. Fuji. In a local bar, Shepherd drowns his sorrows over tequila, looking dishevelled in an unbuttoned shirt, revealing his wedding ring. As in the case of Lila in The Chair, Brianna takes on a mothering role, attempting to prevent the professor from going off the rails. She hands him a lower alcohol content  Magma: Volcanic Disaster, Ian Gilmore (dir.), 2006; Tubi, 2022, HD.  Magma: Volcanic Disaster. 46  Magma: Volcanic Disaster. 44 45

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drink (a beer) and expresses her condolences. She then makes further inappropriate comments, joking about his wedding ring, causing him obvious discomfort as he buttons up his shirt. When she apologizes for making inappropriate comments, Shepherd offers, “It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, it’s just that I don’t know if my failed marriage is really appropriate student/teacher conversation”. While he is trying to establish boundaries, Brianna counters, “technically we’re not really supposed to be drinking beers together either. But then again, I’m not your student this semester, so maybe we’re in the clear”, before once again asking for details of why his marriage fell apart and ending the conversation with encouragement to apologize to Natalie before it is too late.47 The decidedly problematic personal boundaries established by the screenwriter resolve after an accident in an abandoned mine in which Jacques is killed and CJ is severely injured. While Shepherd is guilt-ridden, Brianna continues to act as the parent in charge, until a sudden shift in CJ’s hospital room: she kisses CJ and teases that he shouldn’t “hook up with any hot Columbia [sic] nurses” while she accompanies Kai and Shepherd to Washington, DC, to present their research to the government.48 This is done in view of Shepherd, who clearly approves (and is probably relieved by the setting of unambiguous personal boundaries). Throughout the rest of the film, Brianna settles into a much more appropriate mentor-mentee role with Shepherd, although she is not shy to voice her informed scientific opinion concerning the nefarious USGS director, whom she calls “Professor Plagiarism” in front of the president.49 While we never learn the resolution of the CJ/Brianna relationship, Shepherd is reunited with Natalie after saving the world and refusing the position of USGS director in favour of simply teaching and being with his wife. While it is not said outright that he has given up field work, if he has this could have a deleterious impact on his ability to be an effective mentor to his remaining graduate students (who may have had to switch to a different mentor to complete their work). These practical concerns lay far outside the interest of Hollywood screenwriters more interested in romantic relationships than professional ones.

 Magma: Volcanic Disaster.  Magma: Volcanic Disaster. 49  Magma: Volcanic Disaster. 47 48

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Hard Physics and Hook-Ups Studies suggest that peers rather than mentors more often perpetrate sexual harassment of graduate students. This reality is front and centre in the 1987 John Carpenter film Prince of Darkness. Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong), his physics graduate students, and other academic colleagues, aid an unnamed priest (Donald Pleasence) in preventing the return of a banished Anti-God from a mirror universe. Satan—the son of the Anti-God—awakens and infects the scientists one by one, achieving human form through parasitism in order to (quite literally) reach through the mirror and pull his father back to our universe. The plot is thwarted by the ultimate sacrifice of Catherine Danforth (Lisa Blount), one of Birack’s graduate students, who is herself plunged into the anti-universe. Over the course of the film, Birack becomes highly ineffective as a mentor or protector of his students, as events increasingly contradict both the teachings of standard religion and science. Like Molly in Legion of the Dead, Catherine combines an open, creative mind with scientific knowledge, taking on the parenting role from her mentor and saving both the world and as many of her colleagues as possible. The sexual relationship that develops between graduate students Brian Marsh (Jameson Parker) and Catherine has many red flags. Early in the film, Brian stalks Catherine on campus, watching her from the shadows under the full moon as she meets with another man. Their first real conversation—meant to be flirtatious on Brian’s side—is also rife with warning signs: Brian:

Some things aren’t changed by quantum physics though… for instance, every theoretical physicist I know wonders why it is that no one who looks like you ever seems to settle down in our end of the building. Catherine: That’s not true and that’s an extremely sexist thing to say. Brian: Confirmed sexist and proud of it.50 When Catherine is visibly disturbed by Brian’s response, he dismisses it as a joke, and shifts the blame to her, accusing her of considering numbers romantically and becoming cold when the conversation switches to people. This statement triggers Catherine’s memories of a prior relationship  Prince of Darkness, John Carpenter (dir.), 1987; Peacock, 2022, HD.

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that ended badly. When she tries to leave, Brian reaches out and puts a hand on her shoulder, preventing her from leaving. He asks to start over, and offers, “I was hoping that you would need some help with your theory and that maybe we could discuss it over [smiling] over dinner or something?”51 We find out Brian is a theoretical physics student while Catherine is in applied physics, setting up a gender as well as disciplinary power dynamic in their relationship. There is an established hierarchy within the physics community, with theorists having more status than experimentalists; lower still is applied research.52 After Catherine relents to sharing coffee, Brian’s stalking behaviour continues, and she is surprised when she finds him waiting for her outside a campus building, hoping to have coffee again. She smiles and seems to agree, and we next see them in bed. Despite the fact that they have become intimate, Catherine still demonstrates unease with their relationship. Catherine asks Brian to stop when he wants to tell her something; rather than respect her wishes, he offers “I want to”, insinuating his wishes take precedence over hers. He inquires who gave her such a “high opinion of men?” suggesting that her demonstrated trauma is to be taken as an offense against his gender as a whole, rather than being the natural result of offenses committed against Catherine.53 As this is the earliest of the films analysed (1987), it is not surprising to find such obviously sexist points of view. However, there are myriad other examples of rampant sexism within the behaviour of other graduate students, including a running joke that no one can remember Susan Cabot (Anne Howard), the married radiologist. Several times characters ask where Susan is, only to be met with a response of “Who?” The repeated prompt “radiologist, glasses” marginalizes Susan by reducing her to her job description and physical appearance; this is exacerbated by her liminal status as a married woman in science working alongside single graduate students.54

 Prince of Darkness.  Sharon, Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 33, 20; it is therefore appropriate to his rank that extraterrestrial High Commander Dick Solomon blends in with humanity as a professor of theoretical astrophysics in 3rd Rock from the Sun, as noted by Melissa Beattie elsewhere in this volume. Cite chapter here at proofing. 53  Prince of Darkness. 54  Prince of Darkness. 51 52

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Prince of Darkness can be considered in parallel with the most recent of the films under analysis here: the extremely low-budget zombie film Decay (2012), written, filmed, and produced by physics graduate students at the Large Hadron Collider (with the tacit permission but not official endorsement of CERN).55 The film begins on a Monday morning in the apartment of graduate students Connor (Tom Procter) and James (Stewart Martin-Haugh) in the aftermath of a raucous party. Connor remembers with a smile the behaviour of James’ sister, Amy (Zoë Hatherell), who had gotten up on a table and acted in an inappropriate manner. Amy arrives to pick them up for an emergency meeting at the facility, and acts guiltily when they find another grad student, Matt (William P. Martin), already in her back seat. It is clear to the viewer that Matt and Amy had engaged in a drunken hook-up (similar to that of Molly and Bryan in Legion of the Dead). Research demonstrates that such events are relatively common on college campuses, with over two-thirds of undergraduates admitting to engaging in at least one hook-up.56 Research suggests that between two-­ thirds and over three-quarters of hook-ups involve alcohol, in a majority of cases on the part of both parties.57 At CERN, the students overhear a heated discussion between Dr. Niven (Kurt Rinnert) and the director general (Ed Friesen); the former wants the machine shut down over safety concerns, while the latter refuses due to the importance of finding the elusive Higgs particle. At the emergency meeting, the four graduate students find themselves volunteered for graveyard shift in the control room, while Niven takes an investigative team into the machine tunnels to investigate an anomalous event. During the shutdown, the high-energy particle beam suddenly comes to life (as the safety locks are disabled) and Niven and all his team die (burned by the Higgs radiation), reanimating as zombies. The four grad students (along with James’ girlfriend) are forced to evacuate through the service tunnels while avoiding zombies, repeatedly aided by James’ knowledge (as an engineering student) of the site; this despite Matt’s disparaging remarks concerning James being a mere engineer while the rest of them are “real physicists”, 55  J. Bryan Lowder, “Why a Zombie Movie Made by Physicists is the Best Kind of Science PR,” Slate, December 12, 2012, at: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/ 12/12/decay_a_zombie_movie_created_by_scientists_and_filmed_at_cern_video.html 56  Lori E.  Shaw, “Title IX, Sexual Assault, and the Issue of Effective Consent: Blurred Lines—When Should ‘Yes’ Mean ‘No’?” Indiana Law Journal, 91: 4, 2016, p.  1379, at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj/vol91/iss4/7 57  Shaw, “Title IX”, p. 1385.

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echoing the Prince of Darkness academic hierarchy.58 Matt equates engineering with a reduced masculinity, disparaging James in front of his girlfriend. After James is bitten and Connor fails to use the computer to reach the outside world, Matt taunts them both, and when Amy attempts to stick up for Connor, Matt crows about sleeping with her the night before. Amy (like Molly in Legion of the Dead) counters that she had been drunk, which angers James: “You took advantage of my sister?” Matt brags, “At least I get laid. Bet you didn’t get that far with Kate” (James’ now-dead girlfriend).59 While she and Connor make peace before his death, it is little consolation to Amy, who is the last one standing, until she encounters the gun-toting director general, who admits that they are all expendable (as were the students and staff in Legion of the Dead) compared to the importance of the Higgs research. Decay certainly depicts deliberately extreme cases of graduate student abuse, but still provides an opportunity to discuss real-world exploitation (especially as real-world graduate students wrote and produced the film).

Identifying the Monster Faculty member Mai-linh Hong (University of California, Merced) noted of The Chair that she wished “so much attention hadn’t been lavished on Bill … a self-absorbed, mediocre white man”; although she pointed out that its portrayal was realistic in the sense that “sometimes folks like him get more space in academia”.60 The series ends on a relative highlight, with Bill finally coming through as a mentor for Lila, heavily annotating her manuscript for her next revision while offering an enthusiastic recommendation for the work to his editor, who is interested in speaking with Lila about publishing her research.61 While Lila’s story may have a happy ending after all, the same is certainly not true for all graduate students who suffer harassment, neglect, or other abuse at the hand of their mentors or peers. While no student should have to suffer such abuse, the persistent pervasiveness of these problematic power dynamics is especially harmful to

58  Decay, Luke Thompson and Michael Mazur (dirs.), 2012, at: https://www.decayfilm.com/ 59  Decay. 60  Terry, “We Asked Actual Academics to Review Netflix’s ‘The Chair’”. 61  Peet and Wyman “The Chair”.

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the continued efforts to enhance the percentages of women in STEM fields. As the National Academies report found: women are often bullied or harassed out of career pathways in these fields. Even when they remain, their ability to contribute and advance in their field can be limited as a consequence of sexual harassment—either from the harassment directed at them; the ambient harassment in the environment in their department, program, or discipline; or the retaliation and betrayal they experience after formally reporting the harassment.62

Jon Turney warns that “fictional representations [of science] matter”.63 The time has come for Hollywood to stop playing the harassment and abuse of (and by) graduate students for laughs or dramatic effect—to stop normalizing it and call it out for the monstrous behaviour that it is. While the science fiction films analysed in this sample date from decades past, as The Chair demonstrates Hollywood has not yet embraced this vital truth. Using these depictions—and others like them—to call out bad behaviour (rather than accepting that this is the way the world is) can aid in the fight to combat sexism and sexual harassment, for the betterment of science and scientists. In the process, we support untold numbers of potential graduate students and, perhaps, aid in their persistence to becoming full-fledged members of the academic community and highly effective mentors to the next generation.

 National Academies, Sexual Harassment, p. 2.  Jon Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, p. 13. 62 63

CHAPTER 9

Dystopian Higher Education: A Neoliberal Legacy Stacy W. Maddern

Dystopian themes influence futuristic depictions in science fiction narratives, revealing a violent, inhumane society that awaits future generations. Classic dystopias including 1984 (1949), Brave New World (1932), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) are adult novels with an intended polemical purpose. Contemporary attempts in popular culture direct the dystopian form at children to address a dying world not only are they to inherit but attempt to survive. These dystopian narratives tend to centre on a false hope that science and technology will provide a bridge for human salvation. An all-powerful ruling elite dashes these hopes and exploits and excludes anyone who is perceived as different, unproductive, or weak.1

1  Kay Sambell, “Carnivalizing the Future: A New Approach to Theorizing Childhood and Adulthood in Science Fiction for Young Readers”, The Lion and the Unicorn, 28: 2, 2004, pp. 247–48.

S. W. Maddern (*) University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Harmes, R. Scully (eds.), Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32350-8_9

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In science fiction, the future is new but unfolds in a space where the past is still present. Fredric Jameson describes the “multiple mock futures” in science fiction as intended to transform the “present into the determinate past of something yet to come”.2 Neoliberalism is the dystopian manifestation of the past; this includes its depiction of higher education.3 Learning how to think, being informed by public values, and becoming engaged critical citizens are viewed as a failure rather than a mark of success in the dystopian world of corporate education. The dystopian character of neoliberalism has produced “a broad landscape of cruelty, precarity and disposability”.4 Categorizing dystopia as a theme in science fiction is not necessarily accurate. Science fiction is no more dependent on dystopia, than dystopias are on science fiction. Dystopia is a recurring theme in all forms of popular culture. Television shows, novels, video games, and music are all examples.5 In a recent episode of the new FX television drama Tulsa King (2022), Dwight (Sylvester Stallone) describes higher education as follows: You think anyone really gives a shit about what your major is, English literature, Biology, whatever. The whole point of a college degree is to show a potential employer that you showed up someplace four years in a row, completed a series of tasks reasonably well and on-time, so if he hires you, there is a semi-decent chance that you’ll show up there everyday and not fuck his business up.

Dystopian narratives are built on the foundations of shock and fear. They intend to elicit an uncomfortable response to contemporary corruption which have led to bleak prospects and intolerable futures. Totalitarian 2  Fredric Jameson, “Progress Versus Utopia; or Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies, 9: 2, 1982, at: https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/27/jameson.html, accessed 11 July 2022. 3  Wendy Brown, “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Democracy”, Theory and Event, 7: 1, 2003, pp. 15–18, quoted in Beth Mintz, “Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology”, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 80:1, 2021, p. 81. 4  Henry Giroux, “Beyond Dystopian Visions in the Age of Neoliberal Authoritarianism”, Truthout, 2015, at: https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-dystopian-visions-in-the-age-of-­ neoliberal-­authoritarianism/ Accessed 12 March 2022. 5  Casey Aaron Holliday, “The Reality of Utopian and Dystopian Fiction: Thomas More’s Utopia and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale”, Honour’s thesis, University of Mississippi, 2014, pp. 1–2.

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hierarchies hold citizens hostage. Anti-human behaviour is justified under a set of fundamental beliefs which serve the interests of power. Totalitarian regimes determine the degree of freedom and happiness for others. Abuses of power are exercised by determining language, promoting a central or religious authority, and strict control of information. Failures of the present reveal a dystopian future in which greater social constraints await. John Stephens identifies in dystopian texts warnings issued “about destructive tendencies in human behaviour”.6 The present is a warning as to the necessary changes that must be made if there is to be any future at all. Idealism does not lead to change without direct action. In the dystopian narrative, a neoliberal past impacts on contemporary concerns for higher learning. The neoliberal doctrine frames unrestrained higher learning as toxifying the public sphere, it threatens corporate values, ideology, and power. In the dystopian realm it has eroded into an institutional relic, drained of cultural insignificance. In order to save humanity, socio-political leaders distort the humanities and exert draconian control over institutional norms. This chapter examines a recurring theme in dystopian narratives that envision a society which has dismantled higher learning or in some other way compromised or subverted it. The origins and development of the neoliberal doctrine serve as an entry point to understand it as a mechanism for popular control. The techniques and tools utilized to accomplish this include higher education as the easiest place to steer the populace to serve the interests of the state. The depiction of higher education in dystopian narratives reveals three relevant themes in revealing its philosophical and institutional demise. First, the significance of testing used to sort and identify the concomitant skills and abilities of young adults to serve the interests of the state. Second, developing a population of “docile bodies” enable elites to control efficiency. Finally, the outcomes of control lead to obedience in the form of passive ignorance rendered by commercial and market distractions. The focus here is not to identify various representations of higher education in dystopia. It is to understand the absence of higher learning as dystopian. Far removed from a contemporary grasp, these narratives seem a product of the neoliberal past.

6  John Stephens, “Post Disaster Fiction: The Problematics of a Genre”, Papers, 3: 3, 1992, p. 126, as quoted in Sambell, “Carnivalizing the Future”, p. 248.

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The Neoliberal Past Utopia is the existence of positive human development. Dystopia is not, it is the exact opposite. The dystopian society in literature serves as “the background of the hero to make his way to the escape while navigating us through this social form of degradation”.7 In George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), the panopticon society in Oceania leaves no room for thinking and writing; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) reveals a world where all individuals are socially categorized, birth control, sleep-teaching, and the administration of soma are used to maintain stability of the system. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a totalitarian religious system in which women are marginalized and victims of patriarchal society. These conditions identify the destiny of humans under totalitarian conditions.8 In Veronica Roth’s Divergent series, community is defined by membership to a particular faction, of which young adults are chosen/assigned, those not accepted are considered “factionless”. These are the poor, some homeless, portrayed as living a life worse than death itself where suffering is endless. Divergent depicts the institution of higher education in a dystopian shadow. Training often replaces education in the dystopian world. This is a reference to the Aristotelian view of education intended to serve the interests of the regime in power. In Divergent, education feeds the regime, as each faction has “educational standards and implementations so as to serve the values” and goals of the regime. The central conflict in the Divergent series is reconciling differences. Dystopian worlds, like neoliberal discourse, contend that survival is an individual responsibility. Accordingly, society cannot continue to provide a structure of mutual aid. Instead, it strives for cultural materialism designating possessions and wealth as the reward given to the individual who best survives. Individuals have no obligation to maintain the “social fabric”. Society may dispose of those who are ill-equipped to survive. Differing from this standard allows one to advocate for change. The “training” facility is central to dystopia. It allows for conditioning and docility. Higher education encourages students to engage in critical evaluation of the world  Holliday, “The Reality of Utopian and Dystopian Fiction”, p. 3.  Maryam Kouhestani, “Disciplining the Body: Power and Language in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Novel The Handmaid’s Tale”, Journal of Educational and Social Research, 3: 7, 2013, p. 610. 7 8

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beyond the campus. Students can be “motivated and empowered by the prospect of addressing a real problem in the world”.9 Neoliberalism has inspired reduction of government spending on social services rendering the public good an individual responsibility. Subsequently, higher education has become an instrument of economic growth, aligned with the needs of industry, finance, and commerce. It now serves private interests rather than public good. Bertrand Russell once imagined “education aimed at mental freedom rather than at imprisoning the minds of the young in a rigid armor of dogma”.10 The state-­ operated versions of higher learning in dystopian fiction depict students trapped in a set of beliefs that they did not freely choose. Students and teachers are held prisoners constantly “trying to find ways to get out of the platonic cave”. Beyond there where they might discover freedom and the autonomy to think for themselves.11 Social control is a technique used to expand the role of the state. The hierarchical organization of society lends the empowered minority to wield technology to control those without access to resources, namely capital. Industrial development introduced machine-like human behaviour embodied by Fordist-Taylorist efforts to make workers more efficient. This was an attempt by factory bosses to control the labour force. Such dystopian settings pose threats to human survival in a struggle to obtain essential resources amassed by a powerful and oppressive force. Dystopian narratives describe higher learning as alienated, replaced by a new system designed to produce obedient citizens in maintaining a hierarchical social order. Civil disobedience would only question the motives that lead to war, catastrophes, and taking over of the planet’s resources by a narrow elite.12  E.  Morrell, “Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Popular Culture: Literacy development among urban youth”, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 46: 1, 2002, p. 76, quoted in Sofia Stefanopoulou, Christos-Thomas Kechagias, and Konstantins M.  Malafantis, “Education in Fictional Dystopian Societies: The Case of Veronica Roth’s Divergent”, Journal of Advances in Education Research, 6: 1, 2021, p. 54. 10  L. Elder & R. Paul, “Dogmatism, creativity, and critical thought: The reality of human minds and the possibility of critical societies”, in D. Ambrose & R. J. Sternberg (eds), How Dogmatic Beliefs Harm Creativity and Higher-Level Thinking, New York: Routledge, 2012, cited in Stefanopoulou, Kechagias, and Malafantis, “Education in Fictional Dystopian Societies”, p. 56. 11   Stefanopoulou, Kechagias, and Malafantis, “Education in Fictional Dystopian Societies”, p. 56. 12  Turnin, Ornat. (2017). How is the futuristic school imagined in science fiction movies and literature?. History of Education and Children’s Literature, 12. 673–697. 9

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The aftermath of catastrophe creates a new beginning. That new beginning also delivers dystopia for most. Social hierarchies receive new shape by controlling information and access to knowledge. Power is the product of knowledge, thus maintaining power can be achieved by controlling knowledge. New ideals, rules, and systems that surviving mass populations must accept form dystopian beginnings. New societal constraints come with the admission that the previous way of life is dead. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Aunt Lydia tells the handmaids: “There’s more than one kind of freedom, freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it”. This captures the cynical political strife that has penetrated contemporary America, as The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a land ruled by an extreme right Christian theocracy after an overthrow of the American government. Curbing the discovery of knowledge is a means for eliminating hope. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), firemen are employed to burn books. This restricts people’s imagination, curiosity, and creativity, thereby maintaining the absolute power of government over citizens. The flowering of knowledge and imagination is hazardous to a culture of conformity. Dystopia feeds on the elimination of hope in order to crush uprisings. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) offers insightful commentary on higher education co-opted to serve the needs of the state. The film’s protagonist, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) meets with the high school principal and a guidance counsellor who report his son has already been ruled out for college due to low test scores. The good news is he’ll make “an excellent farmer”. Cooper is a pilot, an astronaut, and an engineer. But, as the principal tells him, “We don’t need more engineers. The world needs farmers”. Cooper is also advised that his daughter, Murphy, who is fascinated by space exploration, should be taught “about this planet, not tales of leaving it”. Dissuading students from space exploration dashes their hopes of finding a new planet and escaping a dying earth. Within Western academia, knowledge has been an end in itself, that there are benefits that accrue from intellectual activity for its own sake. Nineteenth-century theologian John Henry Newman claimed that the indirect benefits of a university education are that of “training good members of society. It is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world”. In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard stated that knowledge had been rendered a commodity, giving it an exchange value demanded that it be

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produced and consumed.13 There now exists a knowledge economy. More often than not, what is worth knowing must first be considered as marketable. Is it saleable? Higher education in the modern university form, established during the nineteenth century, represented an alternative ethic or anecdote to the commercial world. “The primary business of universities”, wrote T.H. Huxley in 1894, “has to do merely with pure knowledge and pure art … with the advancement of culture and not with the increase of wealth or commodities”. Ernest Rutherford (the father of nuclear physics) later echoed this sentiment in 1927 when he warned the University of Bristol that “the utilization of university laboratories for research bearing on industry” would be “an unmitigated disaster”.14 Testing, as depicted in dystopian narratives, is instrumental in accomplishing the functions of the state. Higher education is depicted as having been engulfed and absorbed by elite interests that utilize state controls to ensure legitimacy. Neoliberalism uses testing to indicate performance and level of achievement of a predefined standard. These are used to separate inefficient performance from good performance.15 Transforming individuals into a viable economic force requires regulation, discipline, and subjection. This produces “docile bodies” that are easily manipulated into performing the functions of society. Control is maintained through the regulation of knowledge, or discourse. In a Foucauldian framework, the “archive” harnesses society’s relationship to knowledge and collective memory. Foucault defines the “archive” as rules in which society is limited in forms of expression, conservation, memory, and reactivation. The concern here is not to control how something is said, but rather, what can be said.16 Higher education is capable of serving the public good as an impetus for social change. Its students offer a sense of hope for the future. It is an environment that allows discovery through learning as students are able to 13  Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979, p. 5, quoted in Peter Roberts, “Academic Dystopia: Knowledge, Performativity, and Tertiary Education”, The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 35: 1, 2013, p. 28. 14  Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities, London & New York: Verso, 2018, p. 16. 15  Angulo Rasco, “Standardization in education, a device of Neoliberalism”, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 18: 2, 2020, p. 236. 16  Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace, A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1993, p. 31.

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see themselves in their course of study. Dystopian narratives provide a window into the social conditions of the future by exploring the “hazards of techno-economic progress, predatory global politics and capitalist excesses of consumption”.17 Such narratives reveal uncertainties and the circumstances for which they succeed. Ulrich Beck considers such cultural critiques applied to the future as contributing to what he defines as a “risk society”.18

An Unlucky Category A prevalent theme in dystopian narrative is the role of the test or trial as a gateway to opportunity. College entrance exams have long been the gateway to higher learning. In the United States, the SATs (Scholastic Assessment Tests), ACTs (American College Testing), GREs (Graduate Record Exams), MCATs (Medical College Admission Tests), LSATs (Law School Admission Tests), and GMATs (Graduate Management Admission Test) are all vital exams used to determine students’ academic readiness for higher education. In the dystopian context, testing assesses one’s ability to survive and avoid certain demise. Framed as a conquest, the test represents passage to a better life, or simply the freedom to go on living. Young adult dystopian fiction (The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Giver, The Testing, Legend) are centred on the competition for survival. These are represented in a series of “tests” given to determine the remainder of one’s existence.19 Sean Connors identifies this as “propaganda for the ethos of individualism, the central ideology of consumer capitalism” undermining all “attempts at collective action”.20 If access to higher education is the reward for high scores, failure to do well on the test or trial limits opportunity. In dystopian narratives, poor 17  Elizabeth Bullen and Elizabeth Parsons, “Dystopian Visions of Global Capitalism: Phillip Reeve’s Mortal Engines and M.  T. Anderson’s Feed”, Children’s Literature in Education, 38, 2007, p. 128. 18  Risk society is the manner in which modern society organizes in response to risk. See: Bullen and Parsons, “Dystopian Visions of Global Capitalism”, p. 128. 19   Jonathan Alexander and Rebecca Black, “The Darker Side of the Sorting Hat: Representations of Educational Testing in Dystopian Young Adult Fiction”, Children’s Literature, 43, 2015, p. 214. 20  Sean P. Connors, “Revisiting the Arena: The Hunger Games, Neoliberalism, and Youth Activism”, Paper presented to the 2019 Children’s Literature Association Conference, Indianapolis: Indiana, 2019, p. 1.

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test scores result in long-term suffering. In Legend, Day has the opposite experience from June. Day explains, “You squeak by with a score between 1000 and 1249”. If this happens, “Congress bars you from high school. You join the poor”, where you’ll “probably either drown while working the water turbines or get steamed to death in the power plants”.21 The demographic of “slum-sector kids” are always the ones who fail the Trials in Legend. Here Day explains: If you’re in this unlucky category, the Republic sends officials to your family’s home. They make your parents sign a contract giving the government full custody over you. They say that you’ve been sent away to the Republic’s labor camps and that your family will not see you again. Your parents have to nod and agree. A few even celebrate, because the Republic gives them one thousand Notes as a condolence gift.22

The inclusion of “high-stakes testing” frames choices available to young adults. In Interstellar, testing allows the state to set the bar for the necessary skills required for advancement. These tests simply identify those most capable of following orders and being predictably obedient. Merging the functions of a “test” with the interests of the state is a consistent theme. It reflects an understanding that knowledge is associated with authority. Ideologically, it not only elevates attainment to a core group of “exceptional” students but also defines what is “exceptional”. Dystopias reinforce stigmas about the less fortunate. Following neoliberal foundations, the poor are cast as free agents who have the ability to escape poverty via the market.23 Pathological theories of poverty are seemingly rejected as the poor are viewed as equal to the rest of mainstream society. In The Hunger Games novels and films, Katniss Everdeen is recognized for such potential. She succeeds by being kind to her allies and smarter than her opponents. She embodies the prominent features of unaided individualism.

 Ibid, p. 7.  Ibid. 23  Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty, Second Edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, quoted in Guy Feldman, “Neoliberalism and Poverty: An Unbreakable Relationship”, Bent Greve (ed.), Routledge International Handbook of Poverty, New York: Routledge, 2020, p. 342. 21 22

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The scarcity of resources and battles over their distribution are prominent in dystopias. Testing determines access to greater opportunity (higher education) while diverting others into manual labour positions. In Divergent, those recognized for their abilities to protect and defend become members of the faction known as Dauntless. In the second film of this series, Insurgent, one “initiate” of the intelligentsia faction, the Erudite, describes the high cost of failure: “I didn’t get a high enough score on my initiation intelligence test. So they said, ‘Spend your entire life cleaning up the research labs, or leave’”. In Charbonneau’s The Testing, graduation is referenced as the process of “students crossing over to adulthood or celebrating their promotion to the next grade”.24 The protagonist, Cia, faces mounting pressure for inclusion as she hopes that this is not the end of her education and dreams that her name will be called for “The Testing”. The opportunity to participate in The Testing is not a choice. Students are informed that failure to participate is a violation of the law, “not presenting oneself for The Testing is a form of treason”.25 Testing is portrayed not for measuring aptitude but focuses on the production of youth. Abilities are observed with magnified and timed precision by an adult audience watching and judging every movement. The cultural ramifications of using such tests allow for sorting of students into societal factions, social and professional groups, where they will spend the rest of their lives. Marie Lu’s Legend describes the character of June as “the only person in the entire Republic with a perfect 1500 score on her Trial”. For her perfect score, June was sent to the “country’s top university”, at the age of twelve. She has “what the Republic considers good genes”.26 Formal or standardized testing cultivates certain types of skills, it is not an assessment of a wide range of student abilities. In Charbonneau’s The Testing, the measured aptitudes include science, technology, engineering, medicine, and government, all emphasized because they address the skills needed to restore land and infrastructure to offset the casualties of war. Cia describes a series of skills-based tests as well as pressure-cooker experiences designed to winnow out students who are ill-suited for meeting the

 Joelle Charbonneau, The Testing Trilogy, New York: HarperCollins, 2014, p. 8.  Ibid, p. 24. 26  Marie Lu, Legend, New York: Penguin, 2011, pp. 12–13. 24 25

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goals of the government officials who create, administer, and observe the tests: Thus far, each of the tasks set for us by the final years has tested specific skills. Mathematics. History. Mechanical knowledge. But in addition to classroom-­ learned knowledge, the tests have measured something more. They have judged our ability to work under pressure. To trust one another. To listen to instructions and critically think through problems. Successful government officials do all those things, but the best of them do more. They follow their instincts and figure out a way to do what needs to be done.27

A characteristic shared across the dystopian genre is the production of young minds. Students endure performance-based tests, like lab rats in cages, under the scrutiny of adult observation. Dystopian narratives reveal the use of aptitude tests as means of sorting students into societal factions, or social and professional groups. This is where they are likely to spend the rest of their lives. Many submit after rhetorical devices reward them for their effort. Cia puts it once she recognizes how manipulative and dangerous the testing actually is, “I’d almost convinced myself I could control my future through hard work”.28 Instead of cultivating personal pursuits, students likely feel the need to pursue more “sure bets” or careers with more forecast economic stability. Personal passions are side-lined in the interest of attempts to secure a future within rapidly shifting economic systems. Indeed, a pervasive theme in these novels is that the people who create tests don’t care about the subjects taking the tests, and the creators only view and understand these children in highly instrumentalized ways. These young people exist only in the service of maintaining larger institutional structures, and the tests are designed to produce particular types of citizens to meet the needs of the state. Dystopian narratives demonstrate the consequences that occur due to the conflation of corporate and state interests. Rather than cultivate personal pursuits, students are more motivated to pursue a “sure bet”. The market draws them, and they choose careers that forecast economic stability. Personal passions have less importance than securing a future within a rapidly shifting economic system. Dystopian narratives reveal a primary  Charbonneau, The Testing Trilogy, pp. 134–35.  Ibid., p. 273.

27 28

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characteristic of those who create tests, don’t care about the subjects taking the tests, they believe young people exist only to ensure the maintenance of larger institutional structures. The tests are designed to produce particular types of citizens to meet the needs of the state. In The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins tells of “tributes” reaped from twelve separate districts to compete for their lives. They are human capital. Their skills and talents are showcased before “Gamemakers”, who score them based on perceived competitiveness. Previously, Gale, a hunting companion of Katniss, remarks, “It’s to the Capitol’s advantage to have us divided among ourselves”.29 Like in neoliberalism, everyone is subject to some measure of insecurity. It renders everyone “potentially disposable: we exist and matter only insofar that we are deemed worthy of investment by the state or a corporate firm”.30 In a society divided into winners and losers, one’s skill in serving as one’s own self-agent spells the difference between life and death. The Hunger Games trilogy emphasizes coalition building as survivalist.31 This is the primary defence against neoliberalism. Survival requires one to navigate dystopia. Finding a way out is the quest of the character(s) trapped by the dystopia. Sometimes the survival of hope or change is a dominant theme of the quest. In the film Children of Men, Theo (Clive Owen) must get Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), and her infant, to sanctuary. In The Giver, Jonah’s escape is a way to free the community from its own ignorance. Winston Smith’s death in 1984 reveals finality as escape. Dystopias represent broken, oppressive living circumstances that inspire hope for real beginnings. Rebuilding implies freedom, while uncertainty reveals possibility, no different than the enslaved choosing to flee from the clutches of a cruel master. Once the curtain is pulled away to expose the illusion of authoritative control, it marks its decline. The discovery of uncertainty is challenging for those being controlled. Uncertainty is all that is unknown. The discovery of new knowledge leads to enlightenment and change. Controlling the ability to discover is part of the dystopia. Neoliberalism enlists higher education to serve the private sector. The institutional commodification and corporatization of the university is designed to ensure an “optimal contribution” which provides “the best  Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, New York: Scholastic, 2008, p. 14.  Julie A.  Wilson, Neoliberalism: Key Ideas in Media & Cultural Studies, New  York: Routledge, 2017, p. 119. 31  Connors, “Revisiting the Arena”, p. 7. 29 30

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performativity of the social system”.32 Efficiency is now crucial to a mission that considers research for its ability to produce revenue.33 Higher education is now the articulation of economic modes of production designed for capitalist accumulation.34 Herein the first relevant theme of dystopian narratives depicts institutions of higher learning as stripped down to this essential mission. In doing so, the state or ruling apparatus is no longer to be questioned, only served.

Political Puppets, Small-Scale Models of Power As early as the 1960s, depictions of educational technologies implemented on college campuses reflected an emerging academic dystopia. The British television science fiction anthology drama series Out of the Unknown featured an episode “A World in Silence” (1966), in which students at “Garsfield College” are taught exclusively by tapes fed into teaching machines.35 The adoption and development of more convenient methods allow students to “attend courses online, use applications and employ web-based collaboration to leverage learning, while teachers incorporate social networks and smartphones in the lessons”.36 Loading and transferring information directly into the body reconfigures the necessity and purpose of higher learning. In dystopian narratives, information delivery is much more invasive. In Existenz (1999), a biological computer (“Pod”) connects users to a cyber gaming platform by inserting directly into the nervous system at the base of the spine.37 In The Matrix (1999), aliens drill scalps and people receive USB-like ports to upload necessary information software systems. Policy can be coercive in the way it acts upon the body. It can manipulate its elements, gestures, and behaviour. Upon entering the machinery of  Roberts, p. 30.  Cris Shore, “Beyond the multiversity: neoliberalism and the rise of the schizophrenic university”. Social Anthropology, 18: 1, 2010, p. 16. 34  Katharyne Mitchell, and Kay MacFarlane, “Beyond Educational the Dystopia: New Ways of Learning through Remembering”. Beyond Market Dystopia: New Ways of Living, Leo Panitch and Greg Albo, eds. Socialist Register, London: Merlin Press, 2020, p. 86. 35  Mark Ward, Out of the Unknown: Sci-fi and the 1960s, London: The British Film Institute, 2014, at: https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/out-unknown-sci-fi60s, accessed: 5 December 2022. 36  Turnin, n.p. 37  Nathan Cochrane, “I Compute, Therefore I Am”, AQ: Australian Quarterly, 72: 1, 2000, p. 34. 32 33

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power, humans are explored, broken down, and rearranged. The mechanics of power achieve political anatomy creating discipline onto “subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies”.38 These “docile bodies”, drawn from Foucauldian theory, suggest that individuals can be transformed into a viable economic force. Neoliberalism’s success and persistent dominance over the economic, social, and political lives of the public have been reliant upon the deliberate production of insecurity and “precarity” across the working population.39 As a result, individualism has been institutionalized, infecting every corner of society. In seeking the disintegration of collectivity, neoliberalism has transformed knowledge discovery into information delivery.40 In The Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves) sits still in a chair, all while his “dynamic and actual adventures happen in a virtual reality”. His biological being becomes insignificant. This technique becomes more apparent to depict conscious experience in other films like Avatar and Inception.41 Looking ahead into the twenty-second century, it may be possible to create a hive mind—a sort of unified consciousness—of the planet’s populace linked seamlessly into artificial systems.42 Becoming “docile” is the result of disciplinary efforts. Human bodies become docile by reaching the controlling power’s goal of order and regulation. When the energy of the body is controlled, discipline is possible through restraint and the power of subjection. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the docile society is achieved through the complexities of body image. The novel’s author Margaret Atwood uses the female body as a treatment of the mind/body concept and analyses the way in which her characters respond to, and resist, its destructive effects. The bodies of women in Atwood’s novel, the handmaids, are severely scrutinized to show how a body can be docile. 38  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan (trans.), New York: Vintage, 1977, p. 138. 39  Gregory Frame, “The Odds are Never in Your Favor: the Form and Function of American Cinema’s Neoliberal Dystopias”, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 17: 3, 2019, p. 379. 40   Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences, London: Sage, 2002, quoted in Jakob Krause-Jensen and Christina Garsten, “Introduction Neoliberal Turns in Higher Education”, The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences, 7: 3, 2020, p. 5. 41  Turnin, n.p.

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A Time of Calamity The pathway of life is no longer determined by social roles, creating greater uncertainties and increased risk as consequence. Political engagement falls away to market ideology mapped out by “neoliberal economic logic, de-territorialized transnational corporate capitalism, rampant consumerism, and a raft of social and environmental side-effects”. Zygmunt Bauman best describes the historical evolution of such consequences. Beginning with the pre-modern era, Bauman identifies “the gamekeeper” who defends and preserves the natural, divine balance of the world. In North America, colonialists maintained order in adherence to “manifest destiny” in which they believed they were God’s chosen people. The modern world, Bauman explains, evolved under “the gardener”, who ensured a utopian harmony that was intended to produce the greatest benefit to mankind. In the postmodern era, Bauman proposes that “we are all hunters now”.42 Even when they hunt in groups, hunters are individualized and are able to hunt in a climate of unregulated competition. Reducing the value of universities in society is a cause of concern. Attempts to “short-change or cheat … new generations or the wider public” fails in providing protected spaces where “the extension and deepening of human understanding” is given priority. Here knowledge is unfettered or influenced to meet “practical or political” goals, regardless of economically desirable it may be.43 Beck’s “risk society” thesis is that we have now reached a stage of techno-economic progress in which “the social production of wealth is systematically accompanied by the social production of risk”.44 The political consciousness that a risk society produces is reflected in dystopian hopes and fears. Phillip Reeve’s Mortal Engines (2001) and M.  T. Anderson’s Feed are emblematic of these considerations. Feed zeros-in on the individual hunter consuming goods. Predatory capitalism amidst a jungle of consumerism nullifies all political 42  Zygmunt Bauman, “Living in Utopia”, Speech delivered to the London School of Economics, 27 October 2005, accessed 15 November 2022,a: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/LSEPublicLecturesAndEvents/pdf/20051027-Bauman2.pdf; as summarized in Bullen and Parsons, “Dystopian Visions of Global Capitalism”, p. 130. 43  Ibid, pp. 58–59. 44  Ulrich Beck and Johannes Willms, Conversations with Ulrich Beck, Michael Pollak (trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004, quoted in Bullen and Parsons, “Dystopian Visions of Global Capitalism”, p. 128.

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consciousness. Living in America in its dying days, teenagers have been blue-toothed to the Internet through an implant in their brains. The technology is “the feed”. Corporations have direct access to consumers by tapping directly into their brain with an endless “feed” in a relentless pursuit of wealth. Teenagers are bombarded by direct-line advertising and propaganda from infancy. Anderson creates a world where the characters’ parasitic relationship to corporate capitalism—Feed Corporation—links directly to “American-driven models of late capitalism”. The attempt to replace humans with “thinking machines as efficient and capable” reveal the constant risk of malfunction due to “their lack of emotional understanding”.45 Films like The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, dir. 1975), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, dir. 1982), and the Terminator series (James Cameron, dir. 1984), reveal the anxieties that arise when humanity objects to technological control. In Feed, technology has limitations, particularly when it comes to emotional regulation. The protagonist, Titus, suddenly becomes overwhelmed by an Old Man who reaches out with a metal handle and touches him on the back of the neck. This happens in a moment when Titus’ “feed” is overloaded by incoming transmissions. Suddenly, I could feel myself broadcasting. I was broadcasting across the scatterfeed, going, helplessly, We enter a time of calamity! We enter a time of calamity! I couldn’t stop.46

The Old Man touches others, Titus’ friends (Violet, Link, and Marty), causing an uncontrollable unison chant from all of them, “We enter a time of calamity! We enter a time of calamity!” Anyone whom the Old Man touches if affected, “the signal was jammed just with that, over and over again, all of us in a chorus, going, We enter a time of calamity! We enter a time of calamity!” Titus describes a feeling of being kicked in the face, discovering it was his mouth, “saying the time of calamity thing, but at the top of my lungs”. Everyone was shouting, broadcasting, then the police arrived. The chant continues with the full chorus: We enter a time of calamity. Blood on the tarmac. Fingers in the juicer. Towers of air frozen in the lunar wastes. Models dead on the runways, with  Brian Jacobson, “Ex Machina in the Garden”, Film Quarterly, 69: 4, 2016, p. 25.  M. T. Anderson, Feed, Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2002, p. 38

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their legs facing backward. Children with smiles that can’t be undone. Chicken shall rot in the aisles. See the pillars fall.47

The police enter and begin hitting the Old Man “over the head again and again with stunners and sticks”. The Old Man fell to one knee and the police whispered to Titus and his friends, “We’re going to have to shut you off now. We’re going to have to shut you off”. Next, they are touched, and their bodies go limp and fall.48 This passage from Feed exemplifies the chaos and destruction of dystopia. Its context relates to an uncertain and unpredictable future. There is meaning in the text, obvious warnings of the impending doom of civilization, but also as paranoid gibberish. It screams like mental illness publicly on parade on poorly lit city streets. The crazed town-crier delivers horrid prophetic messages, unconcerned whether or not people hear him. Here, the character is drawn from the same societal vein, but he is wrapped in the technological apparatus of the “feed”. It delivers an infectious effect of contagious ramblings unwillingly transported to the minds of the central characters. While the message, rambling is never really explained, rather implied, the element of control and the rendering of “docile” bodies is clear. Anderson’s Feed advances the ability of consumer capitalism to co-opt society’s desire for a better existence. It replaces real lived experience with temporary satisfactions which provide only a brief relief from their continual suffering.49 Here Anderson writes, “We Americans … are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they were produced, or what happens to them … what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away?”50 Instant gratification thrives on mindlessness. It creates a dependence on other sources to make decisions. In describing the “feed” Titus states, “it knows everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are”.51 Becoming dependent on these transmissions allow for higher education, awareness, and language to decay. Titus makes it very clear that “Everyone is supersmart now. You can look up things automatic, like science and  Ibid., p. 39.  Ibid., p. 42. 49  Bullen and Parsons, “Dystopian Visions of Global Capitalism”, p. 135. 50  Anderson, Feed, p. 290. 51  Ibid., p. 48. 47 48

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­ istory”. He identifies knowledge as a selective, immediate quest expressh ing “it’s really great to know everything about everything whenever we want, to have it just like, in our brain, just sitting there”.52 This is misleading because nothing is truly absorbed or experienced. In an analysis about the contemporary uses of the Internet, Albert Borgmann concludes, “the complement to having ‘the world at your fingertips’ is having nothing in your head”.53 Neoliberalism redirects and distorts higher learning is redirected and warped and young adults no longer have a space that connects them to the world around them. Understanding the structure of government which sets the controls for equality and inclusion is essential for maintaining a healthy citizenry. Strengthening the democratic provisions allows once marginalized groups to enter the fold. The dystopian realities depicted in Feed demonstrate the difficulty that exists for politically pertinent information to compete with a consumer culture. The absence of protected institutions of higher learning reveals the use of government-sanctioned news bulletins that offer reassurance rather than crucial information. While Titus freely admits that corporations “control everything … who knows what evil shit they’re up to” he is willing to excuse this because “they’re the only way to get all this stuff”. He accepts that “they’re still going to control everything whether you like it or not” and also understands they are the reason that “everyone in the world employed, so it’s not like we could do without them”.54 Institutionally, higher education is alienated in dystopian narratives. Its form and mission are no longer serve the public, just to control it. War and mass destruction are omnipresent themes in a catastrophic world where humanity is constantly at risk. In Don’t Look Up (2021), as the earth faces the “existential horror of … environmental catastrophe” denial wins out over preservation.55 Saving the earth, and humanity, falls secondary to political squabbling, misinformation, and the outright rejection of scientific data. Don’t Look Up is a frightening reminder of an inability to trust  Ibid., pp. 59–61.  Albert Borgmann, Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p.  206, quoted in Bullen and Parsons, “Dystopian Visions of Global Capitalism”, p. 136. 54  Anderson, Feed, pp. 60–61. 55  Manohla Dargis, “Don’t Look Up Review: Tick, Tick, Kablooey”, New York Times, 23 December 23, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/movies/dont-look-up-­ review.html, accessed 15 December 2022. 52 53

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knowledge. While elites build rockets to relocate to other planets or secure DNA samples so the “best of humanity” can continue in other galaxies, the mechanisms that control and distract the attention of the masses forces them to suffer the ultimate consequence. Failure to think independently in serving what is best for all, without questioning the validity of power is dystopian. In such depictions, docile minds are the beginning of impending doom. Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron portrays television programmes as a means for preventing people from thinking. The great power of the media allows it to “transmit information to the public” with the freedom to “highlight certain news items and ignore others”. In doing so, they “set the agenda of public life” by influencing consensus and disagreement.56 M.  T. Anderson’s Feed (2002) centres on connectivity as the world’s wealthiest get biotechnological implants that enhance their cognition with smartphone-like features. In reality, “feed” disconnects the world from itself, lulling it into a constant state of “dream literacy”. The mission of higher learning to teach students “to think critically, take imaginative risks, [and] learn how to be moral witnesses” has seemingly been lost.57 The procurement of these skills “enable one to connect to others in ways that strengthened the democratic polity”.58 Instead, young people in these novels, much like in contemporary culture, are really commodities trying to survive in a hostile world/market. Giroux argues that contemporary young people “inhabit a neoliberal notion of temporality marked by a loss of faith in progress along with the emergence of apocalyptic narratives in which the future appears indeterminate, bleak, and insecure”.

Conditioned Belief The German universities impacted the American graduate school. This influence was incorporated into the philosophy of American universities near the end of the nineteenth century. The German university was described as a “detached organism … growing in accordance with its own laws”. It maintained an autonomy which allowed for it to authenticate its 56  A.  Andina-Díaz, “Reinforcement vs. Change: The Political Influence of the Media”, Public Choice, 131: 1/2, 2007, pp. 65–81. 57   Henry A.  Giroux, “Beyond Dystopian Education in a Neoliberal Society”, Fast Capitalism, 10:1, 2013, p. 109. 58  Ibid.

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understanding of truth. It determined that truth must be “value free … unaffected by the personal values of the investigator”. This was the elimination of personal bias which permitted a universal acceptance of knowledge and truth. Neither political nor ecclesiastical authorities should interfere. The foundational philosophy of higher education explores the nature of man, the nature of truth, and the nature of value. The essence of higher education is the cultivation of intellect. The connection between teaching, knowledge, and truth is a desired outcome. In the 1930s, economic depression shook the world. In the United States, social philosophy was reconsidered as was the educational philosophy of its colleges and universities. In 1933, Robert M.  Hutchins observed that the college student between the ages of eighteen to twenty-two was “permitted to do almost no learning”. Hutchins recognized that students were “taught” to continue “the process to which he has been accustomed in high school”. The bar of American higher education had been set fairly low. Completion of required information renders the acquisition of knowledge non-essential. As president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson identified the university as a source of public service, but he did not mean that the university should be subservient to society. Its effect was not direct but indirect. During the First World War, the radical writer Randolph Bourne held a view of service as “soldiering in support of the nation’s war”. A national view was the priority, “other values such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life” must be sacrificed. There was no use in educating people to use “their intelligence to realize reason and beauty in the nation’s communal living”. These sentiments align with the current neoliberalist reign over higher education to produce a competitive workforce to serve the global economy. In this same vein, artistic expression and critical thinking must address those needs of the market if they are to be included in the curriculum. The direct relationship of higher education to government and industry has advanced in the post-war era to what is now referred to as “academic capitalism”. The revolt on college and university campuses during the 1960s was a direct challenge to the national economic, political, and military institutions, identified by C. Wright Mills as the “power elite”.59 Students were at the forefront of raging demonstrations in opposition to the Vietnam War. Belief in the intrinsic value of higher learning demanded  C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, New York: Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 296.

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that it return to being an institution of cultural value and virtue.60 Lashing out against the injustices of the social order, students became critical of the role of the university, claiming a neutral or “value-free” position when it came to the great issues of the day. Students demanded action rather than intellectual analysis, moral outrage over ideological conviction. The greatest legacy of the 1960s was the recognition that college campuses could be a laboratory for social change. In 1975, the Trilateral Commission, a nongovernmental policy group, developed growing concerns that the rise in democracy was due to the failures of the institutions responsible for “the indoctrination of the young”. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell identified college campuses as hotbeds of dangerous zealotry. He addressed the main business lobby, the USA’s Chamber of Commerce, with warnings of a pending “radical” takeover of all American institutions, calling on the business community to use its economic power to reverse the attack. Powell, a former lobbyist for the tobacco industry, understood the power of what he called “the free market”.61 During his campaign for governor of California in 1966, Ronald Reagan accused a “small minority of hippies, radicals and filthy speech advocates” of causing disorder on the University of California campuses. He demanded that they “be taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown off campus—permanently”. As Governor Reagan called for an end to free tuition for state college and university students. He demanded 20 per cent across-the-board cuts in higher education funding during each year of his administration and repeatedly slashed construction funds for state campuses. He campaigned for the firing of Clark Kerr, the highly respected president of the University of California, and declared that the state “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity”.62 The legacy of neoliberalism and those political leaders that used it to shape education policy comes through in dystopian narrative. Melissa Ames claims, “The majority of authors writing YA fiction today lived through the Reagan era”. For the better part of their lifetime, these authors have been immersed in neoliberal discourses that emphasize 60  Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “The 1960s and the Transformation of Campus Cultures”, History of Education Quarterly, 26: 1, 1986, p. 13. 61  Noam Chomsky, “The Assault on Public Education”, Truthout, 2012, n.p. 62  Gary K. Clabaugh, “The Educational Legacy of Ronald Reagan”, Educational Horizons, 82: 4, 2004, p. 256.

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individualism and self-reliance. As young adults, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, and Lord of the Flies were all required reading, “texts concerned with misery and social control”.63 In the 1980s, dystopia focused on the mass destruction that was to come. Atomic bombs, nuclear holocausts, and the final days of humanity never considered what the world would be like beyond destruction. These were manifestations of Walter Benjamin’s prediction that the human race might be capable of viewing “its own destruction as an aesthetic experience of the first order”. The current and future generations do not live in fear of apocalypse. Instead, their fears are based on a post-9/11 reality where education is more about survival. Ally Condie’s Matched series (2010) depicts a society obsessed with calculated planning “where each of life’s stages—from marriage at age 21 to death on or before age 80—is decided in advance for optimal results”.64 In Matched, Condie described the ways in which the society had decided to preserve culture and historical artefacts: in the fashion of an exaggerated “throw away” culture, record keeping and personal preserves were virtually eliminated and only things of value (as decided by the government) were saved. The protagonist, Cassia, alludes to the previous era being overly dependent on technology, stating, “You never know when technology might fail … specialization keeps people from becoming overwhelmed. We don’t need to understand everything”. Ames’ critique of this passage demonstrates that societal belief “that information should be specialized and restricted to the few” may be an acknowledgement of the “post 9/11 culture climate where citizens are not expected to understand everything”.65 As a narrative device, dystopia does not present a promising future for humankind. It does, however, provide alternatives to rethink the present. The absence of higher learning in such narratives is alarming, but not so exaggerated that it is a cause for concern. Dystopian narratives frame higher learning as the pathway to knowledge and freedom. It is there that students find new roads to agency. The ability to escape an oppressive 63   Melissa Ames, “Engaging ‘Apolitical’ Adolescents: Analyzing the Popularity and Educational Potential of Dystopian Literature Post-9/11”, The High School Journal, 97: 1, 2013, p. 8. 64  B.  Fulton, “Romancing the future: Ally Condie’s Matched”. The Salt Lake Tribune, 2011, at: https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=50949533&itype=CMSID, accessed 26 December 2022, as quoted in Ames, “Engaging ‘Apolitical’ Adolescents”, p. 9. 65  Ames, “Engaging ‘Apolitical’ Adolescents”, p. 10.

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reality can be achieved by understanding the specific factors for which such domination occurred. Critical assessments address issues of power, inequity, oppression, and injustice. A picture of a string laid down for students to follow in their own ways, developing their creativity, and independence of mind represents the Enlightenment ideal of education. Today, higher learning has the values and sensibilities of competition, contracting, and income generation over the values of academic freedom and scholarship. Bronwyn Davies states that “we must give to our students a doubled gaze, to enable them to become critically literate, to become citizens at once capable of adapting and becoming appropriate within the contexts in which they find themselves”. Higher learning is not something to escape from or to just survive. It affords society growth because it allows for knowledge to be transported and redefined. Knowledge is organic. Its preservation results from the nurturing of young minds. Discourse is creative, imaginative, and political. The passion to break open the old and to envisage the new is possible when curiosity is encouraged. Failure to prepare students to be able to withstand the worst effects of neoliberalism ignores dystopian visions. Higher learning must be an environment that breeds identity rather than shape it for any other utility.

CHAPTER 10

Dark Comedies/Dark Universities: Negotiating the Neoliberal Institution in British Satirical Comedies The History Man (1981), A Very Peculiar Practice (1986–1988), and Campus (2011) Bethan Michael-Fox and Kay Calver

This chapter considers three British satirical comedies about universities: The History Man (1981), A Very Peculiar Practice (1986–1988), and Campus (2011). As this book argues, academia is largely ‘unseen’ by the general public other than via popular culture. If seen, it is typically as a caricature. Satirical representations emphasise the politically charged dimension of caricatures, revealing how they can serve to undermine,

B. Michael-Fox (*) Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected] K. Calver University of Bedfordshire, Bedford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Harmes, R. Scully (eds.), Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32350-8_10

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mock, and provide critical commentary on their subjects. Where satire— understood here as “the ridicule of prevailing vices and their perpetrators”—has a strong history in British literary and visual culture, Stephen Wagg has emphasised that modern satire is characterised by its “emergence from within the culture of the dominant social classes (a minor ‘revolt of the privileged’)” and “its subsequent dissemination, via the mass media, into popular culture”.1 This is especially evident in satirical representations of the university, which, as this chapter will show, tend to be produced by those with in-depth knowledge of universities as institutions—those who have worked and studied in them for prolonged periods of time. This informs their realist edge and adds weight to their critical function. Each of the three comedies examined here considers the emergence (The History Man; A Very Peculiar Practice) and development (A Very Peculiar Practice; Campus) of the privatised, commercialised, and neoliberal university analysed in texts such as Peter Fleming’s Dark Academia: How Universities Die, and Richard Hall’s The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of History.2 We argue that whilst television can operate as a powerful form of popular culture mediating academic culture and activities, it can also act as a form of critique, contributing to the cultural production of critical knowledge about the academy and its discontents. After briefly outlining each of the three comedies, we explore their representations of higher learning via three themed sections focused on the university as an institution, its staff, and finally its students, exploring how the representation of these facets of the university have shifted over time as the commercialisation of higher education has intensified both in Britain and more broadly.

The History Man The History Man was a four-part television series that aired on BBC2 (the British Broadcasting Corporation’s second channel) in 1981. It was based on the 1975 campus novel of the same name by Malcom Bradbury, an academic and author who studied and taught at a range of English 1  Stephen Wagg, “You’ve never had it so silly: The politics of British satirical comedy from Beyond the Fringe to Spitting Image”, in Dominic Strinati and Stephen Wagg (ed.), Come on Down?: Popular Media Culture in Post-War Britain, London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 254–284. 2  Peter Fleming, Dark Academia: How Universities Die, London: Pluto Press, 2021; Richard Hall, The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of History, London: MayFly Books, 2021.

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universities.3 The series focuses on the character of Howard Kirk, a dynamic sociology lecturer and womaniser who works at his local university. The fictional University of Watermouth is, like all of the universities on which the television series examined here focus, an example of a modern, British university: those established or promoted to university status in the 1960s or later. Kirk is a staunch Marxist throughout the series, which positions the university as an institution hostile to right-wing politics. In the series, Kirk fails and eventually expels a student with right-wing political views taking his sociology class. However, released in 1981 when Margaret Thatcher had been elected and her conservative policies were taking hold, the television series adds a biting satirical conclusion that is not present in the novel (published in 1975 before Thatcher was elected and set in 1972) when it ends with a caption explaining that Kirk went on to vote Conservative in the 1979 general election, having been promoted by then to professor. This ending effectively caricatures the stereotype of a left-wing academic turned right-wing reactionary, rejecting their former political views in favour of maintaining their now-established social and economic status.

A Very Peculiar Practice A Very Peculiar Practice is another BBC production. It ran for two seasons, the first in 1986 and the second in 1988,4 and explores the commercialisation of higher education in Britain following funding cuts initiated by the Conservative government (whose election is signalled at the very end of The History Man). Andrew Davies wrote A Very Peculiar Practice based on his experiences at the University of Warwick.5 It is a dark, satirical 3  There are many interesting differences between the novel and this adaptation, especially in terms of how they each construct the central characters’ identities as ‘radicals’ in relation to the university and to gender roles. Several of these differences were discussed in the excellent short BBC2 documentary Film of the Book: The History Man from 1986. 4  There was a made-for-TV film in 1992 entitled A Very Polish Practice, but this was not based at a university. 5  The University of Warwick was founded in 1965 and has developed a reputation for world-leading research. It is the only member of the prestigious Russell Group of British universities that was not established prior to the First World War. It has a significant history in terms of staff and student discontent. In 1970, E. P. Thompson published a book entitled Warwick University Ltd.: Industry, Management and the Universities (London: Penguin, 1970), which detailed the political surveillance of staff and students by the university and close relationships between its administration and industry partners. The university has continued to be the site of protest for varying reasons in recent years. The 2019 BBC Three Documentary Warwick Uni Rape Chat Scandal details the institution’s high-profile mishandling of a sexual harassment case, and an eleven-week sit in took place in 2021 drawing attention to the issue of women’s safety on campus.

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comedy series and a clear critique of the marketisation of higher education. Focused on a medical doctor who has come to work at the dedicated medical practice for the fictional Lowlands University, the series mediates understandings of the well-being of academia, with one of its central characters—the alcoholic medical doctor Jock McCannon—engaged in writing a book entitled The Sick University throughout season two. This fictional book is resonant with the titles of several texts actually published in recent years, including Hall’s The Hopeless University, and John Smyth’s The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars and Neoliberal Ideology.6 In A Very Peculiar Practice, Daker’s position as a medical doctor new to the institution functions to provide an ‘outsider’ perspective through which the series is focalised. A Very Peculiar Practice becomes increasingly surreal as it develops and, as this chapter will argue, it both mirrors and is prescient of the developing practices of international higher education. By the end of the second season, two disastrous vice-­ chancellors have led Lowlands’ campus into total breakdown, resulting in the death of a student and staff member in a fire that destroys the university. As Mark Fisher has pointed out, the series “mordant atmosphere” shifts it away from its initial conception as a comedy as it gets progressively darker.7 The series concludes with the Lowlands re-formed— the second disastrous vice-chancellor, the American Jack Daniels, still at the helm—as Lowlands High Security Defence Research Establishment. Lamenting its demise, Daker suggests the institution “could have been such a good place”, in a clear indictment of the disappointment of modern universities and their relationship to commercial interests.8 The transformation of Lowlands into a military complex is one of the ways Davies’ series seems disturbingly prescient given its similarity to, for example, the multi-million dollar Raytheon-Umass Lowell Research Institute, built in 2014 as part of the partnership between the world’s third-largest defence contractor and the University of Massachusetts Lowell.9

6  Hall, The Hopeless University; John Smyth, The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars and Neoliberal Ideology, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 7  Mark Fisher, “A Very Peculiar Practice”, Film Quarterly, 1 December 2011, at: https:// filmquarterly.org/2011/12/01/a-very-peculiar-practice/ 8  A Very Peculiar Practice (AVPP), series 2, episode 7, 56 minutes. 9   For a discussion and outline of this relationship, see: Fleming, Dark Academia, pp. 97–111.

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Campus Campus is a semi-improvised sitcom shown on the British Channel 4 in 2011, led by Victoria Pile.10 Like A Very Peculiar Practice, the series is dark and surreal. Set at the fictional Kirke University, described as a “hotbed of academic mediocrity”, this series fuels and engages with stereotypes of modern universities as “dumbed down”, commercially driven, and ultimately unnecessary and bureaucratic institutions. With poor ratings and accusations from critics that it was offensive (which it is, with, for example, its jokes about international students and student suicide in particular coming across as racist and in bad taste, respectively), the series was cancelled after one season.11 The series features, among other things, a power-­ hungry vice-chancellor called Jonty de Wolfe, a womanising English professor, a graduate student who shows little interest in reading any books, and a mix-up in which some members of staff at the university are paid twice.

The University As mentioned above, the focus of all three comedies is on modern universities, those established from 1960 onwards as part of the global expansion of higher education.12 The setting of the series in modern universities is evident most obviously in the exterior and interior settings of the series, with The History Man and A Very Peculiar Practice both showcasing modern cement buildings, small offices, stackable chairs in characterless seminar rooms, and modern-looking campuses.13 Campus, filmed more

 An early pilot was broadcast in 2009 as part of a comedy showcase on Channel 4.  Ian Wolf, “Campus attracts less than 750,000 viewers”, 6 April 2011, at: https://www. comedy.co.uk/tv/news/506/campus_first_episode_low_viewing_figures/ 12  For a discussion of this expansion of higher education, see: Jill Pellew and Miles Taylor (eds), Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 13  Though as Peter Viney has pointed out, whilst the interiors of The History Man are very much in-fitting with a “mid-60 s university” the externals are insufficiently brutalist as to fully reflect the stereotypical modern British university of the 1960s: Peter Viney, “The History Man”, at: https://peterviney.com/film-theatre-reviews/the-history-man/, accessed 8 December 2022. 10 11

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recently, features open plan offices for professional services staff contrasted with a large, corporate, and luxurious office for the vice-chancellor; with modern outdoor and social spaces also featuring that reflect more recent trends in the development of homogenous modern campuses. This focus only on modern institutions in all three comedies suggests anxieties about the shifting identity and meaning of higher education in the popular consciousness, with the massification of higher education raising questions about the purpose and value of degrees and about the tensions between (especially modern) universities’ identities as both businesses and purveyors of an intangible public good. As audiences learn in A Very Peculiar Practice, the stereotype of a university is that it is: like a very, very inefficient sector of British industry. Top management are totally corrupt and idle. Middle management are incompetent and idle. And the workforce are bolshie and idle. And of course there is no bloody product! No wonder people get ill here, there is nothing else for them to do.14

The absence of a clear “product” is coupled with the notion that all staff from top to bottom in an inherently hierarchical institution are idle, suggesting universities are places people go to avoid work, and the most senior staff are corrupt. Explicit engagement with the modern nature of the university is also apparent in A Very Peculiar Practice when it is pointed out that “a university—even a university in the ‘80 s—isn’t just a degree factory turning out the product in times of economic stringency and world recession!”15 Here the product is the degree with which students aim to leave, as well as the student themselves—hopefully graduating as a skilled member of a future workforce. The statement reveals concerns evident since the beginning of the massification of higher education about the motivation for its expansion, often considered at least in part a way to reduce unemployment by providing people with the opportunity for further study, as well as a way to produce a highly trained workforce. Graffiti on the walls of the university in A Very Peculiar Practice states, “university kills intellect through degrees,” suggesting that the modern university often houses its own

 AVPP, series 1, episode 1, 20 minutes.  AVPP, series 1, episode 1, 23 minutes.

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worst critics, with the pun drawing attention to the notion of “dumbed down” degrees and of universities as factories for the replication and maintenance of the sociocultural status quo. Both the aim of modern universities to take people out of the labour market and to fulfil its long-term demands may be in tension with those of university staff, who in several of these comedies (and more broadly in the public imagination) are positioned as left-wing, anti-establishment figures. For example, in A Very Peculiar Practice, Dr Grotowska, an Art History lecturer, rebukes a student who claims never to have had to complete independent work or “do anything like this before” with the response: “Thinking for yourself you mean? Don’t be scared of it, it’s what you are here for”.16 This emphasises the notion that whilst some lecturers may “spoon feed” their students, others are committed to the idea of university as an institution that develops students’ critical faculties. In The History Man, the university is positioned both as needlessly, ludicrously bureaucratic (thirty-five minutes into a meeting scheduled for three and a half hours, they are only beginning to discuss the first agenda item due to a detour into discussing the use of “gentleman” as a greeting when there are women present) and as a site of resistance—where issues of sexism can be addressed, and where Marxism, broader left-wing ideologies, notions of “free love”, and of challenging the nuclear family are all on offer.17 However, the satirical edge of the series ensures these ideas are undermined in several ways. Resistance seems manufactured, detached from the “real world” and entirely insular to the university. For example, in a central plotline focused on the Sociology department’s attempts to no-platform a biological racist named Professor Mangel, audiences are  AVPP, series 2, episode 2, 10 minutes.  The following exchange features in episode one between the central male academic character Howard Kirk and a female colleague carrying a bassinet as they head for the lift: 16 17

Female Colleague: How was your summer? Kirk: Good. I’ve finished my book. Yours? Female Colleague: Got pregnant again! Kirk: Not married, I hope? Female Colleague: God, no. This exchange embodies a radical challenging of the nuclear family, but also emphasises the double bind faced by many women in the academy. Whilst not adhering to the patriarchal ideals of the nuclear family, Kirk’s female colleague is also left balancing work and single parenting whilst Kirk, himself a father of two children, has spent the summer finishing his book, as his wife and several female graduate students undertook the required childcare.

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aware that it is Howard Kirk himself, the series’ central character, which has secretly orchestrated the invitation to Professor Mangel to give a talk to begin with, in order to stage a protest and win the favour of his peers. So, whilst in these series the notion of the university as a site for radical resistance is often engaged with, this resistance is impotent, insular, and ineffective. The university quashes resistance and is a space that only accepts one worldview. Yet, as mentioned above, the series ends with a caption that states the central character Howard Kirk voted Conservative in the 1979 general election. This emphasises a stereotype of a left-wing academic who has rejected their former radical political views in favour of maintaining the social and economic status that the university has offered them: the academic who has “sold out”. Howard Kirk’s left-wing views have made him popular with colleagues and students and got him promoted to professor, and once he has attained this position, he entirely eschews the political commitments that earned him the position. Campus, the most recent of the series, features no positioning of the university in terms of resistance. Whilst The History Man contains stereotypes of the university as a radical, left-wing, and anti-establishment institution—and A Very Peculiar Practice offers an uncannily prescient depiction of the descent of the modern university into a fully financialised neoliberal institution—Campus depicts just this: a university obsessed with income generation and rankings. As explained by a consultant brought in to assess the university’s financial health, modern teaching-intensive institutions are especially vulnerable to shifts in government legislation. She points out that “next year’s funding will be halved for universities who fall below the world’s top 300”.18 Kirke, the university at the centre of Campus, is number 394. The consultant states that in order to move up the list into the top 300, the university would need to overcome the challenges of being a modern university to “get some traditions, find some class, discover something, be newsworthy”.19 Otherwise, they face closure. Here, ideas of value and worth are once more at the fore, with stereotypes of modern universities as lacking in class (or indeed being for the working classes rather than social elites) are reinforced, as are notions of them as lacking in any original, world-leading, or ground-breaking research.

 Campus, series 1, episode 5, 3 minutes.  Campus, series 1, episode 5, 4 minutes.

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In A Very Peculiar Practice, Lowlands University is positioned as being in “euthanasia territory” because it doesn’t “show up in the top 40” due to its academic standards being “lousy”. The shift from top 40 in A Very Peculiar Practice to top 300 internationally in Campus is telling of the globalisation and massification of higher education. Whilst it is unclear whether the top 40 mentioned in A Very Peculiar Practice refers to the UK solely or to a global context, the specific emphasis on international rankings is highly evident in Campus. A Very Peculiar Practice also draws attention to the idea that the function of modern universities is to be for working-class young people whom, it makes clear, may be more academically talented than their elite counterparts, when it is stated that the vice-­ chancellor has tried “foreign students on full fees, British students from wealthy families … not too bright most of them”, in order to plug their funding gap.20 However, Campus also directs its comedy towards elite institutions, when the vice-chancellor explains that “from today, Kirke has to be perceived as an elite university, which means considerable exaggeration and, in some cases, lying”. Whilst the vice-chancellor is intimating that they will have to lie and exaggerate to establish this status, he is also suggesting that this is common practice for elite institutions too. A Very Peculiar Practice bridges the gap between the bureaucratic but also potentially radical, modern university featured in The History Man and the entirely financialised neoliberal institution depicted in Campus. A Very Peculiar Practice grapples with the commercialisation of higher education, with the university as an institution becoming “emotionally bankrupt” as it pursues financial security over student well-being and academic standards.21 As character Jock MacCannon explains: “financially we flourish, but morally we wither”.22 This is in contrast to what a university should do, which is “show us how to live as well […] offer us an ideal model of society, a sense of community, a sense of family”.23 This tension between the university as a progressive social good and the university as a ruthless economic project is borne out in metaphors of health and well-­ being that pervade the series, via its focus on a student health centre, drawing attention back to students as essential to, but often portrayed as superfluous to, the university. As central character Daker explains when  AVPP, series 2, episode 2, 21 minutes.  AVPP, series 1, episode 1, 42 minutes. 22  AVPP, series 2, episode 5, 21 minutes. 23  AVPP, series 2, episode 5, 34 minutes. 20 21

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discussing student illness and depression, “this crisis is the direct result of the administration’s policies. The students cannot afford to buy books, eat or pay the rent and no matter how hard they work half of them expect to be thrown out by the end of this term”.24 With one in ten students who took part in the UK’s National Union of Students survey in 2022 reporting using foodbanks, this depiction of the university seems alarmingly prescient.25 However, it may also strike anyone working in a modern university now as outdated in its representations of the notion of being ‘kicked out,’ given that retention is high on university agendas in terms of league tables and financial incentives.26 By the end of A Very Peculiar Practice, the university has seen staff and student protests turn fatal with the university razed to the ground, and replaced with a hi-tech military training site. The series searingly indicts the neoliberalisation of higher education and, as Fisher has noted and as mentioned above, it is hard to identify it as a comedy by its conclusion.27 In each of these three satirical comedies, the university comes to resemble several of the states of dystopian education discussed in Chap. 7 of this collection by Stacy Madddern. Whilst each comedy engages with the notion of higher education as a public good (to some extent), the universities they represent are bureaucratic, financially driven, and deeply troubled institutions.

University Staff A range of university staff are in the three comedies. A Very Peculiar Practice uses the campus health centre and its four doctors as a narrative device to provide both an insider/outsider perspective on the university.28 The History Man is entirely focused on academic staff, portraying them as  AVPP, series 2, episode 7, 11 minutes.  “Cost of living”, National Union of Students, at: https://www.nus.org.uk/resources/ cost-of-living-research-june-2022-students-and-apprentices 26  For a discussion of non-continuation in UK HE, see: Nick Hillman, “A short guide to non-continuation in UK universities”, 2021, at: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2021/01/A-short-guide-to-non-continuation-in-UK-universities.pdf, accessed 8 December 2022. 27  Fisher, “A Very Peculiar Practice”. 28  Though not academics, head of the practice Dr. Jock MacCannon is the author of the acclaimed textbook “Sexual Anxiety and the Common Cold”. In the first season he near-­ fatally mistakes a case of appendicitis as “home sickness”, in a plotline that pokes fun at the academic tendency to intellectualise. 24 25

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typically left-wing, as (wanting to be) radical, and as able to agree on very little despite what they have in common. Campus focuses on the university vice-chancellor and a handful of academic staff and graduate students. Whilst the vice-chancellor is not a character in The History Man, two corrupt and financially minded vice-chancellors feature in the first two seasons of A Very Peculiar Practice—in season one, the English vice-chancellor with an American name, Ernest Hemingway. In the second season the American vice-chancellor Jack Daniels. Whilst Hemingway embodies the Thatcherite policies of the 1980s, Daniels is even more invested in the privatisation of the university, in money, and in creating links with big business. The shift from an absent or unseen vice-chancellor in The History Man to a deranged, egomaniacal one in Campus with two powerful, business-­minded vice-chancellors in-between in A Very Peculiar Practice is illustrative of the rise of managerialism in British higher education.29 Campus effectively conveys tensions between management, academic staff, and professional services staff, whilst also creating a sense of the university as a community including undergraduates, postgraduates, academics, administrators, and professional services staff. The presence of professional services in Campus is a progressive feature of the series. Representations of university professional services staff are scarce on screen, and here the depiction of an accommodation officer, several secretaries, and the head of finance, amongst others, make for engaging storylines. Many of these characters are represented as having insufficient work to do, reinforcing broader cultural stereotypes of those who work in education and at universities as having an “easy job”. In the depiction of university professional services staff, there are few pre-conceived cultural stereotypes with which to engage. In the character of English professor Beer, however, Campus is able to demonstrate the endurance and progression of stereotypes about male academics. While in The History Man, audiences are presented with a left-wing, radical, womanising, prolific, and dynamic academic, in Campus it is mostly the womanising that remains. As Fisher has pointed out, in A Very Peculiar Practice—the series that bridges The History Man and Campus—academic “militancy has all but disappeared” in a series full of “profound resignation” over the

29  For a discussion of this, see Rosemary Deem, “‘New Managerialism’ and Higher Education: the management of performances and cultures in universities in the United Kingdom”, International Studies in Sociology of Education, 8: 1, 1998, pp. 47–70.

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“unstoppable” privatisation of both universities and medical professional.30 By the time of Campus, the idea of the academic as politically engaged is all but gone. Professor Beer avoids work at all costs and has been fully institutionalised. While Howard Kirk in The History Man is (rightfully) accused of left-wing bias in his marking practices, in Campus, the marking practices of academics seem even more arbitrary and absurd. Professor Beer decides grades using a dartboard and never reads assignments. In Campus, academic staff are corrupt and idle, claiming fraudulent expenses and demonstrating little or no interest in research. Typically, the academic is a white male in all three comedies.31 All three comedies also represent these mostly male academic staff as predatory. The campus breakout of a sexually transmitted disease in A Very Peculiar Practice is traced back to a staff member. The central male academic characters in The History Man and Campus both regularly have sex with students and colleagues. As Ana Stevenson argues in her chapter on the film Mona Lisa Smile, and Kristine Larsen in hers focused specifically on inappropriate relationship, portrayals of the academy must now be reinterpreted in the wake of the #MeToo movement. In each of these comedies, much of the behaviour that would have been deemed womanising at the time can now be understood more accurately as serious sexual misconduct. A Very Peculiar Practice includes the most comprehensive and enduring stereotype of academics: that of them as pointless, egotistical, and idle. In a scene discussing academic staff in A Very Peculiar Practice, audiences are told: in reality, they are here to avoid contact with students as much as possible, while they write books and articles that nobody is ever going to read and swan off to conferences to give papers nobody is going to listen to. And the more of that they do, the more time off they get to do even more of it, until they’re so eminent there is no danger of them seeing another student!32  Fisher, “A Very Peculiar Practice”.  In line with Susan Hopkins’ chapter on female bodies and female sexuality in films about higher learning in this collection, an analysis of representations of women’s sexuality and of feminism in the three series discussed in this chapter would be a valuable endeavour. For example, the character of Rose Marie in A Very Peculiar Practice, a manipulative careerist who considers illness “something men do to women” and uses her sexuality to progress before eventually becoming a nun, awkward scientist Lydia Tennant in Campus who propositions a student as she simultaneously tries to masturbate on a coat hook, and all of the women in The History Man, are ripe for critical attention. 32  AVPP, series 1, episode 4, 13 minutes. 30 31

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However, sitting alongside this indictment of academics is a contrasting representation in all three comedies of academics as under pressure, competing with each other, and in desperate need of publications. In A Very Peculiar Practice, the understanding is that academics must “publish or die … and if you don’t publish, we will kill you”.33 In The History Man, several of Howard Kirk’s colleagues struggle to write. In episode one of Campus, entitled “Publication! Publication! Publication!”,34 the vice-­ chancellor of Kirke University explains that his role is to “ram” his “Oxford English” down the “gullet” of Professor Beer “until he shits out something with an ISBN number”.35 Here, the role of the university vice-­ chancellor as first and foremost a manager of productivity is emphasised, and throughout this series, academic staff are pitted against each other in a fiercely competitive environment. It is in this representation of academia as an enterprise in which publishing is valued above all else, including reading and research, that Campus exhibits most verisimilitude. As Koops has argued in a short, darkly humorous, dystopian, and sadly realistic article for the journal Surveillance and Society, “most scholars have internalized the commandment to publish or perish” and many academics “publish too much and read too little”.36 This is because “scholars simply don’t have time to read each other’s work, because they have to write”, resulting in an environment where most people’s publications won’t be read.37 What Campus illustrates effectively is the clamour amongst academics to publish something that will appeal to a broad audience in order to achieve academic celebrity status; as mathematician Imogen Moffatt does with her book The Joy of Zero in the series.38

 AVPP, series 1, episode 4, 12 minutes.  This episode title is a play on British prime minister Tony Blair’s phrase “Education! Education! Education!” in the 1997 Labour Party campaign in the UK. The party’s education manifesto included the target of at least 50% of young people attending university. Labour education policies further expanded higher education in the UK, in turn increasing reactionary accusations in the popular tabloids of “Mickey Mouse” degrees. 35  Campus, series 1, episode 1, 46 minutes. 36  Bert-Jaap Koops, “Goodbye to publications, or confessions of a privacy law scholar”, Surveillance and Society, 20: 3, 2022, p. 313. 37  Ibid., p. 316. 38  For an interesting article on academic celebrity, see: Peter William Walsh and David Lehmann, “Academic Celebrity”, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 34, 2021, pp. 21–46. 33 34

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Whilst professional services characters are typically underrepresented in these comedies and academics embody the contradictions of being typified as both lazy and extremely ambitious, vice-chancellors need little talent in order to succeed. Though there is little reference to senior management in The History Man, in A Very Peculiar Practice, Vice-Chancellor Ernest Hemmingway is described as follows: he’s failed to keep his talented people, he backed all the wrong horses, he couldn’t even flog the campus to the Japanese. His lack of principle I’m afraid is only mitigated by his lack of competence. He’ll probably get a government post and something in the honours list.39

Whilst controversies over vice-chancellors’ pay and expenses came to a head in the UK in 2018—when it was reported that some were earning close to half a million a year and had claimed expenses for first-class travel, chauffeurs, and the relocation of a pet dog—A Very Peculiar Practice demonstrates how concerns about senior leadership in universities dates further back in the popular imagination.40

University Students Students do not feature in any of these comedies. As we have argued elsewhere, it was not until the increase in tuition fees in 2012 and the removal of student number controls in 2013 that students became a staple of the British televisual landscape, with several popular reality television series and fictional programmes about students emerging.41 The History Man includes several female graduate students that have affairs with lecturer Howard Kirk, engage in protests and discuss academic ideas. The series also includes a young male student with conservative views kicked out of the university at the behest of Kirk, who dislikes his political stance. In both A Very Peculiar Practice and Campus, the idea of international  AVPP, series 1, episode 7, 48 minutes.  Harriet Swain, “Have university leaders changed after the vice-chancellor pay scandal?”, 1 November 2018, at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/nov/01/ have-university-leaders-changed-after-the-vice-chancellor-pay-scandal 41  Kay Calver and Bethan Michael-Fox, “Constructing the university student in British documentary television” in Rachel Brooks and Sarah O’Shea (ed.), Reimagining the Higher Education Student Constructing and Contesting Identities, London: Routledge, 2021, pp. 152–169. 39 40

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s­ tudents as ‘cash cows’ is a prominent characterisation. In A Very Peculiar Practice, Daker notes that the institution seems to “encourage a lot of overseas students,” and he is told that this is “for the big fat fees”.42 As the series progresses, Daker becomes increasingly disillusioned, stating that international recruitment practices form “a cynical exploitation of the most contemptible kind.” He states: We take these young people from ALL over the world, half of them don’t even speak English, we don’t care do we. We want their money, shove them into course they can’t even follow, let them sink or swim, let them suffer, let them turn their faces to the wall and die quietly.43

Whilst in A Very Peculiar Practice, it is possible to see that concerns about suspect recruitment practices at universities have been present since at least the 1980s, there is overt criticism of this approach. In Campus, the notion of recruiting what racist Vice-Chancellor Jonty de Wolfe calls “foreigns” is more normalised, positioned as an expected and de facto practice within higher education, perhaps reflective of increased popular awareness of scandals around international recruitment.44 When international students are not positioned in the series as “cash cows”, they are positioned as the “brightest and best” in line with what Rachel Brooks has noted about the representation of international students in British policy documents, which tend to adhere also to this polarising and reductive dichotomy.45 At other times, students are constructed as vulnerable and in need of care. This is the case throughout A Very Peculiar Practice, where it is often noted that student grants are insufficient to enable students to meet their basic needs. In Campus, an accommodations officer asks a student if they

 AVPP, series 1, episode 1, 31 minutes.  AVPP, series 1, episode 1, 42 minutes. 44  In 2017, The British Broadcasting Corporation’s investigative series Panorama revealed a significant student loans scandal involving international recruiters, see BBC News, “Student loans fraud exposed by Panorama” 13th November 2017, at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/uk-41966571 45  Rachel Brooks, “The construction of higher education students in English policy documents”, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 39: 6, 2018, pp. 745–761. 42 43

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have a tent they could live in, as there is no suitable accommodation.46 Both A Very Peculiar Practice and Campus also engage with the increasingly high-profile tragedy of student suicides. In A Very Peculiar Practice, Daker warns that all staff at the medical practice should “be alert to the start of suicide season” in “the run up to exams”.47 In Campus, the vice-­ chancellor encourages a suicidal student to end their life so that he can blame financial mismanagement at the university on the student posthumously. This brief storyline is perhaps one that would not be included now, in the aftermath of several highly publicised student suicides in the UK, which have themselves garnered televisual representation in popular factual programming.48 Commenting on a coroner’s report produced in response to the death of a student by suicide—which suggested that academics’ personal mobile phone numbers should be given to their tutees— Alexander Gilder has argued that there is “major disconnect between public perceptions of what academics do and the services that students should and do receive”, particularly in relation to student support.49 Whilst in each of these comedies there are depictions of sexual relationships between academic staff and students and representations of students as vulnerable and exploited, what is rarely depicted (perhaps because it offers little in terms of comedic potential) is the role of academic staff in supporting students academically or pastorally.

Conclusion As this collection argues, televisual representations can be key mediators of popular understandings of the university and university life. As satirical comedies, these three comedies function to challenge shifts towards the neoliberal university, mocking the absurd and sometimes surreal practices

46  This series was produced and broadcast before a high profile story about a university lecturer who herself had to live in a tent due to poor wages and no job security, see: Anna Fazackerley “‘My students never knew’: the lecturer who lived in a tent”, 30 October 2021, at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/oct/30/my-students-never-knew-thelecturer-who-lived-in-a-tent 47  AVPP, series 2, episode 6, 11 minutes. 48  Kay Calver and Bethan Michael-Fox, “Under Pressure: Representations of Student Suicide in Documentary Television”, Mortality, 26: 4, 2021, pp. 376–393. 49  @DrAlexGilder, 3 November 2022, at: https://twitter.com/DrAlexGilder/status/1588 288840296726528

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of global higher education. Over the course of the three comedies, it is possible to see some of the ways in which ideas about academia have shifted in the British popular cultural imagination. It is through their knowing satire and their rich depictions of the complexity and absurdity of university life that these comedies not only mediate academic culture but act as a form of critique. It is in their surreal elements that A Very Peculiar Practice and Campus seem most critical, in line with surrealism’s position as a movement that seeks to bring about revolutionary change and to subvert the “deadening influence of rationalism and dominant intellectual traditions of western civilization”.50 In 1970, E.  P. Thompson asked whether it was “inevitable that the university will be reduced to the function of providing, with increasingly authoritarian efficiency, pre-packed intellectual commodities which meet the requirements of management?”51 He was writing specifically about the University of Warwick, the university on which A Very Peculiar Practice was based. In 2010, the University of Warwick hosted a talk by Andrew Davies, the writer of A Very Peculiar Practice, about the series and its relationship to the university.52 Though no doubt a fascinating event, this is perhaps a surreal example of how neoliberal capitalism can co-opt everything that might constitute resistance into its own aims, with a television series that represented a biting satirical attack on the university now playing a part in its public engagement agenda. As Fisher has pointed out, much of the unscrupulous behaviour depicted in A Very Peculiar Practice on the part of academics and administrators is now “taken for granted” in the academy, so in rewatching the series, “there’s a quaint charge about returning to a moment when such opportunism could be the object of mockery”.53 Sergio Angelini has similarly pointed out that in 2012, A Very Peculiar Practice was more “topical than ever in its view of the ruination wrought by the intrusion of big

50   David Pinder, “Surrealism/Surrealist Geographies”, in Audrey Kobayashi (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Second edition, Elsevier: Science & Technology, 2020, pp. 87–94. 51  Thompson, Warwick University Inc, p. 166. 52  Warwick University, “Event, Andrew Davies: A Very Peculiar Practice”, accessed 8 December 2022, at: https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/events/a_very_peculiar/ 53  Fisher, “A Very Peculiar Practice”.

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business in education and healthcare”.54 Whilst their focus on modern institutions is telling of anxieties about the expansion of higher education in the UK and the quality of education on offer, the shifting representations of the university, its staff, students, and discontents across all three comedies suggest a slow de-politicisation of academics and a deepening marketisation of universities with little room for resistance.55

54  Sergio Angelini, “A Very Peculiar Practice”, Sight and Sound, 1, 2012, p. 91, at: http:// libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/magazines/very-peculiar-­ practice/docview/913132791/se-2, accessed 23 October 2022. 55  How true these representations are is questionable, with 2022 seeing the UK’s Universities and Colleges Union stage what they have called their “biggest ever” strikes. See: UCU, “Biggest ever university strikes”, 8 November 2022, at: https://www.ucu.org. uk/article/12609/Biggest-ever-university-strikes-set-to-hit-UK-campuses-over-pay-­­ conditions%2D%2Dpensions

CHAPTER 11

A Doctor Who Academy for Dystopian Times Robin Redmon Wright

I grew up in a small, bucolic town in the mountains of east Tennessee. Since I left home 40 years ago, my hometown has grown to a whopping 848 residents. When I was a child, in the 1960s and 1970s, we could receive two television channels, NBC and CBS, by using an aerial antenna on a tall pole that rose several feet above our roof. Daytime TV was limited to soap operas and game shows. Boring. When not in school, and while my parents were away at factory jobs, I spent most of my time reading. But occasionally, when conditions were just right, daytime TV offered up a third option infinitely more interesting than the soaps. Occasionally, I could persuade a sibling to call out through a window while I went outside to turn the pole—“a little more … almost … no! too far … go back! … there!”—we could sometimes get a grainy, zig-zaggy signal from PBS, the public broadcasting station out of Knoxville. On one such occasion, PBS was airing an episode of Doctor Who, about the time and space travelling Time Lord whose companions were usually women from Earth. Jon Pertwee, portraying the Doctor in his ruffles and velvet, together with

R. R. Wright (*) Penn State Harrisburg, Middletown, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Harmes, R. Scully (eds.), Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32350-8_11

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Elisabeth Sladen as his companion Sarah Jane Smith, were simply captivating. I longed to be an investigative reporter, brave enough to face off with monsters and evil humans alike, like Sarah Jane. I marvelled at a universe inhabited by the Doctor. And although it was difficult back then to watch consistently, due to irregular scheduling and the rarity of having a cooperative sibling to help with the antenna, I, nonetheless, became a lifelong fan. It wasn’t until I was an adult, however, that I realized Doctor Who was so much more than mere entertainment.

To Tell the Truth (CBS Daytime Game Show), 1956–1968 “You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit the views”. ~ The Fourth Doctor, “The Face of Evil” (1977)

We are living through an unprecedented time. Many historians, scholars, and pundits refer to this era as a “post-truth world” where facts no longer matter, or else are vehemently denied or distorted. Moreover, many of the critical discourses hitherto associated with leftist cultural resistance have been appropriated by disingenuous far-right actors. Educators worldwide find themselves teaching within, and often against, this rising tide of post-­ truth propaganda persistently casting doubt on nearly every facet of reality. Conspiracy theories—a problem even before the COVID-19 pandemic—were amplified and rendered mainstream by far-right politicians in the USA and elsewhere in the days following the coronavirus outbreak.1 Perhaps even more disheartening, many of the promulgators of these conspiracy theories and “alternative facts” were using techniques, tools, and tactics similar to those we teach within critical media literacy (CML): unmasking issues of power and control, seeking ideological connections across media sources, forging links between corporate goals and media meanings, decoding messages for their political intentions, and accessing multiple sources for reinforcing content.2 Given this landscape, 1  Alice E.  Marwick and William Clyde Partin, “Constructing Alternative Facts: Populist Expertise and the QAnon Conspiracy”, New Media & Society, 2022, at: https://doi. org/10.1177/14614448221090201 2  Matthew N. Hannah, “A Conspiracy of Data: QAnon, Social Media, and Information Visualization”, Social Media + Society, 7: 3, 2021, at: https://doi.org/10.1177/ 205630512110360

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any form of critical education can feel, at best, ineffectual and, at worst, impossible to accomplish given the onslaught of disinformation—and the affirming reinforcement of that disinformation—that students encounter in their daily social media feed. Critical educators may find it difficult, if not impossible, to penetrate the alternative realities that many of their students, friends, and families construct and inhabit. Finding ways to soften defences and to encourage critical analysis of this onslaught of disinformation is imperative. For this chapter, I will briefly examine several episodes of Doctor Who, along with the third series of Torchwood, a Doctor Who spin-off, as suitable content for facilitating critical analysis of real-­ world issues. Expanding the analyses of the academy in science-fiction in the preceding chapters, I discuss the possibility of creating Doctor Who Academies of Informal Critical Learning in courses, social groups, communities, and families. Whether by joining fan groups as activist educators or by using Doctor Who and Torchwood as assigned texts in courses, educators and activists can discover and utilize the power of such stories to change hearts and minds. The reason some science-fiction programmes, films, or film series endure, while others do not, is due in large part to the depth and intelligence of the writing. Many blockbusters are forgotten because the stories soon feel outdated or stale. Or they contained predictable plots relying on special effects, rather than presenting more prescient stories that question cultural institutions, delve into human strengths and weaknesses, or present unconventional societies that have solved—or that are solving—issues around equity, inclusion, diversity, and community. The science-fiction programmes that do endure frequently—and perhaps subtly—challenge the entrenched norms of capitalism, human hierarchies, and environmental neglect or misuse. Stories that continue for generations, with fans that follow them for decades, have enough depth so as not to get old, not to get outgrown, or not to become boring. This chapter considers the concept of viewing Doctor Who, specifically episodes of the new series that began in 2005 (dubbed “NuWho” by some fans), as informal academies where characters exhibit traits of both students and teachers. Likewise, fans often join or form groups that, in practice, become “study groups” to explore plot meanings, to extend metaphors, and to interrogate the episodes as cultural texts. The Doctor, and at times some of the Doctor’s companions, act as organic intellectuals, “who dedicate themselves at all times to interpret the needs and aspirations of justice and equity of the time and social space of which they are part, to endow it with concrete

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political content”.3 As part of the BBC’s children’s programming, Doctor Who was originally conceived in 1963 by Sidney Newman as a show that would educate, as well as entertain.4 Indeed, that intent has clearly been realized over the last 60 years and, as I discuss later in this chapter, is continuing to aid educators in facilitating learning on myriad topics. Educators may choose to lead or guide group discussions of the concepts and the “truths” the Doctor and his companions uncover, debate, embrace, or demonstrate. The groups may meet in university classrooms, living rooms, and/or in virtual spaces. Such gatherings are akin to Habermas’ public sphere5 and may put forward venues for facilitating critical learning with people who might otherwise resist more straightforward approaches to progressive critical ideas. As authoritarianism spreads, populations tribalize, and  racism, antisemitism, and sexism proliferate propelled  by internet algorithms. Consequently, educators struggle to help students understand the need, as well as the means, for deconstructing disinformation and conspiracy theories. This chapter first looks briefly at the Doctor’s relationship with schooling and academia, then offers ideas for a curriculum—or assorted classroom activities and assignments—that may help educators with that aforementioned struggle. Next, I will consider Doctor Who as an informal place of learning outside the classroom, followed by concluding thoughts on the value of engaging with quality media in university and lifelong education.

The Doctor and the Academy “I’m not a student of human nature. I am a professor of a far wider academy, of which human nature is merely a part”. ~ The Second Doctor, “The Evil of the Daleks” (1967)

Doctor Who began as part of the BBC’s Saturday afternoon children’s programming in 1963. The Doctor, as identified elsewhere in this collection, is a human-presenting alien from the planet Gallifrey who purloined a 3  Anatolii P.  Getman, Danilyan G.  Oleg, Magda Julissa Rojas-Bahamon, Diego Felipe Arbelaez-Campillo, and Olexandra’s Ptashnyk-Serediuk, “Rethinking the Category of Organic Intellectual of/by Antonio Gramsci in Today’s World”, Cuestiones Políticas, 39: 68, 2021, pp. 273–289. 4  Brian J. Robb, Timeless Adventures: How Doctor Who Conquered TV, Harpenden: Kamera Books, 2009. 5  Jürgen Habermas, “Reflections and Hypotheses on a further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere”, Theory, Culture & Society, 39: 4, 2022, pp. 145–171.

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space-time ship called a TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), then ran away to explore the universe. The TARDIS is a living ship— which ought to conform to the landscape of the terrain where it lands. However, its “chameleon circuit” became stuck and now, when visible, it appears as a 1960s British police public call box. Time Lord technology allows it to be much bigger on the inside than the outside dimensions would seem to dictate. Inside the TARDIS there are multiple floors, high ceilings, living quarters for many travellers, a library, and even a swimming pool, while the outside dimensions remain approximately 5′ × 5′ × 10′. Remarkably, the Doctor, like all Time Lords, has two hearts and can regenerate into a completely different body altogether should they be mortally wounded, enabling the TV programme to celebrate its 60th anniversary this year as new actors play the Doctor every few series. As a Time Lord, the Doctor travels in and through time and has been living for several millennia. The Doctor was educated at a school for Time Lords, variously called the Academy (various episodes), the Time Academy (“Shada”), the Academy of Time (“Heart of TARDIS”), and the Prydonian Academy (“Timewyrm: Revelation”, an original novel spinoff). Their time there, however, is only referred to in passing throughout the series and rarely in a positive light. The Doctor is a genius but graduated by scoring the minimum of 51% on his second attempt at the final examination for graduation (“The Ribos Operation”). The Fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker, puts it bluntly: “They hardly teach anything useful at the academy, do they?” (“The Ribos Operation”). Yet the Doctor often chooses the role of educator whenever they spend a long stretch of time on Earth.6 They act as “Professor”, nominally in the case of the Seventh and literally in the case of the Twelfth Doctor, and as teacher and mentor to all companions and with the many species they encounter. The Doctor also learns with and from the human companions. While Doctor Who was created for children and has evolved into a well-produced prime-time family favourite, the Doctor and their companions perform as tutor(s)/student(s), in some cases, and as learning “communities of practice” in most episodes.7 6  Ann Harris, “Shape-Shifting and Stories: Professionalism and Education with Doctor Who”, in Christine Jarvis and Patricia Gouthro (eds), Professional Education with Fiction Media, pp. 205–28. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 7  David Gijbels, Maaike Endedijk, and Tim Hirschler, “Communities of Practice: Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger”, in Filip Dochy, David Gijbels, Mien Segers and Piet Van den Bossche (eds), Theories of Workplace Learning in Changing Times, London: Routledge, 2021, pp. 146–154.

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According to Wenger, “Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”.8 The same can be said for each incarnation of the Doctor and their companions. In the original series, the Doctor tended to be didactic towards his companions, but in the post-2005 series, the companions are often instructing the Time Lord just as much as they learn from them. The Thirteenth Doctor, and the first female presenting incarnation, travels with three companions and enacts a collaborative approach to problem-solving while openly emphasizing the “flat team structure” of their investigating, their erudition, and their decision-­ making. In most episodes of the NuWho era, the Doctor and their companions encounter new situations and universe-threatening problems that must be solved, and they accomplish the necessary learning and perform the required actions as a community, each contributing to the learning of the group. Overall, the Doctor rejects the inflexibility of the formal academy with its concomitant neoliberal agendas and chooses to uncover solutions through progressive, critical pragmatism with a community of learners intent on constructing knowledge through their community and their shared experience.

Using Doctor Who in the Academy: Teaching with the Doctor “You want weapons? We’re in a library. Books! Best weapons in the world. This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have!” ~ The Tenth Doctor, “Tooth and Claw” (2006)

Perhaps because Doctor Who has a history of responding to political and cultural situations in many of its scripts, NuWho consistently reflects contemporaneous political conflicts, disinformation campaigns, social justice issues, and corporate consolidation in its storylines. As I discussed in the introduction to this chapter, social media has ushered in an era of disinformation over the last decade that has changed the political landscape in countries across the globe. Changes in algorithms made around 2012 increased dramatically the virality of conspiracy theories, disinformation, 8   Etienne Wenger, “Communities of Practice, a Brief Introduction”, University of Oregon  – Scholars’ Bank, 2011: 17–22, at: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/ handle/1794/11736

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and misinformation in the US and other Western democracies.9 Thereafter, Donald Trump and other far right leaders ushered in a new wave of racism, homophobia, and sexism, and White supremacists felt encouraged to creep out of their dark corners. Social media transmuted from connecting us to dividing us in a matter of months.10 During the Trump presidency, “Neofascist politics [became] increasingly normalized and mainstreamed”, leading to the violent attack on the US Capitol Building on 6 January 2021.11 Importantly, educators in the US are encountering more students in their classrooms with attitudes and belief systems that confirm Anthony R. Dimaggio’s assertion that polarization in “mainstream” partisan media is almost entirely a right-wing trend so that consumption of venues such as Fox News is strongly associated with pulling viewers to the right far more than consumption of “left” venues like CNN and MSNBC is pulling viewers to the left, even after statistically “controlling” for audiences’ partisan and ideological predispositions. Polarization plays out in a similar way in social media content, with conservative Americans gravitating to extremist and conspiratorial websites, while liberal Americans are more likely to rely on mainstream corporate news.12

According to Giroux, the academy must “launch an educational campaign that makes clear how neoliberal capitalism has sowed the seeds of fascism not only in the United States but also across the globe”.13 Such an ­educational mission cannot be left to one discipline or a particular course in the general curriculum. It must span all disciplines, all educational sites, and become an essential component of general academic missions. Still, finding ways to reach those in the clutches of right-wing echo chambers, those who are apathetic or immature, and those who cling to 9  Robin Redmon Wright, “How Adult Learning from Media Cultures Changed the World in 2020”, in K.  Evans, W.  O. Lee, J.  Markowitsch, M.  Zukas (eds), Third International Handbook of Lifelong Learning. Springer International Handbooks of Education, Cham: Springer, 2022, at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67930-9_58-1 10  Dominique Cagliuso, “Age of the Alt-Right: New-Age Media and White Nationalism in Trump’s America”, International Social Science Review, 97: 2, 2021, pp. 1–30. 11  Anthony R.  Dimaggio, Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here, New  York: Routledge, 2021. 12  Dimaggio, Rising Fascism in America. 13  Henry A.  Giroux, “Insurrections in the Age of Counter-Revolutions: Rethinking Cultural Politics and Political Education”, The Review of education/pedagogy/cultural Studies, 44: 2, 2022, pp. 90–120.

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faith-based extremist belief systems like the White evangelicals intent on theocratic authoritarian rule—sometimes all in the same classroom together with activist-oriented progressives—is a daunting task, indeed. Too many academic institutions prefer to abdicate their responsibility to educate critical, active citizens in exchange for neoliberal agreements with funders.14 Despite the decline of the worthy ideals widely taught in the 1960s, I choose to “believe in educators and in their ability to dream into existence, the features of an alternative archetype that (Smyth) called the socially just/socially critical university—one that provides a more transformative vision to the corrosive, corrupted, dystopian ‘toxic university’ that mostly prevails at the moment”.15 In the meantime, reaching students of all belief systems will be vital to creating a more socially just/socially critical world. Teaching towards this ideal requires we develop the capacity for addressing those topics essential to an educated citizenry. The more deeply steeped in disinformation that our students are, the more difficult will be our task. According to Rogers, negative stress in the classroom can trigger physiological changes in the brain that create a “fight or flight” survival response in students (this being the fundamental underpinning of anxiety disorders, psychologically). This response prevents the encoding processes needed for committing information to long-term memory.16 In other words, it does not stick. Our goal necessitates imbuing students with a lifelong ability to examine evidence critically, separate facts from fictions, and distinguish  expertise from propaganda. Proficient critical evaluation of the neoliberal and neofascist soup in which we swim (via media, politics, and the mainstreaming of right-wing propaganda) is an imperative for our ­citizenry if democracy is to endure. The suppression of critical voices and critical theories, the propagation of revisionist and exclusionist histories, and the growing amplification of hate-filled religious dogmas threaten to exacerbate the damage already done to our collective self-image as a free, diverse, generous, and welcoming people. The US’ de facto motto E 14  Leo McCann, Edward Granter, Paula Hyde, and Jeremy Aroles, “‘Upon the Gears and upon the Wheels’: Terror Convergence and Total Administration in the Neoliberal University”, Management Learning, 51: 4, 2020, pp. 431–451. 15  John Smyth, “The Neoliberal Toxic University: Beyond No is Not enough and Daring to Dream a Socially just Alternative into Existence”, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52: 7, 2020, pp. 716–725. 16   David L.  Rodgers, “The Biological Basis of Learning: Neuroeducation through Simulation”, Simulation & Gaming, 46: 2, 2015, pp. 175–186.

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pluribus unum (“Out of many, one”), together with Emma Lazarus’ invitation to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”,17 succinctly emphasizes the historical uniqueness of the US vision of a pluralistic society and the hope of its people, respectively, despite the flaws of its reality. It will require a new generation of receptive and capable critical thinkers for that dream of true democracy to be realized. Popular culture can lend a helping hand to educators’ efforts to get a foot in the door of closed minds and mediate the fight or flight physiological response. I have written previously about using the 2005 Doctor Who episode “The Long Game”—starring Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor— to introduce students to critical media literacy and the dangers of media corporate consolidation.18 In the 2005 episode, set far in the future, all human news comes from one satellite, streamed to humans across the universe. The news, of course, is determined by a consortium of banks, which uses an alien monster to package and report the propaganda. Digestion of this “news” has created a xenophobic human species, stunted by their ignorance and blind acceptance. The monster, the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe, is a thinly veiled allusion to Rupert Murdoch and his NewsCorp empire. After showing the episode to students, I provide a factsheet and a list of questions, using several quotations from the episode to start conversations in small discussion groups. Depending on the make-up of the class, as well as current events, the questions and discussion prompts vary. Yet the results are always impactful and, typically, students refer to this episode throughout the semester. Likewise, in a later article, my co-writer and I discuss various episodes from NuWho Doctors 9 through 12 and their use as entry points to open discussions about topics ranging from corporate labour abuses to ageism.19 In the most recent complete series arc, in which the Doctor is played by Jodie Whitaker (2018–2022), the showrunner and head writer, Chris Chibnall, provides several entry points for discussions of political, social, 17  Emma Lazarus, Selected Poems and Other Writings, edited by Gregory Eiselein. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002, p. 20. 18  Robin Redmon Wright, “Narratives from Popular Culture: Critical Implications for Adult Education”, New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 126, 2010, pp. 49–62. 19   Robin Redmon Wright, and Gary L.  Wright, “Doctor Who Fandom, Critical Engagement, and Transmedia Storytelling: The Public Pedagogy of the Doctor”, in K. Jubas, N. Taber and T. Brown (eds), Popular Culture as Pedagogy, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2015, pp. 11–30.

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cultural, and environmental issues. The Thirteenth Doctor’s fourth episode, “Arachnids in the UK” (2018) stars Chris Noth as Jack Robinson, a Trump-like billionaire hotel tycoon with aspirations to the US presidency, who is building his golf resorts on reclaimed hazardous waste dumps around the world. With his greed unchecked by his political pawns, construction starts without dealing properly with the contamination. The resulting giant, mutated spiders at the Sheffield resort are less of the episode’s focus than Robinson’s ambition, narcissism, and ruthlessness. In a subsequent episode, “Revolution of the Daleks”, Noth reprises the role and, this time, having learned nothing from his first encounter with the Doctor, nearly destroys the Earth in his attempt to gain wealth and power. It’s a clear indictment of capitalist greed, the political-corporate complex, and oligarchic lack of concern for possible negative consequences. Likewise, Series Twelve (2020) begins with “Spyfall” Parts 1 and 2, in which another billionaire capitalist, Daniel Barton (played by Lenny Henry), owns the mega-corporation VOR, an internet search engine and media platform. In Part 2, Barton proclaims in a televised speech: To everyone who, over the years, has given us everything. We gave you pieces of plastic and circuitry and games, and you handed us—me, my company—total access to your lives. What you buy, where you go, who you text, what you text. Every thought and photo and post. Every credit card number, every birthday, every memorable place and all your mothers’ maiden names. So, thank you for carrying our cameras in your pockets, and putting our microphones in your bedrooms. For signing up your kids, handing them our devices. We told you, ‘of course your lives are private, of course your data’s safe.’ And you believed us. You kept clicking Agree. And now, we can do anything.

Everyone’s devices have become weapons for the planet’s invaders. Search engines and social media used by a callous, ambitious billionaire to ensnare people’s minds and blind them to reality is certainly a fair topic for discussions around privacy, media, politics, ethics, education, corporate power, neofascism, neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and personal autonomy. Series eleven includes the episode “Kerblam!” (2018), which portrays an Amazon.com of the future that, like the present-day corporation, abuses workers for profit.20 The episodes “Orphan 55” and “Praexus” 20  Heather Stewart, “Amazon workers vote to strike at Coventry depot in UK first”, The Guardian, 17 December 2022, at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/ dec/16/amazon-workers-vote-strike-coventry-depot-uk-first

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(2020) focus on the horrific destruction caused by humans ignoring the need for prioritizing environmental care and sustainability until it is too late. Each of these episodes addresses issues facing humankind in this moment and, though set in the future or within an alien context, can engage students in discussions of current issues by introducing the topics in non-threatening ways. Discussion questions for small groups can be designed to relate the fictional characters and situations to factual real-life problems and issues. Educators from various disciplines are using Doctor Who in classes and assignments. Alec Charles posits that television is “the cultural equivalent of the atom bomb: its confusion between the old and new, between the archived and the live, has dissolved the distance between the past and the present—has killed history at the speed of light”.21 Recognizing that carefully facilitated discussions of, and research around, such anachronisms can create lasting learning, Jolie C. Matthews argues that using historical Doctor Who episodes to teach history can “offer unique ways for students to think about the past, diversity of perspective, and the disruption (or maintaining) of dominant narratives in media representations”.22 Matthews first asks students to write down everything they think they know or that they assume about a historical event, like a “partitioned India in 1947, sixteenth-century London or Venice, 1955 Alabama and the Civil Rights Movement, or 1930s Depression-era New York”. After she shows an episode set in Earth’s past, she distributes a list of questions for small group discussions. Moreover, she provides a list of other historical episodes to use, along with classroom-based activity suggestions. Not only do students learn to research history with renewed insight, but they also learn “how media influences perceptions of history and our present in subtle and overt ways”. At this moment in the US, right-wing actors are banning history books in schools and raging against “critical race theory” while pushing a White-nationalist, mythologized history that glosses over the atrocities committed against people of colour and the LGBTQ+ community in America’s past and continuing in our present. Toxic masculinity and misogyny, too, have exploded in the wake of the Trump presidency. 21  Alec Charles, “The Ideology of Anachronism: Television, History, and the Nature of Time”, in David Butler (ed.), Time and Relative Dissertations in Space: Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who, Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2007, pp. 108–22. 22  Jolie C.  Matthews, “Dominant Narratives and Historical Perspective in Time Travel Stories: A Case Study of Doctor Who”, Social Studies, 112: 2, 2021, pp. 76–90.

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Addressing these issues can be fraught, since many young adults leaving home for university share these attitudes. Broaching these issues through historical time-travel episodes of Doctor Who clearly holds promise. The expectation of success when using DW to teach history does need to be facilitated by well-designed questioning and critical theoretical approaches. Educators are challenged to heed Lindy Orthia’s warning to “honour the historicity of oppression and the sociopathetic abscess that is post-colonial modernity. To heal an abscess, one must engage with the pus; only by grappling with the pain will we find our way to new futures”.23 Orthia suggests that Doctor Who represents too smooth a transition from colonialism to cosmopolitanism, glossing over the post-colonial pus and the imperative of ongoing decolonialization and post-colonial reparative efforts. Matthews’ techniques, however, enable teachers to fill those gaps with connecting information. Additionally, series 11’s “Demons of the Punjab” (2018) does attempt to depict one of the messiest of abscesses: the horrors associated with the British colonial partitioning of India and Pakistan in 1947, turning Muslim against Hindu and vice versa, are clearly evident in the scene of brother killing brother and can be extrapolated to other such incidents. The roots of the American Civil War, for example, drew from that same polluted pond. Academics should encourage Doctor Who writers and creators to consider writing more storylines around and related to decolonialization and its impacts. An astute approach taken by Holly Jordan was to use episodes from the Tenth Doctor, played by David Tennant, in her Western Religions course. In fact, she incorporates the two-part plotline from “The Impossible Planet” and “The Satan Pit” (2006) as part of the final exam.24 She found that “by learning to apply pre-existing religious knowledge to new situations, even if those situations come in the form of science fiction, students become better able to interact with others of differing religious traditions, be more aware world travellers, and become better representatives of their own faith”. She provides the full assignment as an appendix to the article. In an era of increasing antisemitism and religious bigotry, such lessons dramatized by the Doctor—and carefully facilitated by skilled educators— can provide, at the very least, a lifesaving, democracy-preserving 23  Lindy A. Orthia, “Sociopathetic Abscess Or Yawning Chasm?: The Absent Postcolonial Transition in Doctor Who”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 45: 2, 2010, pp. 207–225. 24  Holly A. Jordan, “The Impossible Pit: Satan, Hell, and Teaching with Doctor Who”, Implicit Religion, 18: 4, 2015 & 2018, pp. 457–469.

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connection to like-minded ambassadors of goodwill working to open closed minds. The development of skilled critical educators can also be addressed and enhanced by using Doctor Who as instructional text. Ann Harris uses Doctor Who “to inform and educate professionals about the construction of professional identity” in teacher education.25 She argues that, like the Doctor, “teachers need to be brave enough to face their demons and fight any monsters while caring for and empowering others”. The Doctor can teach student teacher (or teacher-intern) “to be adaptive and responsive while also coping creatively in demanding and often unpredictable situations”. She uses episodes to help student teachers “to interrogate, debate and conceptualise notions of professionalism”. She provides several examples of episodes and clips for classroom use. One advantage of using Doctor Who in university teacher education, especially as relates to the development of a professional identity, might be to make them more comfortable using popular culture, and DW specifically, in their work as educators. As a professor of lifelong learning and adult education I, too, have found popular culture—and Doctor Who specifically— an excellent resource for helping students conceptualize notions of democracy, equity, de/post-colonization, and cultural pluralism. From the discipline’s inception, adult education has had a critical focus. For example, though rarely discussed in history books, civil rights icons like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks trained at the Highlander Folk School, an adult education facility now called the Highlander Research and Education Center, and located in New Market, Tennessee.26 The desire to be an activist and educator is why I chose this discipline for my PhD.  One of the most difficult, emotionally draining, yet rewarding courses I teach is a graduate course on social issues. In that course, I often use fiction, like novels, short stories, movies, and TV episodes to help ­students think critically on issues that challenge their worldviews. One assignment is to watch the third season of Torchwood, a Doctor Who spinoff featuring John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness, a recurring omnisexual and charismatic character who originally appeared in Doctor Who in 2005. Torchwood’s third season is a five-episode story entitled 25  Ann Harris, “Shape-Shifting and Stories: Professionalism and Education with Doctor Who”, in Christine Jarvis and Patricia Gouthro (eds), Professional Education with Fiction Media, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 205–28. 26  Stephen A. Schneider, You Can’t Padlock an Idea: Rhetorical Education at the Highlander Folk School, 1932–1961. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014.

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Children of Earth. The plot can be compared to the short story, “Space Traders”, by Derrick Bell, a former Harvard Law professor dubbed the father of critical race theory. Bell wrote the story to help his primarily White, privileged Harvard Law students understand racial hierarchies and structural, institutionalised racism.27 Children of Earth, conceived and written by showrunner, Russell T. Davies, with co-writers James Moran and John Fey, is a story that uses plot devices and themes similar to Bell’s to point out class hierarchies and structural classism within cultural and political structures. In each story, aliens come to earth and want governments on earth to hand over a portion of their population in exchange for financial gain. In the case of “Space Traders”, they want Black people; in Children of Earth, they ask for a quarter of the world’s children. Naturally, given our imperfect systems, the governments choose the children of the poor—the kids from public housing; in “Space Traders”, the US justifies handing over its Black citizens. In both stories, governments, and the corporate executives who lobby them, engage in arguments for sacrificing those already oppressed by race or class. In Children of Earth, the British prime minister and his cabinet consider sending the children of asylum seekers or children underperforming in school to be consumed by the alien monsters. The deliberations sound almost reasonable and, unfortunately, are far too familiar. Both creative works hold up a mirror to  people’s implicit biases, the ugliness of the barbarity of human history, and earth’s continuing aristocratic and oligarchic inequities. Yet framing each critical work as science fiction allows students to view their culture from an outsider perspective. That is the first step to critical consciousness. Using the two works of fiction in tandem can have a significant impact on students grappling with critical theory, which focuses primarily on capitalism’s inevitable classism, as well as with critical race theory. In today’s climate of division, political silos, conspiracy theories, disinformation, and theocratic authoritarian campaigns permeating social media, fiction can help educators disarm resistant students long enough for them to recognize concepts like White privilege and the realities of institutionalized classism, racism, and sexism in their own beliefs and actions. In some cases, such assignments may cause enough cognitive dissonance for students to begin questioning what they thought they knew. And that may very well be their first step in a critical education.  Derrick A. Bell, “The Power of Narrative”, The Legal Studies Forum, 23; 3, 1999, p. 315.

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With so many Doctor Who stories that directly or indirectly address a variety of critical social issues, educators can use episodes or clips to initiate class discussions, journal entries, and self-reflective assignments as learning tools in almost any discipline as the scholars above illustrate. In the next section, I will discuss ways Doctor Who may help activists, organizers, and citizens engage with difficult topics outside of formal schooling.

Doctor Who as the Academy: Informal Learning with the Doctor “So the population just sits there? Half the world’s too fat, half the world’s too thin, and you lot just watch telly?” ~ The Ninth Doctor, “Bad Wolf” (2005)

As the Doctor so succinctly points out in the quotation above, inequality and the seeming omniscience of a neoliberal capitalist ethos in Western democracies too often results in disengagement and apathy. Increasingly, media in all its invasive forms pull people away from the realities of life, of human suffering, and of community responsibility and citizenship. Instead, the online tribes that create, then reinforce, disinformation, pull them in. QAnon conspiracists and the “bakers”, who decipher “Q-drops”, effectively manipulate emotions and nostalgic narratives to attract followers.28 QAnon, as with other sensational conspiracy theories, is a form of infotainment that, like Fox News, skews reality to serve the disseminators— typically the obscenely wealthy, autocrats, authoritarians, neofascists, and oligarchs.29 And its influence is vast and dangerous.30 Entertainment media, exemplified as reality TV and game shows in the 2005 pre-mass-­ social-media Doctor Who episode “Bad Wolf”, becomes a compulsive 28  Francesca Polletta and Jessica Callahan, “Deep Stories, Nostalgia Narratives, and Fake News: Storytelling in the Trump Era”, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 5: 3, 2017, pp. 392–408; Carrie Lynn D. Reinhard, David Stanley, and Linda Howell, “Fans of Q: The Stakes of QAnon’s Functioning as Political Fandom”, The American Behavioral Scientist, 66: 8, 2022 & 2021, pp. 1152–1172. 29  Liane Tanguay, “Exit Stage Right: Neo-Liberalism, Cable News and the Persistence of Trumpism”, European Journal of American Culture, 41: 2, 2022, pp. 109–126. 30  Mark O’Brien, “The Coming of the Storm: Moral Panics, Social Media and Regulation in the QAnon Era”, Information & Communications Technology Law ahead-of-print, 16 June 2022, pp. 1–20, at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13600834.202 2.2088064?src=

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distraction. Since that episode aired, social media and chat platforms have attracted conspiracy groups like QAnon, along with White nationalists, racists, anti-vaccinationists, antisemites, White evangelicals, and toxic masculinists, all working against democratic principles. Authoritarians and oligarchs who push these discourses (represented in “Bad Wolf” by the Daleks), benefit from keeping humankind distracted from the reality of their essential enslavement. Good fiction, like conspiracy theories, must contain elements of reality to keep people’s interest. This section considers how Doctor Who fan groups often engage in serious discussions around political and cultural topics as they engage with other Doctor Who fans. Several scholars have investigated political discussions in online Doctor Who fan spaces. Gunderman did a fairly large study of social media discussions of Doctor Who and either Brexit or Donald Trump on Facebook and Twitter fan spaces between December 2015 and October 2017. After discarding search results that did not actually reference Doctor Who and either Brexit or Trump, she analysed 507 posts for their political content. She found that DW fans, indeed, “compare many aspects of the two events to Doctor Who”.31 They used their fandom “to bring order to and influence interpretations of real geopolitical, cultural, and social geographies”. They compared right-wing politicians like Trump, or the British prime ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson to Doctor Who villains in thought-­ provoking and critical ways. The discussions were specific, ranging from topics like immigration policies and economics to racism, sexism, and xenophobia. She goes on to point out that one of “the most striking observations of the research is that none of the posts collected were pro-­ Brexit or pro-Donald Trump. The data, as collected, exhibit only ­anti-Brexit and anti-Donald Trump rhetoric”. She points out that NuWho has been “more progressive, compassionate, and empathetic” than earlier incarnations, and Doctor Who fans on the far-right “may have felt betrayed by the show’s political stance and have chosen to lessen, or end, their involvement with the fandom”. Possibly that is the reason that fans were able to have “detailed discussions that demonstrated deep knowledge of both the geopolitical event and Doctor Who”. These findings echo Kathryn Sandoe’s research that showed how fans of The Hunger Games books and 31  Hannah Carilyn Gunderman, “Fan Geographies and Engagement between Geopolitics of Brexit, Donald Trump, and Doctor Who on Social Media”, Transformative Works and Cultures, 32, 2020, at: https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/ view/1675

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films went even further by using their fandom and online fan communities to create political activist groups across the globe.32 Science fiction and fantasy, when thoughtfully and critically constructed and presented by its creators, can fire imaginations and help people grasp the implications of larger geopolitical happenings. This is happening outside formal classroom settings. It is informal learning in living rooms and online communities, without the necessity of a teacher or facilitator. A good example is Lindy Orthia’s survey of 575 Doctor Who viewers to try to understand whether or not the show had an impact on viewers’ attitudes towards science.33 As the political struggles over climate change, abortion, COVID vaccines, and even COVID-19 itself have shown, there are too many people with a poor understanding of science. Orthia concluded that “Doctor Who prompted viewers to think more deeply or extensively about a science topic… [and this] can be used to spark interest in science in large and small ways”. The study also posits that science fiction can “prompt some viewers to engage deeply with current science debates”. In a study of gender and science in Doctor Who, however, Orthia and Rachel Morgain found in a 2016 study that, while the programme has improved its depictions of women as scientists since its inception in the 1960s, the writers still struggle with “a continuing underlying expectation that everyone will conform to the existing endorsed masculine culture of science”.34 Still, I would argue that the Chris Chibnall era (2018–2022), with a woman as the Thirteenth Doctor, has been a move in the right direction. Jodie Whitaker’s Doctor was, like all the Doctor’s regenerations, a scientific genius. Yet, her communal approach and pedagogical stance as she shared her knowledge with her companions was an identifiable shift from the didactic lectures of male versions of the Doctor. And while there was fan resistance to a woman as the Doctor, there was also widespread enthusiasm. Rebekah Grome, Kristina Drumheller, and Emily S.  Kinsky analysed 5000 Twitter posts in the two weeks after the announcement that the 32  Kathryn J. Sandoe, “Hungry for Justice: The Hunger Games and Developing an Activist Identity in Women Fans”, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2017. 33  Lindy A.  Orthia, “How does Science Fiction Television Shape Fans’ Relationships to Science? Results from a Survey of 575 Doctor Who Viewers”, Journal of Science Communication, 18: 4, 2019, pp. 1–18. 34  Lindy A. Orthia and Rachel Morgain, “The Gendered Culture of Scientific Competence: A Study of Scientist Characters in Doctor Who 1963–2013”, Sex Roles, 75: 3–4, 2016, pp. 79–94.

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Thirteenth Doctor would be a woman in 2016.35 They found the majority of reactions to be positive with many relating it to the overwhelming feeling of backlash at the election of Donald Trump. They framed the casting of a woman as the Doctor as an example of representation for women. Moreover, in a qualitative study of feminist Doctor Who fans, Neta Yodovich found that Whitaker’s enactment of the Doctor “represented a significant step towards equality and acceptance of women in popular culture and outside of it”.36 Yet, many of the participants wanted her to maintain more masculine characteristics, revealing a “cultural-political duality in their reactions”. Perhaps the same cultural assumptions about science as masculine, and the fears that a woman Doctor will display feminine characteristics, are both examples of how popular fiction can hold up a mirror to reveal internalized sexist expectations we have yet to overcome. But what is clear is that the Thirteenth Doctor has enlivened the conversation. People are learning, reflecting, and sharing about politics, social issues, and the human condition in fan communities and in living room conversations using Doctor Who as their entry point, their cultural academy.

Concluding Thoughts “I am and always will be the optimist. The hoper of far-flung hopes and dreamer of improbable dreams”. ~ The Eleventh Doctor, “The Almost People” (2011).

Thinking again about Habermas’ public sphere, Jeremy Sarachan points out that heretofore the concept of the public sphere has specifically related to discourse about non-fiction politics and philosophy. However, the same rules that define the public sphere (equality, common interest, and inclusivity) may also define how digital technologies raise the level of discourse between those who discuss, re-evaluate, and repurpose fictional programmes.37 35  Rebekah Grome, Kristina Drumheller, and Emily S. Kinsky, “‘It’s about Time’: Twitter Responses to Gender Change with Doctor Who’s 13th Doctor”, Popular Communication, 4 August 2022, at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15405702.2022. 2109030 36  Neta Yodovich, “‘Finally, We Get to Play the Doctor’: Feminist Female Fans’ Reactions to the First Female Doctor Who”, Feminist Media Studies, 20: 8, 2020, pp. 1243–1258. 37  Jeremy Sarachan, “Doctor Who Fan Videos, YouTube, and the Public Sphere”, in Christopher J.  Hansen (ed.), Ruminations, Peregrinations, and Regenerations: A Critical Approach to Doctor Who, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.

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Doctor Who can be viewed as an informal academy focused on teaching “a positive social message that encourages viewers to embrace tolerance, individuality, good humour, and a thirst for true knowledge that can never be quenched”.38 And here’s the bonus: as educators, we know that the use of Doctor Who in the classroom prompts students to think about issues from a variety of perspectives and it facilitates critical learning of the topics under discussion. Studies have also shown that fandom on social media sometimes forms the equivalent of voluntary study groups to discuss politics and social issues by relating reality to fictional dilemmas. But what has yet to be fully appreciated is the ripple effect of educators facilitating critical discussions around myriad real-world topics in classrooms by using Doctor Who episodes and discussion prompts. If fan groups are already engaging in making those connections, consider the impact of broadening those informal learning discussions with formal education. Given the family-­friendly nature of the programme, students may use what they learn to teach their children, start conversations with neighbours, and so on. They may share it with siblings and friends who, based on shared life experiences, may be ready to hear. So, what we do in the classroom leads to organic intellectual conversations that can lead to cultural, even global, change. As Nicol points out, “the programme forcefully echoes the people’s discontent with the political establishment and their growing alienation from the processes of representation”.39 I will conclude with thoughts from the great Brazilian educator and activist Paolo Freire in his influential book Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage: I have always rejected fatalism. I prefer rebelliousness because it affirms my status as a person who has never given in to the manipulations and strategies designed to reduce the human person to nothing. The recently proclaimed death of history, which symbolizes the death of utopia, of our right to dream, reinforces without doubt the claims that imprison our freedom. This makes the struggle for restoration of utopia all the more necessary. Educational practice itself, as an experience in humanization, must be impregnated with this ideal.40

38  Marc Edward Dipaolo, “Political Satire and British-American Relations in Five Decades of Doctor Who”, Journal of Popular Culture, 43: 5, 2010, pp. 964–987. 39  Danny Nicol, Doctor Who: A British Alien? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 40  Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998.

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It is a statement that could come from the Doctor themselves. As neoliberal corporations push neofascist politics with social media, and the internet’s darkest spaces flood with anti-democratic bots, universities must resist the neoliberal and neofascist turn of the last few decades. In the US, we are at an inflexion point. Do we accept Orwell’s prediction that “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— for ever”?41 Or do we prefer rebelliousness? As a rebel, I propose a Doctor Who Academy in classrooms and online spaces that motivates participants to push back against the oppression and anti-democratic narratives preached by a global authoritarian oligarchy. Instead, Doctor Who can produce fans as “subjects who while teaching, learn. And who in learning also teach”.42 People learn, in part, by example. And “the Doctor acts as a force for change, nominally saving lives and civilisations from alien threats and cybernetic tyrants, but also defeating political and cultural enemies, principally those of sexism, class prejudice, racism, and homophobia, which he can easily observe because of his alien identity”.43 If, as Freire posits, education is an experience in humanization, perhaps we need the Doctor, a time-travelling alien who has witnessed all of humanity’s history and much of its future to reveal our potential as a democratic, caring species.

 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, London: Penguin, 2000, p. 280.  Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom, p. 103. 43  Lee Barron, “Intergalactic Girl Power: The Gender Politics of Companionship in the twenty-first Century Doctor Who”, in Hansen (ed.), Ruminations, Peregrinations, and Regenerations, pp. 130–149. 41 42

CHAPTER 12

Conclusions Marcus K. Harmes and Richard Scully

As this “Unseen Universities” collection was going to press, news broke on Twitter and Facebook of a new series, due to stream on Stan from 20 March 2023: Lucky Hank, starring Bob Odenkirk “as a professor in the midst of a mid-life crisis”. Promoted as being “from the executive producers of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad…”, Lucky Hank is based on a 1997 campus novel Straight Man, by Richard Russo, and the premise of the series is to chronicle the travails of William Henry Devereaux Jr., interim chair of the English department at the fictional West Central Pennsylvania University in Railton, Pennsylvania. The title is also a call-­ back to Lucky Jim, the 1954 novel filmed in 1957, discussed in our first chapter. Hank and Jim connect to each other across decades as both offer satire of academic culture and life. If nothing else, then Lucky Hank indicates that academia, with all its seen and unseen foibles and quirks, still has cachet as a source of entertainment. Or, at least, some networks and

M. K. Harmes (*) University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] R. Scully University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Harmes, R. Scully (eds.), Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32350-8_12

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streaming services assume that it does, despite The Chair failing to gain a second season over at Netflix; the series apparently having failed to meet the KPIs set for it by management.1 Given what so many of our contributing authors have had to say about the neoliberal form of the university, the irony of this is more than palpable. That this volume has been both a contribution to the critique of the contemporary university, at the same time as contributing to each of our own publication metrics and esteem measures, is also not lost on the attentive reader. Such are the paradoxes of living and working in a system which is self-perpetuating and resistant to reform from within. Yet, as Robin Redmon Wright points out, there is scope for reform, if not the revolution cherished by many a wannabe History Man. It is not just through research outputs like this book and these chapters that awareness of the university’s many flaws and problems can be made manifest, but through that other 40% or 60% of the vanilla academic’s workload: pedagogy. We can teach individuals, classes, and the whole societies we serve, to think critically about the very means by which such instruction is delivered, and both empower and be empowered by, those constituencies, in order to enact change and make a difference. However hackneyed that phrase may sound to the disillusioned or cynical ear, it is the great task to move beyond the disillusion and cynicism that confronts the seen and unseen academy. We can’t sit and hope for an omniscient, omnipotent, omnicompetent god-professor to rise to the vice-chancellorship and sweep away the accumulated garbage of half a century (or half a millennium). She may have the best of intentions, but will undoubtedly be conditioned by her own education, her donors or funding bodies, and end up simply moving the furniture around (whether it be Chesterfield or Postura Max®). It is not enough to laugh at the antics of the “Well-Rounded Dick”, sigh at the corporate mentality of those holding the purse strings of Lowlands University, or rage against the sexual abuse endemic to Watermouth as well as Warwick. Only to then go back to campus and go through the motions. It is certainly not enough to flee from the academies of Prydon or Gallifrey simply to go out and see the universe, because there are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things; they must be fought. 1  Kasey Moore, “‘The Chair’ Canceled at Netflix; Won’t Return for Season 2”, What’s On Netflix, 10 January 2023, at: https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/the-chair-season-­2has-­netflix-renewed-or-canceled-01-2023/, accessed 22 February 2023.

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Resistance can come in countless small ways. Choosing not to use “proactive” when “enterprising” will serve just as well. Refusing to take the committee papers “as read” when the paragraph on “circling back to paradigmatic first principles” really doesn’t make any sense at all. Asking the congresswoman, MP, or senator precisely why the higher education budget hasn’t been increased in real terms for a decade, and then—very publicly—telling them that you simply don’t believe them and think they’re lying when they provide an evasive non-answer. And then challenge them again. Not answering emails on a day of strike action in order to “stay on top of things” or simply shutting-off after five or before nine and keeping your weekends free for your partner, kids, fur-babies, or yourself. Standing-up for, or making allowances for, more junior colleagues with less power or influence than you have (whether because of their rank, age, sex, class, or ethnicity), and putting them first when it comes to shouldering additional teaching hours, taking on committee work, or dealing with those stupid coffee pods that are definitely destroying more than just a decent 3 p.m. beverage and chat. Join the union. And instead of just writing about satire, write satire itself. Instead of being content to perform a role indistinguishable from a character in a satirical TV series, refuse to speak the required lines and ad lib a different role instead. Look at how all those avant-garde Weimar satirical clubs stopped Hitler!

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Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #MeToo, 28, 121, 157, 208 A Abbott (Bud), 105 Abrams, J. J., 8, 9n26 Absurd, absurdity, 7, 16, 20, 21, 29, 32–37, 39–43, 46, 48, 50–51, 55, 74, 88, 208, 212, 213 Academic leadership, 64, 67 Academic socialisation, 112, 119 Academies (fictional) Prydon, Gallifrey, 236 Starfleet Academy, 9 Time Lord Academy, Gallifrey, 19, 71, 74, 88 Vulcan Science Academy, 95 Ace (Doctor Who), 87, 88 Adams, Douglas, 18

Adaptation, 11–13, 22, 26, 29, 94, 96, 104, 107, 108, 124, 160, 161, 163, 199n3 Advertising, 188 Albright, Mary (3rd Rock from the Sun), 21, 29, 53–67, 155, 169n52 Alien (1979) and sequels, 145 Aliens, 19, 21, 53–55, 57, 58, 60, 63, 67, 72–74, 76, 76n10, 85, 86, 90, 144, 145, 149, 185, 218, 223, 225, 228, 234 American Astronomical Society (AAS), 24 Amis, Kingsley, 6, 14 Anthropology, 59, 66 Arnold, Matthew, 11 Art history, 112, 120, 122, 125–127, 129 Attwood, Margaret, 176, 176n8, 186 Australia, 4, 13, 14n42, 17, 29, 136, 146

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Harmes, R. Scully (eds.), Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32350-8

265

266 

INDEX

B Bad Teacher (2011), 10, 23, 133, 144, 145 Baker, Tom (actor), 18, 219 Barnard, Robert (author), 13, 14, 14n40, 14n41 Beer, Professor Matt (Campus), 207–209 Bentham, Jeremy, 58 Big Bang Theory (CBS, 2007-2019), 10, 16 Birth control, 176 Blair, Tony (UK Prime Minister), 4, 209n34 Bradbury, Malcolm, 14, 15, 27, 29, 198 Brown, Perpugilliam ‘Peri’ (Doctor Who), 86 Bruce, Nigel (actor), 103–105 Bullying, 65, 142 Bureaucracy, 26 Burman, Anders, 38n30, 44 Butler Act (Educaton Act 1944), 75 C Campus (Channel 4), 26, 197–214 Campus novel, 9, 11, 12, 16, 198, 235 Canada, 48 Capaldi, Peter (actor), 18 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgson), 99 Cartoons/comics/caricature, 4, 7–9, 14n41, 16, 24, 87, 107, 144, 197, 199 Chair, The (Netflix, 2021), 2, 10n29, 15, 16, 25, 29, 29n70, 95, 154–159, 166, 171, 172, 236 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 5 Cheat (ITV, 2019), 133, 137, 141–144 Chieng, Ronnie, 29 Civil War, American, 226

Clarke, Charles (UK politician), 4 Class, 5, 10, 11, 16, 29, 32, 35, 37, 39, 40, 63, 75, 82, 98, 116, 119, 120, 122, 126, 134–136, 138, 139, 145–147, 156–159, 198, 199, 204, 223, 225, 228, 229, 234, 236, 237 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 113 Cold War, 26 Colleges (fictional) Greendale Community College (Community), 17 St Cedd’s (Doctor Who), 18 Colleges (real) Balliol, Oxford, 13 Barnard, 114 Bennett, 114 Brasenose, Oxford, 12 Bryn Mawr, 114 Christ Church, Oxford, 12 Downing College, 83 Emmanuel, Cambridge, 18 Merton, Oxford, 12 Mount Holyoake, 114 Oberlin, 114 Oriel, Oxford, 12 Radcliffe, 114 Smith, 22, 112, 114 Spelman, 114 University, Oxford, 5, 6, 12, 13, 13n37, 20, 22, 28, 31, 32, 40, 83, 100, 103, 134, 137, 145–149, 209 Vassar, 114 Wellesley, 22, 112–119, 121, 121n45, 123, 127–129 Commercialisation of higher education, 198, 199, 205 Community (NBC and Yahoo!, 2009-2015), 10, 16, 17 Competition, 38, 40, 46, 132, 134, 148, 180, 187, 195

 INDEX 

Connell, Raewyn, 11 Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), 25, 170 Conservative Party (UK), 199 Corruption, 3, 26, 174 Costello (Lou), 105 Critical pedagogies, 48 Critical thinking, 58, 66, 126, 192 Critical vantage approach, 57, 66 Cumberbatch, Benedict (actor), 106, 108 Curtain, Jane (actor), 55 D da Vinci, Leonardo, 123, 125, 129 Daker, Stephen (A Very Peculiar Practice), 200, 205, 211, 212 Dale, John, 11 Daniels, Jack (A Very Peculiar Practice), 200, 205, 207, 210–212 Darwin, Charles, 100, 102 de Wolfe, Jonty (Campus), 26, 201, 211 Dead Poets Society (1989), 10 Dean (academic rank), 17 Death of an Old Goat (novel), 14, 14n41, 17n58 Decay (2015), 25, 155, 170 Decolonialism, 43 Deconstructive critique, 21, 38, 42, 44, 46, 48 Depression, Great, 116 Dern, Laura (actor), 160 Dexter, Colin, 12, 13 Dicks, Terrance, 83 Discworld novels, see Pratchett, Terry Divergent (2014) and sequels, 176, 180, 182 Dobson, Bill (The Chair), 2, 10n29, 14, 16, 25, 29, 95, 154–159, 171, 172, 236

267

Doctorate (academic title and rank), 73, 89, 105, 106, 136 Doctor Who (BBC Series and spinoffs, 1963-1989; 1996 & 2005-present) episodes and stories; “Ark in Space,” 73; “The Armageddon Factor,” 85; “The Claws of Axos,” 69; “Closing Time,” 89; “The Deadly Assassin,” 19, 83–85; “Death in Heaven,” 73; “Earthshock,” 86; “The Enemy of the World,” 73, 75; “Four to Doomsday,” 87; “Full Circle,” 71, 91; The God Complex, 73; “Hell Bent,” 90; “The Husbands of River Song,” 89; “The Invasion of Time,” 84; “Let’s Kill Hitler,” 89; “Listen,” 91; “Mark of the Rani,” 87; “The Moonbase,” 73, 75; “The Name of the Doctor,” 72; “The Pilot,” 90, 91; “Revelation of the Daleks,” 87; “Revenge of the Cybermen,” 73; “The Ribos Operation,” 84, 85, 219; “Robot,” 72, 84; “School Reunion,” 90; “Shada,” 18, 19, 82n12, 219; “The Shakespeare Code,” 88; “Silence in the Library,” 89; “The Sound of Drums,” 19, 89; “Spearhead from Space,” 76; “The Stones of Blood,” 85; “Terminus,” 86; “Terror of the Autons,” 82; “Time and the Rani,” 87; “The Time Monster,” 19, 82, 83; “The Tsuranga Conundrum,” 73; “An Unearthly Child,” 73–75; “The War Games,” 76 Downey Junior, Robert (actor), 107

268 

INDEX

Doyle, Arthur Conan, 13, 22, 22n61, 93–96, 96n7, 96n8, 99, 102, 103, 105–108 Dubcek, Mrs (3rd Rock from the Sun), 62 Duchovny, David, 155 Durant, Henry Fowle, 114, 118 Durant, Pauline, 114, 115 Dystopian education, 206 E Educators “bad,” 23, 24, 132, 144 “good,” 10, 23, 24, 124, 126, 128, 130, 132, 140, 144, 145, 147, 150, 151 heroic, 24, 124, 125, 128, 130 precarity, 174 sexual predation, 14 Elementary (CBS, 2012-2019), 22, 103, 106–109 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans), 5 Eliot, T. S., 5, 158 Elite and elitism (including universities), 16, 132, 139, 142, 150, 205 Ethnicity, see Race Expenses, 42, 43, 163, 208, 210 F Faculty, The (1998), 23, 24, 131–151 Faculty, The (novel, 2022), 11 Fatal Attraction (1987), 141 Feed (2017), 187–191 Femme fatale, 125 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 5 Fielding, Henry, 5 Film reviews, 23, 112, 122 Financial mismanagement, 212 Fleming, Peter, 26, 198 Forster, E. M., 6

G Gender, 21, 54, 60–67, 70n1, 113, 120, 144, 155, 169, 199n3, 231 Germany, 29, 98 Gillette, William (author, actor), 96 Giver, The (193), 180, 184 Good Will Hunting (1997), 23, 133, 139–141, 149 Gordon-Levitt, Joseph (actor), 54 Gramsci, Antonio, 27 Grant, Alan (Jurassic Park), 28, 160 Grosfoguel, Ramón, 43 Gross Misconduct (1993), 23, 24, 133, 141–144 Groupthink, 59 H Haggard, H. Rider, 97, 99 Hall, Richard, 198, 200 Harrison Bergeron (novel, 1961), 191 Harry Potter franchise, 146 Hartnell, William (actor), 72 Health and wellbeing, 205 Hemingway, Ernest (A Very Peculiar Practice), 26, 30, 197–214 Henty, G. A., 98 Hierarchy (academic), 58, 59, 171 Higher Learning (1995), 11, 23, 95, 138, 143 History, 6, 10, 12, 22, 23, 26, 28, 35–37, 45, 47, 49, 50, 62, 70, 100, 101, 108, 112, 116–118, 120–122, 121n45, 125–127, 129, 135–137, 183, 190, 198, 199n5, 225–228, 233, 234 History Man (BBC, 1981), 197–214 History Man (novel, 1975), 14–16, 27, 30, 236 Holmes, Sherlock, 13, 22, 29, 93–110 films and TV, 93, 105, 107, 108

 INDEX 

novels and stories; "Final Problem,” 96; “Gloria Scott,” 99; Hound of the Baskervilles, 96; “Musgrave Ritual,” 99; “Shoscombe Old Place, 93; Study in Scarlet, A, 97; Three Students, 103; Valley of Fear, 22 Howard, John (Australian PM), 3 Humanities, 4, 21, 53–60, 64, 66, 67, 126, 154, 169n52, 175, 188, 190, 191, 194, 234 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 5 Hunger Games (novel, 2008) and franchise, 181, 184, 230 Hutcheon, Linda, 94 Huxley, Aldous, 176 I Instructors, 8, 112, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 127, 129, 130 International recruitment (students and staff), 211 Interstellar (2014), 26, 178, 181 Ivy League, 7, 13, 17, 114, 115, 118n33, 133 J Jeremiad literature, 7 Johnson, Boris (UK Prime Minister), 230 Johnston, Kirsten (actor), 54 Jones, Henry “Indiana,” 28, 30, 89, 159 Jurassic Park (1993), and sequels, 25, 28, 155, 159–163 K Kim, Ji-Yoon (The Chair), 29, 155 Kingsolver, Barbara, 11

269

Kirk, Howard (The History Man), 14, 15, 29, 198, 199, 203n17, 204, 205, 208–210 Kirk, James Tiberius (Star Trek), 8, 9, 95 Knights, Robert (director), 15 L Legally Blonde (2001) and sequels, 29, 137 Legend (novel, 2011), 180–182 Legion of the Dead (2011), 25, 155, 163–168, 170, 171 Libraries, 32, 35, 219, 220 Bodleian, Oxford, 32 Lithgow, John (actor), 54 Lucky Hank (2023), 235 Lucky Jim (novel, 1954; and film, 1957), 6, 235 M Magma: Volcanic Disaster (2006), 25, 155, 165 Managerialism, 29n70, 207 Marathon Man (1976), 133, 135–139 Marketisation of higher education, 26, 200 Marlowe, Christopher, 5n11 Marx (Karl) and Marxism, 98, 203 Massification of higher education, 6, 18, 202, 205 Master, The (Doctor Who), 83 Matilda (novel, 1988, and film, 1996), 124 Matrix, The (1999) and sequels, 185, 186 May, Karl, 98 May, Theresa (UK Prime Minister), 230 Mbembe, Achille, 44, 46, 47 McCannon, Jock (A Very Peculiar Practice), 200

270 

INDEX

Mentoring, 127 Midsommar (2019), 25 Mill, John Stuart, 58 Modernity, 97–101, 107–109, 226 Moffat, Steven, 90, 106 Moffatt, Imogen (Campus), 209 Mona Lisa Smile (2003), 22, 23, 29, 111–130, 208 Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC, 1969-1974), 14n42 Moriarty, Professor James, 108 Morse, Endeavour, 12, 13n37 novels and TV; Ghost in the Machine, 12; Infernal Serpent, 12; Last Bus to Woodstock, 12; Remorseful Day, 12 My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), 121 N Neoliberalism, 174, 177, 179, 184, 186, 190, 193, 195, 224 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 11, 178 Nightwish (1989), 25 Notting Hill (1999), 121, 122 O Obama, Barack, 113 Oh, Sandra, 29, 155 Oliver, John (comedian, actor), 16 Orwell, George (Eric Blair), 176, 234 Out of the Unknown (1965), 185 Oxbridge, 7, 13, 14, 17–19, 39, 40, 45, 83–85, 146–148 Oxford Blues (1984), 133, 145–149 P Participant-observation study, 57 Participation (higher education), 1, 2

Pelican Brief, 121, 122 Pertwee, Jon (actor), 215 Physics, 19, 21, 53, 56, 57, 59, 65, 76, 90, 102, 154, 168–171, 179 Pollack, Jackson, 126 Potts, Bill, 90 Power, 7, 10, 15, 21, 25, 27, 32, 33, 36, 38, 41, 42, 44–47, 56, 63, 64, 107, 121–123, 126, 129, 130, 132, 146, 147, 150, 153–172, 175, 176, 178, 181, 185–186, 191, 193, 195, 216, 217, 224, 237 Pratchett, Terry, 18, 20, 21, 29, 31–51 novels; The Colour of Magic, 31; Equal Rites, 36, 42, 43; The Last Continent, 35; Sourcery, 34, 41, 46; Unseen Academicals, 36 Pretty Woman (1990), 121, 122 Prince of Darkness (1987), 25, 155, 168, 170, 171 Privatisation, 207, 208 Professor (academic rank), 169n52 Publication, 19, 93, 209, 236 Public good, 18, 177, 179, 202, 206 Purpose (of higher education), 3, 18, 175, 185, 202 Q Quatermain, Alan, 97 R Race, 29, 60, 89, 113, 194, 228, 237 Radicalism and radical politics, 204 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and sequels, 159 Rankings, higher education, 148, 205 Rathbone, Basil (actor), 103–105, 107

 INDEX 

Reagan, Ronald (US President), 193 Recruitment practices, 211 Reflexive modernity, 108, 109 Reid, Diana, 11 Religion, 99, 102, 168 Research, 10, 18, 30, 38–40, 50, 55, 57, 59–61, 66, 75, 76, 82, 86, 87, 89, 101, 116, 129, 153, 156, 157, 165, 167, 169–171, 179, 182, 185, 199n5, 204, 208, 209, 225, 230, 236 Resistance, 27, 36, 42, 48, 61, 203, 204, 213, 214, 216, 231, 237 Riot Club, The (2014), 133, 137, 145–149 Ritchie, Guy, 22, 107–109 Roberts, Julia, 23, 112, 120–122, 120n40, 125–129 Rumford, Professor Emilia (Doctor Who), 85 Runaway Bride (1999), 121 S Satire, 7, 8, 13–15, 14n42, 18, 20, 21, 31–33, 36, 42, 43, 45, 48, 56, 198, 213, 235, 237 Sayers, Dorothy L., 13 Schildermans, Hans, 47–50 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst Daniel, 5 Schools Eton, 83, 146, 148 Harrow, 83, 146 Rugby, 146 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths (STEM), 55–60, 64, 66, 67, 154, 172 Scrubs (NBC and ABC, 2001-2010), 16 Seven Sisters Barnard College, 114

271

Bryn Mawr College, 114 Mount Holyoke College, 114 Radcliffe College, 114 Smith College, 22, 112, 114 Vassar College, 114 Wellesley College, 22, 112–119, 121, 121n45, 123, 127–129 Sexism, 25, 26, 28, 57, 61–64, 155, 169, 172, 203, 218, 221, 228, 230, 234 Sexual harassment and misconduct, 121 Sexuality, 23, 63, 119, 120, 122, 208n31 Sexually transmitted infections/ diseases, 208 Shakespeare, William, 5, 5n11, 88 Sharpe, Tom, 18 Shaw, Liz (Doctor Who), 76, 82, 83, 85, 87, 89 Sher, Anthony (actor), 15 Sherlock (BBC, 2010-2017), 106 Sherlock Holmes (1922), 93 Sherlock Holmes (2009) and sequel (2011), 107 Showalter, Elaine, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13 Simpsons, The (Fox, 1989-Present), 10 Singleton, John, 11 Smyth, John, 200, 222 Social Network, The (2010), 133, 137, 138 Social sciences, 21, 54, 56, 57, 66, 67, 102, 116 Solomon, Dick (character, 3rd Rock from the Sun), 21, 53, 156, 169n52 Solomon, Harry (character, 3rd Rock from the Sun), 54, 56 Solomon, Sally (character, 3rd Rock from the Sun), 54, 56, 59, 61 Solomon, Tommy (character, 3rd Rock from the Sun), 54, 57

272 

INDEX

Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, 43, 44, 46, 47 Spock (Star Trek), 95 Stand and Deliver (1988), 10, 145, 149 Star Trek franchise (1966-pesent), 8, 9, 95 Star Wars franchise (1977-present), 8 Sternfeld, Nora, 36, 46, 47, 49, 51, 127 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 98 Stewart, French (actor), 54 Stoker, Bram, 98 Stoler, Ann Laura, 36, 42 Students African American, 119 graduate, 9, 24, 25, 118, 153–157, 160–172, 201, 203n17, 207, 210 international, 119, 201, 210, 211 recruitment, 56 undergraduate, 86, 166 Suicide, 142, 201, 212 T Tarzan, 105 Taylor, Holland, 29, 29n70 Teaching, 10, 18, 23, 27, 38–40, 42, 47–50, 55, 57, 60, 61, 70, 111, 112, 116, 118, 120, 124, 126, 127, 129, 131, 132, 134–136, 138–142, 145, 148, 150, 153, 156, 159, 163, 165, 167, 168, 185, 192, 216, 220–229, 233, 234, 237 See also Instructors Tennant, David (actor), 226 Testing, The (2013), 180, 182 Thatcher, Margaret (UK PM), 15, 87, 199 Thing, The (1982), 145

Thompson, E. P, 199n5, 213 3rd Rock from the Sun (NBC, 1996-2001), 21, 29, 53–67, 155, 169n52 episodes; “Brain and Eggs” (1.1), 61; “Dick Puts the Id in Cupid” (5.11), 61; “Dick Soup for the Soul” (6.16), 62; “Dick Strikes Out” (5.16), 59; “Dick v Strudwick“ (4.21), 57; “Indecent Dick” (4.8), 62, 64; “Much Ado About Dick” (2.5), 53, 60; “Paranoid Dick“ (4.14), 58, 64; “The Physics of Being Dick” (3.21), 56; “Power Mad Dick” (4.2), 64; “Sensitive Dick” (2.21), 62; “Why Dickie Can’t Teach” (6.6), 56, 57 Timeline (2003), 25, 155, 163 Time Trap (2017), 25 Torchwood (BBC, 2006-2011), 27, 217, 227 Troughton, Patrick (actor), 72, 74 Trump, Donald (US President), 221, 225, 230, 232 U Unemployment, 15, 202 Unions and unionism, 237 United Nations Intelligence Task Force (UNIT), 20, 76 United Federation of Planets (Star Trek), 9 United Kingdom(UK), 1, 4, 71, 75, 142, 205, 206, 209n34, 210, 212, 214 United States of America(USA), 56, 178, 188, 193, 216, 225 Universities (fictional) Drummondale, 17

 INDEX 

Kirke, 204 Lowlands University, 236 Pendelton State, 53, 61, 67 St Luke’s, 19 Watermouth, 199, 236 West Central Pennsylvania University, 235 Woolamaloo, 17 Universities (real) Berlin, 5 Bologna, 5 Bristol, 13, 179 California, Merced, 159, 171, 193 Cambridge, 5, 6, 32, 82, 100, 103, 134, 137, 146 Columbia, 135 Edinburgh, 22, 106 Harvard, 114, 115, 137, 138 Heidelberg, 5 Imperial College London, 101 Jagiellonian, 5 Massachusetts Lowell, 112, 200 Melbourne, 141 Monash, 29 New England (Australia), 29, 118 Oregon, 156, 157 Oxford, 5, 6, 12, 20, 22, 31, 32, 100, 103, 134, 137, 145–149 Paris, 5, 75 Prague, 5 Queensland, 29 St Andrews, 5 Salamanca, 5 Southern California, 163 Tromsø, 13 University College London, 12, 13, 101 Warwick, 26, 199, 199n5, 213 Unlearning, see Sternfeld, Nora Unseen University, 1–51, 130

273

V Vampire Academy (2014) and franchise, 146, 147 Van Gogh, Vicent, 127 Very Peculiar Practice, A (BBC, 1996-1998 and special, 1992), 26, 30, 197–214 Vice-chancellor (academic rank), 26, 200–202, 205, 207, 209–212 Victorian era, 94, 99, 102, 104 W Walsh, Diane Chapman, 117, 123 Watson, John, 94, 99, 101–106, 122, 126–129 Waugh, Evelyn, 6, 9 Wells, H. G., 98 Wendel, Elmarie (actor), 62 Whittaker, Jodie (actor), 74 Womanising, 201, 207, 208 Women, 13, 22–24, 28, 29n70, 40, 59, 61–66, 82, 111–130, 142, 143, 147, 154, 163, 172, 176, 186, 199n5, 203, 203n17, 208n31, 215, 231, 232 Wonder Boys (1995), 11 Working class (students), 5, 75, 88, 145, 204, 205 World Wars First, 192, 199n5 Second, 97, 116, 120 Y Yes, Prime Minister (BBC, 1980-1982), 18, 19 Z Zuckerberg, Mark, 138, 139