Campus Fictions: Exemption and the American Campus Novel 3031499115, 9783031499111

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AMERICAN LITERATURE READINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Campus Fictions Exemption and the American Campus Novel Wesley Beal

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century

Series Editor Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century publishes works by contemporary authors that help shape critical opinion regarding American literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twentyfirst centuries. The books treat fiction, poetry, memoir, drama and criticism itself—ranging from William Dow’s Narrating Class in American Fiction and Amy Strong’s Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction, to Maisha L. Wester’s African American Gothic, Joseph Fichtelberg’s Exceptional Violence and the Crisis of Classic American Literature, and Guy Davidson’s Queer Commodities: Contemporary U. S. Fiction, Consumer Culture, and Lesbian Subcultures. Beginning in 2004, the series is now well established and continues to welcome new book proposals. Manuscripts run between 80,000 and 90,000 words, while the Pivot format accommodates shorter books of 25,000 to 50,000 words. This series also accepts essay collections; among our bestsellers have been collections on David Foster Wallace, Norman Mailer, Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Literary Criticism, Kurt Vonnegut, Kate Chopin, Carson McCullers, George Saunders, and Arthur Miller (written by members of the Miller Society). All texts are designed to create valuable interactions globally as well as within English-speaking countries. Editorial Board: Professor Derek Maus, SUNY Potsdam, USA Professor Thomas Fahy, Long Island University, USA Professor Deborah E. McDowell, University of Virginia and Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute, USA Professor Laura Rattray, University of Glasgow, UK

Wesley Beal

Campus Fictions Exemption and the American Campus Novel

Wesley Beal Lyon College Batesville, AR, USA

ISSN 2634-579X ISSN 2634-5803 (electronic) American Literature Readings in the 21st Century ISBN 978-3-031-49910-4 ISBN 978-3-031-49911-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 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: H. Armstrong Roberts/Getty This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Courtney, Reed, Wyatt, Ana, and the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke.

Acknowledgments

Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of its arguments, this book is a register of many debts to my family, friends, mentors, colleagues, and even to my institutions. Often the work here traces debts and influences that are deeply personal. Many of the project’s body chapters cycled through the atelier at Lyon College. Phil and Carol Cavalier, Paula Cucurella, Brian Hunt, Matthew Lebrato, James Martell, Helen Robbins, Scott Roulier, Awah Sidjeck, and Ella Wilhoit provided trenchant feedback on working drafts, as well as support and encouragement and inspiration during some of higher education’s most challenging times. Tim Gruenewald, Gray Kochlar-Lindgren, and Florian Verbeek shared provocative insights on what higher learning looks like in their unique contexts in Hong Kong. Tony Davis, Emily Riley, and Zach Ward shared time and talent to transform text into data and data into visualizations. Andrew English provided tutorials on data literacy, and Michael Simeone introduced me to the basics of machine reading. Brad Austin, Sarah Robins, Robert W. Miller, and Derrick E. White directed me to indispensable readings on histories of the university and trauma pedagogies. My mentor Rebecca Resinski helped me troubleshoot the tangled classical roots of “schola.” Annie Blevins managed final editorial touches. Molly Beck and the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan have been hugely supportive of this project,

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moving it toward the finish line with grace and care. And my family— Courtney, Reed, and Ana—have indulged me in the time and energy that this project has siphoned away from them. In keeping with the book’s subject matter, many of the debts and influences traced here are also deeply institutional. Lyon College, the scrappy liberal arts college where I work, supported this project with a sabbatical, funded an editorial assistant, and supported a research team that took data from John Kramer’s The American College Novel, transformed it into our Directory of the American Campus Novel, and used that database to create visualizations of the academic novel’s publishing history. A Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant gave me opportunities to test out and revise some of these ideas with brilliant colleagues and students at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong. The M.R.G. at the University of Florida provided generous feedback on material pertaining to academic freedom—a matter of acute concern for higher learning in Florida—and continues to inspire my writing and teaching years after I left the fold. The Arkansas Governor’s School continues to inform my thinking about what higher learning can be: experiencing its innovative curriculum was a defining moment of my life in the summer of 1999, and I was fortunate to work there for thirteen subsequent summers. The Brick House Institute continues to shape my understandings of self and society, particularly where they intersect in academic life. I thank these family, friends, mentors, colleagues, and institutions—and of course spare them responsibility for this book’s shortcomings. And, as ever, thank you, Mr. Miner.

Contents

1

Introductions to the American Campus Novel Why the American Campus Novel? Authorship and Audiences On Campus Fictions Works Cited

1 4 10 16 21

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Campus Characters: Exemption and Utopia on Campus Exemption and Big Men on Campus Exemption or Utopia? Works Cited

23 26 36 41

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Anti-intellectualism, “Theory,” and the Reactionary Impulses of the Campus Novel Identity, Resentment, and Resistance to “Theory” “Competitive Thinking” and the Ends of Anti-Intellectualism Works Cited

43 47 65 70

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Unauthorized Sex?: Sex, Power, and Privilege in the Campus Novel Elided Assaults and Imagined Predators in I Am Charlotte Simmons Parables of Ambivalence: Ironies of Assault and Harassment in Blue Angel and Vladímír On Sex and Resentments Works Cited

73 78 86 98 100 ix

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CONTENTS

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Subordinations of Academic Freedom: “Speech” as Campus Keyword and Codeword Speech and Manners in The Groves of Academe The Hog, the Governor, and the Mining Magnate; Or, Academic Freedom in Moo Dithering on Academic Freedom Works Cited

103 110 117 127 130

6

Identity and Culture War on Campus Pseudo Cool and the Fates of Western Civilization “The Raw I”: Identity and Resentment in The Human Stain Whose Affirmation? Works Cited

133 137 145 155 159

7

Hardly Workin; or, the Valences of Productivism in Campus Novels Paradise as Work Refusal Work as Play in Dear Committee Members Ambivalence in a Long Day Gendering Work and The Life of the Mind Closure or Horizon? Works Cited

161 163 169 176 180 185 191

On Teaching the University Works Cited

193 201

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Appendix I: Further Data

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Works Cited

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Index

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About the Author

Wesley Beal is the W.C. Brown, Jr. Professor of English at Lyon College, a small liberal arts college in the Ozark foothills where he lives with his family and walks their dog.

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. A.1 Fig. A.2 Fig. A.3 Fig. A.4 Fig. A.5 Fig. A.6 Fig. A.7

Campus Fiction Protagonists, Share of Faculty & Student 1828–2002 Campus Fiction Production, 1828–2002 Campus Fiction vs. Library of Congress Fiction Production, 1828–2002 Campus Fiction Protagonists, 1828–2002 Campus Fiction Settings by U.S. Census Region, 1828–2002 Campus Fiction Authors’ Sex, 1828–2002 (Synchronic) Campus Fiction Authors’ Sex, 1828–2002 (Diachronic) Topic Modeling of Genre, 1828–2002

13 208 211 212 213 214 215 219

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CHAPTER 1

Introductions to the American Campus Novel

“I am invisible. And Exempt,” thinks Gnossos Pappadopoulis to himself at the outset of Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966, 4). “Immunity has been granted to me, for I do not lose my cool. Polarity is selected at will, for I am not ionized and I possess not valence” (Fariña 1966, 4). Bohemian, prone to musing, intent on gathering no moss, and swept up in campus protests, Fariña’s Beat protagonist in many ways epitomizes the popular conception of the American college student. Studying, nominally, in the late 1950s at a Mentor University that resembles the Cornell that Fariña attended, Gnossos develops a policy of Exemption that defines his character and the novel’s plot. “No index card for me, I’m Exempt,” he thinks to himself as he surveys the stockcharacter fraternity brothers and sorority sisters bustling about campus to start the fall term (Fariña 1966, 24). “Look, man, I’m Exempt as it is,” he tells his classmate Alonso Oeuf, who is trying to bring him into campus politics (Fariña 1966, 206). For Gnossos, “Exemption” is a blanket policy to discard a range of bourgeois social conventions, typified by the right to pursue self-determination through paregoric and free love. For the rest

Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1_1. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 W. Beal, Campus Fictions, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1_1

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of the student body at Mentor, Exemption from the university’s new ban on “coed” visitation of off-campus apartments is a galvanizing force. In this book I take Exemption not only as a chief readerly appeal, but also as a principal driver of the logic of the American campus novel. In exploring the tangled politics of Exemption and tracking them across some of the genre’s principal themes, I argue that the campus novel navigates the central contradiction of American higher learning—on the one hand, considered Exempt from market pressures as a social good generating knowledge and nurturing democracy,1 and on the other, thought to serve the individual’s pathway to credentialing and class stability or to provide an idealized site of free play and self-determination.2 Both of these states of Exemption are of course highly idealized. The university’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge suffers for ever-intensifying corporatization and declining public trust, and personal freedoms such as Gnossos’s diverge sharply from the stressful, harried lives experienced by 1 Some readers will view this claim with circumspection—and with good reason, given the demographic trends that increasingly reserve higher learning for the elite and given the populist and authoritarian attitudes that seem to define our zeitgeist. However, in Higher Learning, Greater Good (2009), a vastly underappreciated study of the university’s public goods, Walter McMahon uses a modern human capital approach to capture the benefits of the university. I refer to the personal nonmarket benefits of university education in the final chapter, but McMahon also identifies public nonmarket goods of higher learning, supported by modern human capital research. The use of one’s post-secondary learning in one’s leisure time, he demonstrates, contributes to “the operation and development of civic institutions vital to democracy, human rights, political stability, and the criminal justice system necessary to civic order” (McMahon 2009, 5). 2 In an introduction to Been Down So Long, Thomas Pynchon, whose time at

Cornell overlapped with Fariña’s, says of the American college experience. “Undergraduate consciousness rests in part on a set of careless assumptions about being immortal. The elitism and cruelty often found in college humor arises from this belief in one’s own Exemption, not only from time and death, but somehow from the demands of life as well” (1983, vii–viii). In this reading, the university student, if not the university itself, is exempt from the pressures of the so-called “real world”: free from their parents’ social conventions, free from the grind of waged working lives, free to create themselves as they see fit. This call to the co-curricular bears an uncanny resemblance to the ways in which liberal arts advocates describe an individual’s opportunity for personal transformation. For instance, in his exceptional philosophy of the liberal arts, The Problem with Rules (2021), John Churchill argues that the deliberative capacities facilitated by liberal learning are personally transformative because they lead to better opinions—those that exist in a consistent way with other opinions and that “lead to growth, to fuller humanity, to richer takes on things” (89). This is of course one of the noblest goals of the liberal arts tradition! But it also drifts, troublingly if incidentally, toward the ethic of privatization that typifies the neoliberal order.

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many students on American campuses today. Notably, as it relies formally on private experience to represent university life, the campus novel may be understood as widening the space between these polarities, authorizing a regressive privatization at the same time that it purportedly speaks for an institution that, at least in the abstract or perhaps expressing a vestigial remainder, often frames itself as a public utility. The campus novel transforms the university’s defining contradiction into an antinomy: across the genre’s titles, tropes of Exemption hold together the genre’s utopian frameworks as well as its most troubling, reactionary impulses in a productive tension. This antinomy, operating on an ambivalent politics of Exemption, acts as the fundamental logic of the American campus novel. Further, I argue that when it comes to the cultural and material challenges we face in American higher learning, the campus novel produces some portion of the university’s troubles. Critical university studies scholars have rightly identified the ways in which the American university has faltered in responding to the ideological-economic pressures of neoliberalism. In its Exemption tropes, the campus novel often validates the very discourses that critical university scholars have identified as external threats to higher learning. And despite all this, I will argue that the campus novel’s utopian angles may provide some measure of encouragement in an era characterized, for many, by Damoclean portent. The genre’s exemptions, then, are fraught. And here again Gnossos exemplifies. Not only seeking play and self-actualization, he is also Exempt from criticism for overtly racist conduct and Exempt from consequences for multiple sexual assaults. “House mascot,” he says of an Asian American student while attending a fraternity rush event for a free meal—“in ten years, zoom, back to Peking, a commissar” (Fariña 1966, 33–34). As Fariña’s narration would have it, Gnossos walks away from the dinner a lovable scamp. Gnossos also takes liberties with his classmates’ bodies. He deceives two women, Pamela and Kristin, with sabotaged condoms. Soon after the second woman confronts him for having imperiled her with an unwanted pregnancy, the last paragraphs of the novel have him drafted, his Exemption denied, and headed off to Vietnam, his conscription organized by his rival Alonso Oeuf as punishment for the assaults. Is this an indictment of Gnossos’s sexual violence, or is it a tragedy—the world’s intrusion on our young hero’s Immunity? The novel gives readers some room to critique Gnossos’s behavior when his friend Heffalump chides him, “right now you’re into something very private and from here it looks spooky” (Fariña 1966, 282). But I think the narration is content

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to have us read these episodes as the excesses of the big man on campus or perhaps dismiss them as part of the genre’s nineteenth-century investment in pranks rather than sounding alarms about the raced foundations of the university or about sexual assault on and near campus. Moreover, the invocation of Vietnam and its injustices to me indicates that readers are intended to understand this finale as a tragedy for Gnossos rather than his punishment. Here Fariña captures the genre’s ambivalence, at once invested in the autonomy and freedoms associated with and produced by the university while simultaneously entangled in deeply reactionary politics.

Why the American Campus Novel? Why a booklength study of the campus novel? I undertook this project with two organizing questions in mind: what are the fundamental tensions of this genre, and how might their study illuminate our relationships to our situations of American higher learning? In reading to unpack that question, I found that these novels offer manifold readerly pleasures, as any robust range of fiction would. If one is attuned to these novels’ affirmative dimensions, the reader may find in them reminders of what the academy aspires to be and what we aspire to achieve through the academy. Indeed, part of my goal in this project is to refocus our attention on the virtues of higher learning and to sustain some hope for its missions in dispiriting times. The campus novel serves this function, as I hope to show in the following chapters on campus characters and work themes, even if it is also often complicit in threats against the missions of the university. Campus novels also, at least for those who work in or around higher learning as I do, produce many a grimace. I suspect this explains why so little scholarship has been written on the campus novel. One may cringe at the way these novels call to mind tedious institutional politics or students’ distressing experiences or wearisome colleagues or traumatizing scandals. Worse, a reader may be pained by the way these novels represent hard realities and persistent crises such as those that we face in various ways in our academic workplaces. Further, the campus novel’s mimetic qualities are inherent to its ambivalent politics. In the genre’s tendencies to realist mimetic devices, or at least in its claims to mimesis, it recreates the same divide between the academy and the public that we see in sensationalist press, in culture war diatribes. In other words, while campus novels aim to represent the various situations of the university,

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they take on an independent discursive function of their own. Whether in aggravated and aggrieved contents or in narratives of development and liberation, the campus novel’s politics of Exemption, posited within realist projects and alongside non-diegetical events and discourses, disrupts the genre’s representational function in the production of a new, antinomous discourse. In drafting this book, I have imagined its audience as scholars of American literature and American studies—and especially as scholars who would consider bringing “the university” into their teaching. In “Teach the University” (2008), the critical university studies scholar Jeffrey Williams encourages humanities scholars to find ways to teach philosophies and histories of higher learning, representations of the university, as well as sociological information that informs higher learning in America. “To prompt students to reflect on how they are formed, where modern institutions come from, and how they work is,” Williams writes, “a primary pedagogical goal of higher education and especially its criticism” (2008, 26). Further, he argues that “we should teach the university to counteract our resignation or abjectness or, on the other hand, overinflated claims of our political ‘interventions’” (Williams 2008, 27). Many scholars have long been generating research in critical university studies, or have long been serving in faculty senate and union roles to identify and redress the difficulties we face in American higher learning. Teaching the university is another tactic that should become common in this toolbox, and this book aims to provide material for those interested in answering Williams’s challenge, tracking the Exemption antinomy across a historical range of titles and across the campus novel’s foremost themes. Even if ambivalent or dispiriting at times, the campus novel indeed provides a unique platform for thinking about the cultural and material stressors arrayed against the university. So often we frame these stressors as matters of “crisis.” Such crises number too many to capture here in full. We recognize them, for instance, in an ever-deepening and increasingly well-funded strain of American anti-intellectualism, in declining public trust in the academy amid toxic culture war rhetoric, in a shrinking enrollment market due to falling birthrates, and in the corporatization that manifests in adjunctification of the faculty ranks, runaway tuition pricing and student debt rates, falling state financial support for higher

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learning, heedless pursuits of huge athletic endorsements3 and related television contracts, campus centers transforming to look like shopping malls, aggressive institutional claims on patents produced by scholars, and a misconception of the student as “customer”—many of which stressors are symptoms and in some cases also drivers of the broader neoliberal reorganization of our institutions into a fully privatized society. Such crises appear somewhat differently according to the type of institution—large public research universities, community colleges, or small liberal arts colleges such as my workplace. Setting aside the for-profit institutions that operate solely on market principles, in a grand or totalizing view, the strengths and crises faced by American universities and colleges indicate that these institutions have more in common than not. This is one reason that I will use the terms “college,” “university,” and “academy” somewhat interchangeably, the other being that the campus novel itself has very little invested in such distinctions. Higher learning is typified by crisis. In any study of the academy from any decade of the last century, one is likely to find preoccupations with one crisis or another. In his cornerstone work Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963 and responding in large measure to McCarthyist reprisals against intellectuals generally and the university specifically, Richard Hofstadter notes the denunciations of professors and their home institutions in the wake of the New Deal, when Roosevelt’s “brain trust” was perceived by some to have outstripped the power even of his Cabinet (216–17). Marc Redfield goes further, arguing that this cycling discourse of crisis is a distinctly American preoccupation, at least for the humanities.4 Further, Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon argue in Permanent Crisis (2021): “Crisis has not only been variously invoked to describe the plight of the humanities—crisis has also been the humanities’ rationale” (253). One will not be surprised to read that the postindustrial, neoliberal era is far from the first time that the academy’s mission 3 See, for instance, the dealings between the University of Louisville’s athletic association and the Adidas Corporation that were uncovered in 2017. 4 “No other country in the world supports an equivalent level of talk about ‘the humanities,’ or indulges and invests to the same degree in a pastoral idea of ‘college,’” Redfield argues in Theory at Yale (2016). “Liberal arts colleges and elite universities may compose only a modest fraction of the far-flung American postsecondary educational system, but they garner most of the media attention and inspire an endless stream of books and articles about the crisis of the humanities, the liberal arts, and the university” (Redfield 2016, 4).

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came afoul of business and economic pressures, as Thorstein Veblen’s 1918 screed The Higher Learning in America demonstrates.5 Or one might observe the litany of crises the American university has weathered—not least during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008, the enrollment instability posed by the G.I. Bill, or the McCarthyism of the early Cold War era—and through which it has evolved. It may not be the greatest reassurance to observe that the American university exists in a perpetual state of crisis or that crisis is a cornerstone of the humanities, that the university has survived manifold crises before, that perhaps we talk it up a bit much in the U.S. But it may be of some comfort to situate our present discourses in a wider frame. These are of course very real threats to higher learning, past cycles of crises notwithstanding. And, as I hope to demonstrate, the campus novel is at least obliquely related to these cultural and material stressors due to the ways in which it provides a new antinomy that in part sustains the belief that higher learning is a private, personal commodity. But part of my framing here is to suggest that foregrounding our preoccupations, perhaps even our pathological fixations, on crisis narratives may prompt us to re-center ourselves, as the following chapter and the final chapter aim to do, on the values of American higher learning that are augmented in the campus novel. If the readerly pleasures of the campus novel can be somewhat ambivalent, the payoffs for scholars and for classroom instruction are not. These I have encountered in thinking about the broader appeals of the genre, Exemption chief among them. The genre appeals to readers in other ways, too. The campus novel hangs principally on character—eccentrics, youths beginning the world, hermits, degenerates, sociopaths of varying degrees, all more or less performing Exemption, as the following chapter explores. As the genre marches into the contemporary, it’s increasingly populated with characters who are granted the freedom to air out their neuroses, their improprieties, even their defiance of bourgeois legal and moral standards. Throughout the genre, these questions recur: who is Exempt and who’s not? From what? And why do they carry this privilege? This pairing of Exemption and character effects a privatization of

5 See also Max Weber’s “The Scholar’s Work” (1919), also translated as “Science as a Vocation,” for a perspective on the German academy from around the same period.

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higher learning itself—a major consequence of the campus novel that I will return to throughout this book. Other payoffs for the campus novel arise from analysis of its major themes. Many of these are fairly regressive. The genre wallows in antiintellectualism, harboring one of the dangerous American traditions in the place that readers might suppose is its antithesis, the campus itself. The genre consistently authorizes sexual predation in the power structures that define faculty rank as well as the professor-student relationship. The genre tends to misrecognize the philosophy of academic freedom, thereby fortifying a range of free-speech canards regarding higher learning and the broader culture wars across the U.S. Each of these themes is the subject of body chapters below. Further, the campus novel is closely attended by undercurrents of resentment—students resenting each other and academic orthodoxies, professors resenting colleagues and entire fields of knowledge, and in the campus novels written during the culture wars that develop in the late twentieth-century readers find a blanket resentment of identitarian causes that begin to look suspiciously like a resentment of racial and ethnic and queer and women’s identities themselves. Resentment may be an inherent property of an institution that operates on an economy of status, as the academy does. Resentment also demonstrates a premium on Exemption, marking the spaces where other people and institutions have intruded upon the liberties that one feels entitled to presume. At the same time, the genre offers utopian work refusals, as the final chapter discusses in greater detail, and in so doing pairs the campus novel and higher learning itself in a frame of deep wishfulfillment for those who follow academic affairs closely and indeed for a reader from any walk of life. In some measure, my identification of the crises of American higher learning and the themes of the campus novel genre must necessarily reflect my own working situation: a non-elite but proud small liberal arts college in the American rural south. My college serves students who are often

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out-priced by their flagship state universities,6 and it suffers the existential dread shared by many similar tuition-dependent institutions that live on a budgetary knife’s edge. The institutional values, the culture of my college’s student body and our small city, and other factors that color my academic life have surely also colored my thinking in this book project. Perhaps readers approaching from other experiences—working at a large land-grant university or at an urban community college, living in a town with an elite, well-heeled small university, working without the protections of tenure, experiencing the university from different identity positions from those of a white, straight, cisgendered man—will find other academic crises and genre themes more or less pressing than the way I have prioritized them here. My study doesn’t presume to capture all of those meanings of academic life, nor does the campus novel: it tends not to deal with university crisis management, for instance, though that is top-of-mind for many in higher learning today. The campus novel most often operates at some measure of removal from the technical details of academic life and therefore doesn’t facilitate easily discussion of all that readers might hope to find there. But I don’t think that these limitations—of my own subject-position or of the campus novel’s inattention to details—should preclude us from starting a discussion of what teaching the university through the campus novel might look like. Heeding the multitude of calls for a brand of intellectualism that would defend the mission of the university, I have devised this book to sustain the discussion of the purpose of higher education and the broader ideological-economic climate in which it is situated. In Speaking of Universities (2017), Stefan Collini argues that this kind of intellectual work isn’t compelled to speak to all audiences with the goal of challenging each reader’s core convictions, but that it might fortify “those who are sympathetic but dispirited” and encourage readers “to articulate what they half believe already” (212). Such work, Collini suggests, should focus on long-term transformations of the institution rather than topical affairs, and it should foreground the relationship between students 6 See, for instance, “Opportunity Lost,” a 2019 report from the Institute of Higher Education Policy, which concludes that most public flagship universities “are not affordable for the students who stand to benefit most—hardworking students with limited means who are striving for the economic freedom that a high-quality college education can provide. Unless states and institutions change their priorities to make these universities more affordable, they risk perpetuating rather than disrupting the cycle of intergenerational poverty that has persisted for decades” (Mugglestone et al. 2019, 13).

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and the university (2017, 214–15). Here again, then, we find reason to consider Williams’s enjoinder, “Teach the university!” In sum, Campus Fictions argues that in addition to the ideological-economic functions of neoliberalism, we might locate the origins of the academy’s crises in the academic novel—“the genre,” as I’ll be calling it for short—that represents the life of the American campus. And we may also locate in the genre, and in our discussion of it, hope to sustain us through discouraging times.

Authorship and Audiences Who is the campus novel for? What is its purpose? This is an important starting point for understanding the genre—critical especially if we consider the campus novel as a potential pollinator of the university’s ideals or of reactionary politicization of higher learning. The campus novel’s audience is perhaps less certain than that of other literary genres, which are likelier to display reliable plot conventions and character tropes and cater to well-defined audiences. If there is scant scholarship on the campus novel, much of it has hinged on this question, with scholars arguing by turns that the genre is driven by a range of production and consumption pressures. For instance, in his seminal book The Program Era (2009), Mark McGurl ties the campus novel to the rise of creative writing programs. The institutionalization of the American author, he argues, leads to a broad focus on “the culture of the school” in the postwar period, with the campus novel being uniquely suited to authors registering “the ironies of institutionalization” (McGurl 2009, 30, 47). Reconciling the artist to the institution is a chief concern after the normalization of the creative writing program, perhaps even the era’s defining tension—and thus a sign, perhaps, that at least during the postwar era, the genre may reflect foremost its authors’ preoccupations.7 Alternatively, some critics argue that the genre suits an audience that is increasingly troubled by class anxieties. In “The Rise of the Academic Novel” (2012), Jeffrey Williams argues that the genre is driven less by

7 This period may have begun winding down recently. Phillip E. Wegner (2020), for instance, argues that the Program Era may be being slowly replaced by a return to the practices of the romance novel (116). If that’s the case, it remains to be seen whether or to what degree contemporary fiction would change in regard to its representations of campus life.

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the rise of the creative writing program and more by the rise of the professional-managerial class, borrowing from Barbara and John Ehenreich’s formulation for the modern American class stratum that derives its standing from academic credentialing rather than inherited wealth and that occupies a fraught space between working and ruling classes (579). “The profusion of the academic novel results less from the advent of M.F.A.s than from an audience for whom higher education is natural and expected, and who takes the professor as a conventional figure,” Williams argues (2012, 579). This new class stratum, according to Williams, finds itself reflected in the campus novel’s themes of downward mobility, culture war, and modern bureaucracy (2012, 576, 57). And further, Williams argues, “it is an audience that still assumes the novel is a central medium of expression—in other words, an adult audience, probably of those born in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, who still read books and might see their own fate in the situations that confront the beleaguered professors in academic novels” (2012, 579). Williams’s argument here has the advantage of straddling the writer-production/reader-market divide, with elements of the professional-managerial class operating on both sides: he points to Richard Ohmann’s argument in “The Shaping of the Canon” that the professional-managerial class dictates what fiction is deemed to have value because its members staff the literary publication industry and comprise those who teach at the secondary and post-secondary levels (2012, 579). Christopher Findeisen offers a complementary argument about the genre’s audience in “The One Place Where Money Makes No Difference” (2016), contending that the American campus novel scorns classed distinctions precisely because the American university relies on and exacerbates class inequality: “it is necessary for the producers and consumers of literary fiction to believe that universal higher education makes our unequal distribution of resources fair” (84). To explore further the question of the genre’s purpose, I have pulled and visualized data from John E. Kramer’s The College Novel in America (2004). Kramer’s source material, surveying 648 of the genre titles beginning with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe (1828) and terminating in 2002, captures the bulk of the Directory of the American Campus Novel that I offer in the appendices. I discuss in the “Appendix I: Further Data” appendix my parameters for defining the campus novel genre and for focusing on those novels set on American campuses, as well as the limitations of Kramer’s dataset—not least among them his purist definition of the campus novel’s genre boundaries and an inconsistent tracking of

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authors’ attainment of creative writing degrees, which would be useful data for the following paragraphs. But it is important to stick with his corpus to avoid confounding the results of differing methods of data collection. Despite its limitations, Kramer’s dataset provides some clues to the genre’s production and consumption—as well as other perspectives addressed in the “Appendix I: Further Data” unit. In the absence of a concrete profile of the readership of the campus novel, we can surmise the genre’s purpose in the negative space, so to speak, of its content. The content is ambivalent: does it reflect a reader’s demands or the writer’s interests? Fig. 1.1 visualizes protagonist numbers from Kramer’s dataset spanning from 1828 to 2002. When we eliminate outliers and focus only on the novels that feature either faculty or student protagonists and then chart them diachronically, the rise of faculty protagonists comes into relief. Figure 1.1, a 100% stacked bar chart showing the distribution of student and faculty protagonists, demonstrates the share of the genre’s protagonists in ten-year groups through 2002. For instance, the period from 1828 to 1837 is totally occupied by student protagonists, and in the period from 1958 to 1967 the genre’s faculty protagonists claim a majority share—56%—for the first time. The chart is skewed somewhat because each bar shows 100% of the faculty- and student-centered texts for its period, accounting for only one novel in the 1828–37 window and 82 novels from 1988 to 1997. But Fig. 1.1 nonetheless charts a significant transformation: an inclining interest in faculty protagonists. While not a perfect chiasmus, the chart captures a marked change of direction. Using a different dataset, Jeffrey Williams comes to a similar finding in “The Rise of the Academic Novel,” in which novels featuring faculty protagonists begin to outpace those featuring students around 1960. Figure 1.1 shows that reversal taking off somewhat earlier than Williams’s data indicate, and somewhat earlier than I would have expected. I had anticipated an uptick in faculty narratives around the 1980s, corresponding to my own perception of the growth of anti-theory faculty stories around then, but in fact the data show faculty protagonists taking an increased share of the genre in the 1940s and afterward remaining about even with student protagonists. Williams attributes the declining numbers of student-centered novels to film, which he suggests displaces the novel in representations of undergraduate experience (2012, 569). But with the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, often a byword of sorts for formalized American creative writing, being founded in 1936, perhaps it is no surprise to see faculty protagonists claiming a larger share of the

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Campus Fiction Protagonists, Share of Faculty & Student 18282002 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% student 40%

fac

30% 20% 10% 0%

Fig. 1.1 Campus Fiction Protagonists, Share of Faculty & Student 1828–2002

genre’s titles from that point onward. This figure, then, suggests evidence for McGurl’s argument that an evolving change in genre authorship motivates a decisive change in genre authorship. But of course Williams points to similar evidence of inclining faculty protagonists in order to argue that the campus novel caters to an emerging audience that recognizes the professor as a familiar type and empathizes with the professor’s cultural and economic stresses. I don’t intend to frame the question of purpose as a strict either/or between author and audience, but it’s important to understand just how distinct the authorship of the genre may be. Further anecdotal evidence would also lend support to McGurl’s position, or at least to the consequences of the phenomenon he identifies. The campus novel is rife with writerly identity—and more and more so in the contemporary period. See for instance two passages from novels explored further in subsequent body chapters. The protagonist of Francine Prose’s Blue Angel (2000), Ted Swenson, is a creative writing professor, and when his editor suggests that he write a memoir, he reacts with indignation: “I’m a novelist. An actual writer. I’ve still got some…standards” (236). The protagonist of Julia

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May Jonas’s Vladimir (2022), a professor of creative writing and literature, pairs writerly pathology with her sexual enthusiasm for a younger colleague. “It was the real and true urge to write,” the narrator thinks to herself after a pool party with her shapely junior colleague (Jonas 2022, 50). Frequently Jonas’s narration describes the impulse to write as “orgasmic,” as an undeniable physiological fact of life. It is no exaggeration to say, as the third chapter explores further, that the privileged position of the creative writer becomes a kind of identity politics in the campus novel. This is surely a pillar of the genre’s production. To the arguments about the genre’s production and consumption offered by McGurl, Williams, and Findeisen, to common findings about the genre’s increasing focus on faculty protagonists over time—to this, I add a finding pulled from Kramer’s dataset: the relationship between campus settings and authorship turns out to be compelling. At least 32% of the genre’s authors through 2002 had some kind of formal relationship to the settings represented in their novels. For instance, John Erskine graduated from and later taught at Columbia University where he set Bachelor—of Arts (1933), John Coulter worked at the Wabash College where he set In Freshmen Year (1934), Albert Murray graduated from the Tuskegee Institute that bears an unmistakable resemblance to the setting of The Spyglass Tree (1991), Amanda Brown attended the Stanford Law School where she set Legally Blonde (2001). The finding is particularly strong among novels set at Harvard University: 75% of the authors of novels set at Harvard either studied or worked at Cambridge. Another data subset demonstrates this relationship: there are 46 authors who appear with multiple works in the Directory, accounting for 108 or 17% of the genre’s titles between 1828 and 2002, and of those 46 authors, 20 have an alumni relation to at least one, but usually not all, of the settings featured in their texts. So especially among the genre’s recidivist authors, there’s a strong likelihood of direct campus ties of one sort or another. 32% of the genre’s authors bear strong ties to their novels’ settings— and perhaps a little more, given the dearth of information Kramer had to work with in composing his earlier biographical notes! The timeline of Kramer’s dataset skews from the more contemporary focus of McGurl, Williams, and Findeisen. And it likely indexes a different ken: where, for instance, McGurl is expressly concerned with the so-called literary fiction of the Program Era, Kramer’s list indexes also popular titles. But here we have another compelling suggestion of the genre’s raison d’être: that the

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campus novel is written as a result of the author’s imagined tie to the collegiate experience itself. The strength of this imagined tie to the alma mater manifests elsewhere in the genre, too. For instance, Fig. A.7 in the “Appendix I: Further Data” appendix captures the results of a machine reading exercise that I interpret as indicating a deep nostalgia permeating the genre. That nostalgia may not be so evident in the reading of discrete texts, such as the exercises that make up the following body chapters. But a disaggregated machine reading of the genre’s contents can be revealing. So even if any given campus novel might emphasize intellectual disillusionment or culture war scandals or other vices, we might trace in that disenchantment a nostalgia for an idealized university experience—whether the author’s or the reader’s, whether drawing from lived or imagined pasts. And that nostalgia would also serve the genre’s reactionary tendencies, signaling not only the idealized past but also critiquing the university’s present. The nostalgic currents of the genre also explain its relative stasis: despite a few pivotal events, foremost the arrival of the Program Era corps of creative writers or, for instance, the development of the adjunctroman subgenre, the campus novel remains remarkably durable in its thematic contents. “Even though the society from which the campus novel emerged has changed radically,” Findeisen says of this durability, “the conventions through which the campus novel defines itself have not” (2016, 69). This is especially true of the genre’s treatment of the big man on campus trope, of academic freedom, and of work refusals. For this reason, the following body chapters spread their textual archives across the twentieth century, reaching as far back as 1920 to study F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise in the final body chapter. This is not to sideline or impugn periodization and historicist methods, but the genre’s persistent engagements with these tropes create some measure of consistency for the genre across time, and the nature of this consistency—nostalgia, the idealization of the past, the convenience of a hitting-stick for the present—has deep consequences for its representations of higher learning. The genre’s imagined ties to the alma mater and its abiding nostalgia indicate an idiosyncratic relationship between author and reader and complicates a market relationship between producer and consumer. Consider also the role of professionally trained creative writers who may be working out what McGurl calls “the ironies of institutionalization” and university alumni who may be working out the meaning of their own higher learning experiences, which may occupy extremes according

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to one’s nostalgic idealization of or traumatic experiences during the college years. Whether alumna or M.F.A. writer, both of these authorial positions may carry highly fraught ideological perspectives. And while of course narrative always carries ideological freight, it is important to recognize at the outset the degree to which the campus novel’s authorship hews to these particular perspectives. If any given campus novel originates in writerly identitarianism or in wistful alumni nostalgia, perhaps it’s little wonder that the resulting genre balances extremes of idealizing the Exemption of university life and wallowing in deeply reactionary politics—or that these deeply personal relationships to institutions of higher learning indicate a kind of privatization of the university that corresponds to the neoliberal fundamentalism that is increasingly imposed upon the university.

On Campus Fictions In a period when U.S. higher learning is typified by uncertainty, with radical transformations seemingly imminent, the discursive representations of academic life matter. And how we talk about those representations matters. That reflection must happen between those working within and alongside U.S. universities and colleges, and it is also an important discussion to develop in classrooms—especially but not exclusively literature courses—to facilitate deeper thinking on the meaning of higher learning among those whose time on campus is relatively short, whose understanding of the academy may be limited, and whose support for the missions of higher learning will be increasingly critical. Williams writes persuasively on this subject in “Teach the University,” wherein he proposes an interdisciplinary framework for such teaching that would span “the idea of the university,” histories of higher learning, academic novels, and sociological data about university life (2008, 31–37). The strengthening field of Critical University Studies, or the insurgent field of the Abolition University,8 supports this kind of pedagogy. The fictions studied in this book paper over, or perhaps demonstrate, a wide range of cultural and institutional ideologies that impede U.S. higher learning

8 See the beginnings of this work at, for instance, https://abolition.university/.

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from delivering on its promise. Close study of the ideological formations at the bedrock of the genre will illuminate the more subtle and sophisticated obstacles facing the U.S. academy. Perhaps chief among these ideologies is Exemption, so critical to the missions of higher learning, so central to the genre’s thematic work— and yet a stark gap between its meaning in these two contexts. In the closing action of Been Down So Long, Gnossos Pappadopoulis returns to campus from an extended drug-dealing trip to Cuba and finds thousands of students protesting the Student Affairs office’s mandate that women students be chaperoned in off-campus apartments—and he finds himself the unwilling figurehead of the Demonstration. “We bemoan the chaperone, we would rather be alone,” students chant across the quad. Gnossos spots some friends among the throng displaying a sign reading “NON LOCO PARENTIS” (Fariña 1966, 318). Gnossos is enraged to have been enlisted into a shared cause, so much so that he will later take revenge via sexual assault against one of the Demonstration’s organizers. Indeed, Fariña derides everything surrounding the Demonstration. The novel suggests an unfavorable comparison between the campus activism of Mentor University and the “real” revolution that Gnossos has just observed in Cuba—“small arms in the morning, machine guns in the afternoon, tiny bombs at cocktail hours,” with Gnossos’s friend Heffalump shot and killed in crossfire (Fariña 1966, 296). To my mind that would constitute a faulty comparison, and anyway I don’t think that explanation captures the root of Gnossos’s anger over being embroiled in the Demonstration. His commitment to Exemption is absolute, with resentment flaring at any intrusion into personal freedom, no matter the cause—even a free love campaign for the sexual liberation of Mentor University that aligns with his other Exemptions from bourgeois society. In addition to the genre’s reactionary impulses that this passage captures in Gnossos’s sexual assault on Kristin, the Demonstration registers a deep-seated ideology of Exemption: that its public or institutional goods are subordinated to the private goods of self-determination. A payoff, then, which will be a recurring concern throughout Campus Fictions: it’s not only that there are economic and demographic shifts that destabilize the university, nor that the genre focuses on dissipation that scandalizes the name of the academy during the period of theory and the culture wars. It’s that the genre focuses on private experience. In fact, this is one of the signal differences between campus novels and screen representations of campus life. The recent spate of campus films and streaming

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series—such as Netflix’s The Chair (2021), Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of White Noise (2022) or Lucky Hank (2023), A.M.C.’s adaptation of Richard Russo’s Straight Man (1997)—offer high-profile and probing representations of campus life. But formally they tend not to offer much character interiority, precisely what the campus novel affords and emphasizes foremost. And surely that’s not unique to the genre, especially as private experience has become one of the hallmarks of contemporary fiction, perhaps the single-most distinguishing feature of the contemporary American voice.9 But the effect is still remarkable. In narrating private experience, the genre enables a market ideology of higher learning: private experience, private commodity.10 What would it look like for a campus novel to imagine higher learning as a public resource? Perhaps problems of form make that impractical, narration and narrative perspectives closely attending personal point of view. Or perhaps that puts us down the road to agitprop. Put another way, one might ask: what are the consequences of privatizing academic life? What of the genre’s themes may capture or refute this privatization? Or more broadly, what happens during and after the market ideology’s privatization of all other major institutions of civilization? The genre’s ideological mystifications are uniquely suited to frame and investigate important questions such as these. In his single-minded zeal for Exemption, Gnossos reveals just one of several ideologies we can trace through the genre—but an important one. Understanding such campus fictions is vital to recommitting to higher

9 McGurl identifies this voice, closely attending master’s-level creative writing workshops, as marking a “reflexive modernity” and as demonstrating an “autopoetic process” and finds that it’s no coincidence that it arises in a postwar situation in which “the category of ‘personal experience’” has arrived at “a functional centrality in the postindustrial economies of the developed world” (2009, 12). And here again, the genre is a principal expression of this voice: “The campus novel and the portrait of the artist are, then, two of the signature genres of the Program Era,” McGurl writes, “each of them allegorizing, in complementary ways, the autopoetic agendas they also enact” (2009, 49). 10 Christopher Newfield has written the foundational study of this transformation of the university. In The Great Mistake (2016), he demonstrates that “privatization has become the public university’s political unconscious, in which non-economic educational means and ends lost their autonomy and become half-submerged in economic goals” (Newfield 37). In other words, the defining trait of higher learning today is the subordination of the university’s role in service of the public good to market logic, especially to the individual student’s private accumulation of skills and cultural capital.

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learning in the U.S. if its open inquiry is to remain Exempt from the market without becoming Exempt from its social promises. ∗ ∗ ∗ The following chapters trace Exemption tropes across themes that prevail in the American campus novel and that align tidily—conspicuously so—with many of the major crises we in higher learning face today. If these chapters read somewhat as a primer, it is because I am following Williams’s injunction that we “teach the university!” In the following studies, then, I try to provide diverse frameworks for the kinds of discussions that might follow from such a program. Chapter 2 foregrounds the utopian possibilities of the campus novel, studying the mythology of the “big man on campus” as well as the prevalence of eccentric characters in the academic novel. These tropes of the genre are also rooted in informal cultures of academic freedom: scholars, and to some degree students, enjoying wide personal latitudes at the workplace. These characters, paired with the work refusals I discuss in the final chapter, make up one of the chief appeals of the academic novel. Here the campus novel’s emphasis on character, and especially eccentric characters, comes to the fore. These characters are generally celebrated for their defiance of social norms, sometimes also for their defiance of drug and alcohol laws, providing a kind of wish-fulfillment for self-determination. The chapter complicates the tropes of the big man on campus, demonstrating its raced and sexed biases. Through readings of Don DeLillo’s football novel End Zone (1972) and Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys (1995), this chapter evaluates the meanings of eccentricity: to what degree does it signal mere personal exemption from social norms, and to what degree does it facilitate a broader utopian program? And how does this Exemption/utopia framework help us understand the possible futures of the university? Chapter 3 studies the genre’s penchant for anti-intellectualism, perhaps its most disturbing trait. I situate this theme against the backdrop of historic American anti-intellectualism discussed in Richard Hofstadter’s classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and the “intellectual dark web” that emerges in the 2010s, as well as Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s call for a generative intellectualism in Generous Thinking (2019). The more pressing issue for the genre, however, is that it often pits creative writers

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against “theory,” the omnibus term referring to deconstruction, poststructuralism, feminism, Marxism—much of it suspiciously French. With discussions of Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring (1993) and Richard Russo’s Straight Man, this chapter details a schism between professionally trained creative writers and “theory,” how this schism plays out in the academic novel, and how this schism confounds the academic novel’s relationship to the campus life that it lays claim to. Chapter 4 considers the sexed-up reputation of the university—both the notorious prevalence of sexual assaults against college-aged women, but also the reactionary responses to the very fact of women on campus. With discussions of Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, and Julia May Jonas’s Vladímír, this chapter studies the genre’s ambivalence toward sexual assault and sexual harassment, as well as its racialized imagination of sexual predation, all of which combine to corrode the utopian promises discussed in chapters two and seven. Chapter 5 studies the conflation of “free speech” and “academic freedom,” taking as its point of departure the “free speech” demonstrations at major public universities in 2017 and 2018. With readings of Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1951) and Jane Smiley’s Moo (1995), this chapter demonstrates that even earnest attempts to delve directly into academic freedom plots in fact undermine core principles of scholarly inquiry. Studying novels such as these, I argue, affords us new vehicles for discussing the meaning and practice of academic freedom, as well as its central role in the public good of the university. A brief conclusion raises the stakes of academic freedom by contrast with the precarious nature of Hong Konger academics in the wake of the Umbrella movement, anti-extradition protests, and National Security Law. Chapter 6 follows from the axiom that the university is one of the primal scenes of the American culture wars. Race, especially the standing of Black Americans, is a defining premise of the culture wars’ relation to higher learning. Through readings of Joseph E. Green’s Pseudo Cool (1988) and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), both published during and setting their action in the heat of the first wave of the culture wars, this chapter studies the academic novel’s waffling relationship to identity studies and so-called political correctness, as well as the conspicuous absence of affirmative action-related plots from the genre’s titles. The results of such novels, I argue, is a weakening of the pluralism that the

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academy aspires to—a goal that is ever more important in our tumultuous times. Chapter 7 studies the academic novel’s thorough aversion to work. Whether their protagonists are faculty or students, the novels’ plots gravitate toward romances, affairs, midlife crises, protests, and all manner of dissipation—which is to say, anything but work! Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), Alex Kudera’s adjunct novel Fight for Your Long Day (2010), Julie Schumacher’s epistolary novel Dear Committee Members (2014), and Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind (2021), this chapter studies work refusal as one of the chief appeals of the academic novel, as well as the distinguishing characteristic of the university among modern institutions. In generally refusing scholarly work and students’ preparations for gainful employment after graduation, these novels also return readers to a central question: what is the university for? I conclude with a discussion of Jeffrey Williams’s “Teach the University” and how materials from Campus Fictions ’s body chapters might be applied. Classroom analysis of the campus novel is not the only value of this genre study, but it can be a beginning to a long process of restoring public trust in and understanding of the university, bridging gaps across audiences whose awareness of the university varies widely— and just maybe rekindling some commitment to higher learning during our disorienting times.

Works Cited Churchill, John. 2021. The Problem with Rules. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Collini, Stefan. 2017. Speaking of Universities. New York: Verso. Fariña, Richard. 1966. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. New York: Penguin Books, 1983. Findeisen, Christopher. 2016. “‘The One Place Where Money Makes No Difference:’ The Campus Novel from Stover at Yale through The Art of Fielding.” American Literature 88 (1): 67–91. Hofstadter, Richard. 1963. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage. Jonas, Julia May. 2022. Vladímír. New York: Avid Reader. Kramer, John E. 2004. The American College Novel: An Annotated Bibliography. 2nd ed. London: Scarecrow.

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McGurl, Mark. 2009. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McMahon, Walter. 2009. Higher Learning, Greater Good: The Private and Social Benefits of Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mugglestone, Konrad, Kim Dancy, and Mamie Voight. 2019. “Opportunity Lost: Net Price and Equity at Public Flagship Universities.” Institute for Higher Education Policy. https://www.ihep.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/upl oads_docs_pubs_ihep_flagship_afford_report_final.pdf. Newfield, Christopher. 2016. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Prose, Francine. 2000. Blue Angel. New York: Harper Collins. Pynchon, Thomas. 1983. Introduction. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, edited by Richard Fariña, v–xiv. New York: Penguin. Redfield, Marc. 2016. Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America. New York: Fordham University Press. Reitter, Paul and Chad Wellmon. 2021. Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wegner, Phillip E. 2020. Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Williams, Jeffrey. 2008. “Teach the University.” Pedagogy 8 (1): 25–42. ———. 2012. “The Rise of the Academic Novel.” American Literary History 24 (3): 561–89.

CHAPTER 2

Campus Characters: Exemption and Utopia on Campus

The scene: a railway coach, in which an elderly passenger sits at the window, surrounded by empty seats. The man sports tortoise-shell glasses and a tweed coat, his profile a distinguished “great brown dome” (Nabokov 1953, 7). The profile is that of the archetypal professor, give or take a stately tobacco pipe. The narrator provides a brief history of the figure’s sartorial evolution over the preceding decade or so, then divulges a secret: Professor Timofey Pnin is on the wrong train, and worse, he is blithely unaware of it, having consulted an obsolete timetable. And perhaps worse still is the supposed humiliation of his would-be destination: “some two hundred versts” west from his college town to deliver a lecture to the Cremona Women’s Club. Insult to injury, he soon discovers the paper he has brought to deliver is a student’s assignment, not his lecture. Through it all, the narrator adheres to an endearing tone—a lovable misfit, no punching down. So begins Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1953), one of the cornerstones of the campus novel. In this opening character sketch, the novel indicates that Pnin’s eccentricities supersede matters of plot, theme, and atmosphere. Indeed, Nabokov toys with “Pninian” as a descriptor, denoting a kind of mythology in the making. See for instance this passage later on the train: the protagonist has yielded to “a special Pninian craving. He was in a Pninian quandary” as he scours the sundry “articles indispensable for a Pninian overnight stay” in his luggage for the paper that later © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 W. Beal, Campus Fictions, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1_2

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he discovers he has not packed (Nabokov 1953, 15). Nabokov’s narrator tries to distinguish Pnin from “that good-natured platitude of the last century, der zerstreute Professor,” framing him not as absent-minded but as exceedingly high-strung (1953, 13). Pnin is impersonated at dinner parties. He orders a library recall of a book that he has forgotten is sitting on his own shelves. His broken English is revered, one colleague describing it thus: “His verbal vagaries add a new thrill to life. His mispronunciations are mythopoetic. His slips of the tongue are oracular. He calls my wife John” (Nabokov 1953, 165). He is a legendary—or at least of a legendary type. A colleague at a nearby university hails him as a universal type in describing his own campus: “We have a real lake. We have everything. We even have a Professor Pnin on our staff” (Nabokov 1953, 37). In sum, Nabokov demonstrates the close tie between character study and eccentricity at the heart of the campus novel. This brand of character, surely, is among the genre’s chief appeals. Nabokov’s Pnin benefits from, or perhaps aspires to, a form of “Exemption” similar to the one that motivates Richard Fariña’s Gnossos Pappadopoulis in Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966). In his introduction to Been Down So Long (1983), Thomas Pynchon argues that “Exemption” typifies not only Fariña’s reprobate protagonist, but also the experiences of undergraduate life. “Undergraduate consciousness rests in part on a set of careless assumptions about being immortal,” Pynchon writes. “The elitism and cruelty often found in college humor arises from this belief in one’s own Exemption, not only from time and death, but somehow from the demands of life as well” (vii-viii). Pynchon’s description of an idealized, carefree undergraduate life also captures the core principle of the genre. For not only do undergraduate novels such as Fariña’s exhibit “Exemption.” So, too, do representations of other campus lives, such as Pnin’s. This premium on Exemption is not specific to Cornell University, where Fariña, Nabokov, and Pynchon orbited each other in the 1950s, though perhaps the term was coined somewhere in that milieu. Rather, the university setting, at least in its idealized form, facilitates Exemption for scholars of all ages. Here in the academy’s commitment to open inquiry, the professor is free from the pressures of the market. The student is free from the pressures of waged work. These Exemptions from normalized work trace back to the classical Greeks’ understanding of the scholar’s role, but the American university develops the Exemption themes further. Through its in loco parentis function, suggested by

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its distinctive residential and co-curricular components, the U.S. university affords students the space for human development that may have been withheld during their upbringing: for instance, the freedoms to create and explore their sexuality and the freedom to question matters of faith. In the informal cultures of academic freedom in the U.S., professor and student alike are afforded tremendous freedom in determining personal matters including dress, social comportment, and time management (Hegeman 2017, 3). Indeed, most of these performances of Exemption, whether self-actualization or community building or recreation, take place in parallel to whatever formal structures of learning and thinking are afforded by the university, demonstrating again the distinctive features of American higher learning. Pnin’s misfit behavior— is this not somehow exempt “from the demands of life,” as Pynchon puts it? And is the university itself not the institution that facilitates this Exemption? Like Gnossos, however, Pnin suffers limits on these freedoms. In the novel’s waning action, he is displaced from his position at idyllic Waindell College when a new chairman takes the helm at his department. Pnin had been teaching Russian inside the German department, Waindell having no standalone Russian unit, but the new chair turns out to be an “anti-Pninist.” And running parallel to this dislocation are deep traumas that unfold mostly in the later stages of the novel: readers learn that Pnin’s fiancée was murdered in Buchenwald, that he is haunted everywhere by the faces of loved ones lost to the Russian Revolution, and that in fact he has taught himself a trick of purposeful forgetting in order to “exist rationally” alongside all this trauma (Nabokov 1953, 134). We learn that the newest addition to Waindell’s faculty is the narrator: a fellow Russian expatriate and an erstwhile competitor for the woman who would become, temporarily, Pnin’s wife—a sympathetic enough fellow who offers to keep Pnin on at Waindell, but a physical reminder of the hardships that Pnin strives to forget. In this miasma of traumas and interpersonal disputes, then, Pnin, tempers its celebration of character eccentricity. And especially in the bruising politics of anti-Pninism, the novel questions the putative openness of the institution to allow such personal freedom in the first place. In offsetting its eccentric tones, which otherwise might have led the novel into the realm of pure comedy, Pnin captures a core ambivalence about the American university that is the subject of this chapter. Do characters such as Pnin and Gnossos Pappadopoulis enjoy anything more than

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personal latitudes in the campus environment—Exemption, as Fariña puts it? Or further, does the genre provide a utopian kind of wish-fulfillment in their nonconformity, a utopia that is specific to the culture and institutional pathways of the university? Or, given the material facts of the university’s corporatization, adjunctification, runaway student debt—what virtue is there in idealizing this milieu? In exploring the utopian dimensions of the campus novel, this chapter, perhaps more than others, follows the call Stefan Collini issues in Speaking of Universities (2017) for intellectual engagement in which “our goal should not be confined to the highly ambitious one of changing people’s fundamental convictions,” but could also be that of “sustaining or fortifying those who are sympathetic but dispirited” and “encouraging people to articulate what they half believe already” (212). This chapter studies tropes of eccentricity in Don DeLillo’s football novel End Zone (1972) and Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys (1995), and their adjacency to tropes of the big man on campus. In sum, this chapter establishes the Exemption/utopia framework as a central and defining feature of the genre, explores the implications of its fundamental whiteness and maleness, and argues for its critical, if fraught, role in nurturing hope for higher learning in discouraging times.

Exemption and Big Men on Campus In the middle of the novel’s big game against West Centrex Biotechnical, Gary Harkness, the halfback for the Logos College Screaming Eagles, worries he may have broken some ribs. The West Centrex squad fields a superior team full of punishing athletes, and Gary and his teammates are getting pummeled on the scoreboard and through their pads. Despite the game’s hardships, Gary experiences moments of euphoria. Somewhere in the first half, he remarks to a teammate, “I’m feeling happy [….] Look at the arc lights, the crowd. Listen to those noises out there. Pop, pop, pop. Ving, ving. Existence without anxiety. Happiness. Knowing your body. Understanding the real needs of man” (DeLillo 1972, 121). It’s a feeling that he seems to chase throughout Don DeLillo’s End Zone—a feeling that is facilitated for him solely by sport, a sport that is afforded to him solely via collegiate athletics.

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In facilitating “existence without anxiety,”1 the game offers a brief reprieve for Gary, who spends most of his time off the field pondering nuclear warfare. This is the explicit thematic axis of End Zone: football and warfare. DeLillo is aware that this axis puts the novel in the orbit of clichéd metaphors and teases them accordingly. For our purposes, the novel shows the continual struggle to maintain the Exemption which is associated with campus life and idealized in the genre, a theme that DeLillo also explores and ironizes through the travails of a professor of Hitler Studies in White Noise (1985). There is no shortage of horrors from which to exempt oneself in End Zone. Gary is positively fixated on nuclear war. He enrolls in R.O.T.C. classes and spends time out of class with the instructor, Major Stanley, discussing all kinds of apocalyptic scenarios, playing wargames together, all of it feeding young Gary’s macabre fascination. Gary recalls the origin of his fixation: “It started with a book, an immense volume about the possibilities of nuclear war—assigned reading for a course I was taking in modes of disaster technology. The problem was simple and terrible: I enjoyed the book. I liked reading about the deaths of tens of millions of people. I liked dwelling on the destruction of great cities” (DeLillo 1972, 20). He later describes the appeal as “sensual,” though simultaneously depressing (DeLillo 1972, 21). Without much effort, he becomes one of the best students in his R.O.T.C. studies. But when the Major recruits him to join the R.O.T.C., Gary demurs: “I don’t want to drop H-bombs on the Eskimos or somebody. But I’m not necessarily averse to the purely speculative features of the thing. The hypothetical areas” (DeLillo 1972, 157). Similarly, at the conclusion of the novel the star running back Taft Robinson declares that he is quitting football to focus on his studies—particularly his studies of the Holocaust. “I can’t help it. I like to read about the ovens, the showers, the experiments, the teeth, the lampshades, the soap,” he explains to Gary (DeLillo 240). And as with 1 This phrase puts me in mind of a brief piece reflecting on the experience of football: “Football: It’s about the Hitting.” John Churchill, a Rhodes Scholar and Executive Secretary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, describes the importance of this “immediate experience” from his time as a college athlete. He concludes, “The point, though, is not merely to recall such intensity, but to have awakened to the possibility of experience on that level, and to be able to carry that receptivity into the rest of life. I am convinced that much of whatever ability I have to savor the sheer flavor of life is rooted in the capacities I gained in the intense experiences of football, and that I owe them to football just as much as the pain I feel every morning in my knees.”.

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Gary’s fascination with nuclear winter, Taft’s fascination with the Holocaust is no fulfillment of an anti-Semitic drive, at least as far as DeLillo’s narration is concerned. “I can’t bear it,” Taft says. “It’s horrible. I don’t know why I keep reading that stuff” (DeLillo 1972, 240–41). Rather than football and warfare, then, we might better understand the novel as operating on an axis of atrocities and exemptions. In its broadest meanings as a cultural touchstone, football fulfills important societal needs in different historical junctures, sometimes corresponding to these extreme pressures. In Discipline and Indulgence, for instance, Jeffrey Montez de Oca (2013) argues that collegiate football in the Cold War supplied a “fortified masculinity” in response to the state’s need for “disciplined, patriotic workers, warriors, and consumers,” and that it performed a response to the anxiety of the “muscle gap” that suggested that American youths were “effeminized by postwar culture” and were falling behind the physical standards of their Soviet peers (20, 33). End Zone, however, is more concerned with the personal semiotics of football, rather than its social or cultural import. For both Gary and Taft, atrocity—past or potential—operates more as the object of pathological compulsion than as an anxiety. But the luxurious sense of time that unfolds in DeLillo’s description of the game against West Centrex provides an exemption from those morbid preoccupations. Further, the novel seems to have exempted itself from fully considering the implications of its own desegregation subplot. Taft Robinson, in addition to being a standout running back, is the first Black football player to enroll at Logos College. The very first sentence of the novel establishes this critical fact, with the college president soon after welcoming Taft with a telling ambivalence. “Young man, I have always admired the endurance of your people. You’ve a tough row to hoe. Frankly I was against this from the start,” she tells Taft when he arrives on campus (DeLillo 1972, 7). But the integration theme is curiously underdeveloped thereafter, as if signaling the nonchalance of the white players to Taft’s introduction to their locker room and team living quarters. If anything, some on the team may be troubled by having gays in the locker room—“There might be a queer on the squad,” Raymond Toon mutters throughout the novel—but no one voices discomfort at Taft’s presence. There are none of the stock tropes of the desegregation plot: no jeering from Jim Crow fans, no words of exhortation to Taft regarding his important service to racial uplift, no fistfights among the team—none pertaining to race, anyway. There are a few moments of casual racism, but none of it regarding Taft and not

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enough to mount a consistent thematic critique of racist discourses. The novel presents Gary and his teammates as astonishingly race-blind. The integration subplot is slyly ironized when, after Gary criticizes his own play and commitment to the game, Taft responds, “Gary, you’re a credit to your race” (DeLillo 1972, 234). The muting of the integration subplot may indicate something of the limited perspective of the white protagonist. But it also runs in inverse proportion to the shockwaves sent through the nation as college football desegregated. Having been vaulted to a supreme position of Cold War identity formation, college football also closely attended discourses of whiteness, and was in turmoil during the postwar Civil Rights movement. In Integrating the Gridiron, for instance, Lane Demas (2010) details the firestorm in the national press regarding the savage assault of Drake University’s Black quarterback Johnny Bright by white linemen playing for Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical University, the news coverage luxuriating in the event thanks to new “lapse-time” photography technology (62). Consider also the case of the 1956 Sugar Bowl: Georgians were thrilled that Georgia Tech had been invited to the prestigious game, but the Governor and state legislature tried to forbid the team from playing when they discovered that the opponent, the University of Pittsburgh, had a lone Black player on the roster—only to reverse course in the face of pressure to compete for the honor of a Sugar Bowl win. Demas concludes that “the importance of participating in a prestigious bowl game seemed to trump, if only briefly, the clear code of segregation at Georgia Tech, seven years before the violence in Oxford, Mississippi” (Demas 2010, 25) when riots marked the admission of James Meredith to Ole Miss. These collegiate histories are generally overshadowed by the integration narratives of Jackie Robinson or Muhammed Ali, but were no less important to the mid-century development of identities of race and nation, given the importance of college football especially during the early Cold War period. And yet Taft Robinson’s integration experience is muted after the first frames of End Zone. Such is the license of the genre: it extends its characters’ freedoms to itself. End Zone affords Exemption to the rest of the student body, framing it as a cornerstone of university life, not a privilege reserved only for athletes. Myna Corbett, Gary’s crush throughout the novel, uses the open campus environment to tinker with self-fashioning. The novel dwells uncomfortably on her weight, but we also learn that she has developed a code: she

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has chosen not to be attractive so that she can pursue her own personhood. She explains, “It’s hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property” (DeLillo 1972, 67). Later we learn that she comes from a wealthy family and that she is driven not to let her wealth or her appearance define her. Rather, she aims to be seen as eccentric: “I could come a little west to out here,” she says of her escape to Logos College, “and be emotional and do what I want” (DeLillo 1972, 101). After winter break, Gary is stunned to see that she has lost weight—not only a physical transformation, but a volte fascia in her philosophy of becoming. All the effort she has undertaken in order to maintain her weight, she argues, has only impeded her from finding her own “reality and independentness.” “At least with the responsibilities of beauty,” Myna explains, “I’ll have a chance to learn exactly or pretty exactly what I can be, with no built-in excuses or cop-outs or anything” (DeLillo1972, 228). The neologistic feel of Myna’s term, “independentness,” indicates something of the daring, aspirational claim to Exemption from the world and its impositions against the private individual. College football is not the only opportunity to play football, of course, nor is football the only way for one to attain “existence without anxiety,” nor is a college campus the only site in which a woman can enjoy selffashioning. But see how closely this discourse of Exemption attends to the college experience, marking it as a space of private experience, personal transformation. End Zone carefully states the stresses of the world—above all, the end of it. And the novel situates Logos College, despite its unglamorous West Texas trappings, as the avenue through which these students exercise self-determination: Gary from the anxieties of nuclear winter, Myna, at least briefly, from the pressures of beauty, and Taft, perhaps most fantastically of all, from the travails of integration. Tucked into the background of these characters’ pursuits of selfdetermination is the novel’s emphasis on amateurism. Where the studentathletes at West Centrex Biotechnical are professional-grade, Gary is bent on amateurism. If Logos College fields a middling team, it’s not a source of personal shame for Gary and his teammates. Christopher Findeisen argues that the campus sports novel demonstrates the campus novel’s generic tendency toward a polarity between business and learning, with high-revenue sports either corrupting the university’s missions or amateurism performing its deepest values (2016, 69). Findeisen has in mind sporting novels such as I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), discussed further in chapter four, that are set at elite universities. When featuring

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elites, representations of student-athleticism, Findeisen argues, stage a “symbolic distinction” that only becomes relevant because there is little or no class distinction to be made between students (2016, 71). Gary’s milieu, however, is not that of the student-athlete for whom college is merely a detour en route to professional play. For Gary, if not exactly for his west Texan coaching staff, football is a pastime that, like his studies, stands apart from market imperatives: the games he plays as a Screaming Eagle are not part of a revenue-producing behemoth for Logos College, and Gary is not pursuing a future in the National Football League. Writing about a similarly business-averse sports novel, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011), Findeisen argues that when the genre discusses amateur college sports, it tends to produce “a version of the educational meritocracy that successfully functions only after capital (symbolic, economic, or otherwise) has been written out”—in other words when sports, like the questions of the liberal arts, are framed as purposeless (2016, 77). For Findeisen, this is part of the genre’s work as an ideological mystification, allowing genre readers to misunderstand the university as a site apart from the marketplace when, in Findeisen’s reading, the university is instead a leading contributor to class inequality in the U.S. (2016, 71). Findeisen’s argument is persuasive, and has a lot to do with the appeals of the genre, as discussed in the introduction chapter. Gary’s bid for “existence without anxiety” under the arc lights may not be so far removed from market pressures as End Zone would have readers assume. And even if it is, perhaps it is too compromised by private worldly pleasures to be considered noteworthy for some readers. But it does frame an important investment in utopian thinking throughout the genre—compromised and incomplete at best, but vital for readers of the genre and for those working in and alongside American higher learning. Gary is about as close as the genre’s literary fiction will come to the big man on campus mythos—the college man known for his cool je ne sais quoi, featured habitué of the best parties, getter of all the girls, celebrated as a student-athlete or a fraternity man or both, known for a distinctive joie de vivre, so on.2 That trope is more commonly the property

2 This character is, for better or worse, a distinctively American figure, the byproduct of a residential and cocurricular system that is specific to higher learning in the U.S., as well as to drinking norms that are perhaps more prevalent in the U.S. than in many other countries.

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of film. Jeffrey Williams argues, for instance, that the genre’s treatment of student experiences “transferred a good deal of its momentum to film” in the mid-1900s (2012, 562). This argument explains the increasing prevalence of faculty protagonists in the genre, as the introduction chapter explores, and it signposts a particular kind of campus character demonstrated notably by National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder (2002). Campus novels sometimes develop this trope, though usually with more nuance than the outrageous, explicit demonstrations of popular film. Christopher Storm’s Campus Motel (1965), for instance, features a depraved student-athlete, branded by an adversarial dean as one of those “big men on campus who have the world on a string and the rainbows in their pockets” (28). Bronc Kendricks sleeps with that dean’s wife, as well as his coach’s wife, the daughter of his benefactor, and his roommate’s girlfriend. His character, however, lacks any sense of joie de vivre, and the novel resists being read as a sex comedy. Instead, Bronc is a problematically Nietzschean character, a fact signposted patently by a barkeep reading a copy of Beyond Good and Evil early in the novel and demonstrated by Bronc’s use of sex to seize power from those who have power over him. This Nietzschean complex defines Bronc’s character until his deus ex reform in the novel’s closing action. I refer to Campus Motel and the National Lampoon brand because the big man on campus in popular fiction or on film tends to capture some of the most regressive traits native to the genre—traits that may be tropologically coded in Gary Harkness for readers familiar with this genre

To demonstrate that exceptionalism further, consider how this American figure is read in other contexts. In the fall of 2018, I was teaching at the University of Hong Kong, including a seminar on the campus novel. In a discussion of Fariña’s bohemian twist on the big man on campus mythology, students indicated no recognition of the type, no idea that the big man on campus is a persuasive narrative for the function of the university. One student had studied abroad in Wisconsin, noted that she had not met the big man on campus in Madison, and asked how she would have known him had they crossed paths. I pulled up a clip of National Lampoon’s Van Wilder to demonstrate the principle, and they were, frankly, a little bit disgusted. The H.K.U. students acknowledged that they don’t spend every hour of the day studying, but they also stated that they understood the purpose of the university was for learning, not as a kind of surrogate playground. To give the mythology its real-world grounding, I explained that this was partly Brett Kavanaugh’s defense against Christine Blasey-Ford’s allegations of sexual assault, current news at the time of our seminar meeting—that he shouldn’t be blamed for going to parties at Yale because, after all, isn’t that what college is for?

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convention. The character trope gravitates toward anti-intellectualism, as his campus feats require disengagement from the classroom, library, and laboratory. Further, the big man on campus should be read, in part, as the rampant id of American patriarchy and nationalism, threatening to curtail others’ university freedoms, foremost those of the women who are the object of his sexual predation tropes.3 And while the term “big man on campus” doesn’t code race explicitly, it carries assumptions of whiteness. In The Blackademic Life (2019), Lavelle Porter provides a reminder that the privileges of eccentricity—and to this I would add Exemption— are always raced formations in university life and in the campus novel. “Questions about one’s innate intelligence and belonging in the university represented by discourses of overeducation,” Porter writes, “are specific challenges that all black intellectuals in the academy have to confront,” and they preclude the Black academic from enjoying many privileges of university life (2019, 81). Porter refers to the eccentricities of the professoriate, more akin to Professor Pnin than to the undergraduates such as Gary, but the sentiment captures the raced, gendered, and classed boundaries that enclose Exemption. Gary Harkness doesn’t fit this big-man mold precisely, and DeLillo doesn’t provide a character in End Zone who does. On Myna’s advice, for instance—“a scientific experiment. An audio-visual-sensory-type thing” (DeLillo 1972, 166)—Gary enjoys a pre-game joint before suiting up for a nameless conference opponent. But his character is not defined by the party scene. A new sports information director wants to feature Gary and Taft in publicity materials, but neither is described as an outright celebrity on campus. Most of all, Gary deviates from big-man tropes in his genuine, scholarly interest in the questions of nuclear warfare. He devotes too much time reading, too much time pondering for a conventional big man on campus. End Zone does, however, share a sense of undergraduate Exemption with the big man on campus figure—a difference of degree, I would argue, rather than a difference of kind. And in so doing, Gary’s pursuit of “existence without anxiety” suggests sexed and raced exclusions

3 I am unaware of a big woman on campus narrative—equivalent to the Cameron Diaz

vehicle, Bad Teacher (2011), for example. With a new generation of women comics who are increasingly adopting conventionally masculine forms of humor, especially regarding sex and sexuality, perhaps such a project will arrive soon in film. There could be a welcome effect of deconstructing the big man on campus mythology and the American pathologies that suffuse it.

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that are made more obvious elsewhere in the campus representations in which Gary is embedded. A similar ambivalence about Exemption runs through faculty narratives. See for instance Grady Tripp, professor of creative writing and protagonist of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys . Tripp describes himself as “a lifelong habitué of marijuana” and in one characteristic moment finds himself wishing “to the point of religious feeling that I had my little bag of Humbolt County with me” (Chabon 1995, 29, 126). He teeters dangerously toward Hannah Green, the precocious, red-booted undergraduate whom he describes as “a disaster waiting to happen” (Chabon 1995, 55). He is party to the killing of Doctor Dee, the pet dog of Walter and Sara Gaskill—the former, head of his department, and the latter, Chancellor at his university and his lover. This mishap follows from a stoned foray into the Gaskills’ home so that Tripp can show Walter’s Marylin Monroe memorabilia to his student James Leer. Slapstick ensues as they wrestle the dog’s body into the trunk of Tripp’s car. Though ultimately he faces an intervention of sorts and sobers up for a tidy domesticated conclusion to the novel, Tripp does a lot of drugs during the course of the novel—and the novel rather delights in his performance of Exemption from law enforcement and from bourgeois professionalism. In other words, Wonder Boys refashions for professorial use tropes of the big man on campus. With Tripp’s ready access to pot and to his undergraduate protégé’s body, Wonder Boys flirts with the big-man tropes without fully performing them. In this coy demurral from full-frontal transgressions, professorial and undergraduate big-man Exemption, which one would assume to be diametrically opposed in university life, are ironically linked in the genre. Romps such as Wonder Boys extend this Exemption theme to the genre’s faculty narratives, and I trundle through this one not for lack of interest but for having already demonstrated the conceits of Exemption. Faculty narratives are likelier to emphasize reflection than student narratives, such as the meditations on alienation in John Williams’s Stoner (1965), which, given my chapter’s juxtaposition with Chabon, some genre readers might find misleadingly titled. As with Pnin, however, Wonder Boys tempers its misfit Exemption comedy—in Chabon’s case, with a brief glimmer of utopia. Tripp treks out to the countryside to celebrate Passover with the Warshaws, his soon-to-be-former in-laws. He is not Jewish, and he is in the process of separating from Emily, but, as Tripp reflects on it, “I was orphaned and an atheist and I would

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take what I could get” (Chabon 1995, 144). The Warshaws’ warm, cosmopolitan family of Jews and Korean adoptees gathering out in the countryside provides an alluring picture for Tripp. The idealization of this group is reinforced by the setting: the Warshaws live on the land of a defunct utopian community. “Things had pretty much been deteriorating around Kinship for over a hundred years,” Tripp says of the place, “since the original Kinship Community was abandoned and its somber-hatted population of utopians were scattered into the great expanse of general American dreaminess” (Chabon 1995, 167). In the Warshaw family and in the historic ruins they occupy, Wonder Boys posits an enviable, perhaps impossible, partner to Exemption. The Warshaws and Kinship Community are tidily excised from Curtis Hanson’s film adaptation of Wonder Boys (2000), which runs Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Katie Holmes, and others through a comic gauntlet of stoned misadventures. This departure, as with the aura of the big man on campus that we see in End Zone, again distinguishes the spectacle of campus films from the introspective work of the genre’s novels. Eliding Kinship from the film adaptation makes a kind of practical sense, not only in that the novel’s Kinship passage lacks a certain zany entertainment value, but also in that it takes place outside the so-called ivory towers, seemingly apart from Tripp’s WordFest conference, his failures to bring his book project to heel, and so on. But this distance from campus is also instructive of the way that Chabon’s novel posits the ideals of campus life. Wonder Boys grants Exemption to its protagonist, but it withholds utopia as a remote, bygone prospect. Chabon’s Kinship Community captures a utopianism that is implicit— and contradictory—throughout the genre. In Wonder Boys , the inaccessible utopianism of the Kinship Community acts as a corollary to desires that Tripp seeks but cannot quite find in his academic life. It’s fitting that utopia is impossible in Wonder Boys : a project to imagine dimly, not one to inhabit. When Thomas More coined the term in the sixteenth century, he dedicated half of it to signaling that utopia is ou-topos, noplace, nowhere, the other half of course punning on eu-topos, the good place. But in reading the genre’s close pairing of Exemption and university life, the genre utopia posits that utopia is not no-where. In other words, the genre posits that utopia lies, at least in some measure, in the fixed place and abstract ideas of the university.

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Exemption or Utopia? Taking to the gridiron through the sting of broken ribs to forget atrocities—does this constitute utopia? Smoking a joint at the Chancellor’s house? These are rather shallow imaginations of the good life, of course. And yet in these Exemption themes, the genre displays a deeper impulse, a human desire often called utopia. “Exemption” and “utopia” are ill-fitting terms, and yet reading them together demonstrates again the fundamental antinomy of the campus novel—the countervailing uses to which “Exemption” is applied. Exemption in this case provides for a utopia that is otherwise hard—maybe impossible—to imagine. The term “utopia” of course makes some readers uneasy. Perhaps Gulags or Great Leaps Forward come to mind. In this regard, yes, the term carries a queasy history. Alain Badiou locates this nexus of utopia and totalitarianism in the specific foment of the early twentieth century. “The century was haunted by the idea of changing man, of creating a new man,” he explains, and “the project is so radical that in the course of its realization the singularity of human lives is not taken into account. There is nothing there but material ” (Badiou 2005, 8). For Badiou, this drive for “the new man” is the defining feature of the twentieth century. Not only does the “new man” motivate various fascist and totalitarian projects, but it also drives modernist aesthetics, philosophical movements, and most other touchstones of the twentieth century—all of it in dialectical entanglement. It is not an endorsement of brute dehumanization, however, to say that “utopia” also captures very human desires that we often see expressed unconsciously and often find in the bedrock and sediment of narrative. Read this way, “utopia” doesn’t correspond to a particular content or a particular politics. Rather, it signals a desire, an impulse, a hope. To unpack the genre’s utopian elements, one must also identify the ways in which the genre actively undermines any sense of utopian good.4 Indeed, its premium on Exemption is both the source of the 4 This two-stage method of ideology critique comes from Fredric Jameson’s “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979). He argues that works of mass culture—and the titles we’re discussing here function similarly, whether described as works of mass culture or literary fiction—operate first as “manipulation” of the audience but also as wish-fulfillment of a utopian desire. For instance, Jameson reads The Godfather (1972) thus: on the one hand it mischaracterizes “the economic realities of late capitalism” by framing the Mafia as “a criminal aberration from the norm, rather than the norm itself,” and on the other

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genre’s regressive and utopian qualities. In its regressive form, Exemption packages the university’s goods as private commodities. Gnossos Pappadopoulis demanding personal freedom from the campus “Demonstration” at the close of Been Down So Long, Gary Harkness’s “existence without anxiety,” Grady Tripp’s constant companion of Humbolt County—these are all personal freedoms. They mischaracterize the university’s value as a personal good, discarding any consideration of its public and social goods and spreading a logic of neoliberal organization. Read this way, Exemption is an ideological manipulation. But I also want to read Exemption as shorthand for a kind of utopian longing. If we take the big man on campus’s hedonism not as hedonism per se but as a wish for freedoms from waged work and other oppressive social structures; if we take misfits such as Pnin not as objects of ridicule but as tokens of an open and inclusive social system—read this way, the genre’s Exemptions signal unconscious desires for another, more equitable, more human organization of our world. This longing depends on reading the institution’s historical values alongside the genre’s premium on Exemption. Specifically, I have in mind here the American university’s historic commitment to open inquiry and to its liberal arts curriculum—always under pressure, but at least notionally distinct from market ideologies and increasingly cognizant of the central role that inclusion of marginalized persons must play in achieving and maintaining this independence. In other words, the genre’s emphasis on Exemption and its relation to university life are not accidental, contingent. Rather, the university is inseparable from the genre’s Exemption themes. Ernst Bloch, preeminent philosopher of utopia, indicates something of the importance of material settings such as the university’s when he provides two models for utopian thinking: the concrete, which harnesses “the power of anticipation” from a tangible, material source, and the abstract, which is more of an “unfinished dream forward” (1959, 119).5 These terms are notoriously oblique due to the

hand its family structure is seen “as a figure of collectivity and as the object of Utopian longing, if not a Utopian envy” (1979, 43). 5 Bloch circumscribes this system in allegorical readings of two genres, detective fiction and the künstlerroman. Between “A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel” and “A Philosophical View of the Novel of the Artist” (both 1965), he teases out the contrasts of concrete and abstract utopian thinking. Because detective work is predicated on the past (the crime, material history), it provides a model for concrete Utopian thinking, whereas

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fact that Bloch is discussing the representation of the unrepresentable. In short, concrete utopia manifests from a base of lived, material experience, whereas abstract utopia springs forward from pure imagination with no regard for the limitations of the present. An abstract utopia, if it affords the opportunity to conjure a world without all of our histories and path dependencies, will strike fear in some—the portent of total failure, perhaps, or the specters or totalitarian projects. Bloch’s concrete utopia is the form that applies here foremost, given the material bases of the academy. If concrete utopia carries the baggage of the present, then it also occasions an evaluation of the failures of our lived, material circumstances. How could the university itself provide the material basis for concrete utopian thinking? This premise seems to me to underlie the genre’s steady emphasis on Exemption. Or as Phillip Wegner puts it in Invoking Hope (2020): “utopia is never no-where, an imagined perfected future, but in fact always already potentially exists in the concrete nowhere, in our collective fidelity to the project of making a world we so desire rather than a world we fear” (218). But isn’t this utopian line of thought at least a little perverse? There are of course plenty of reasons to reject summarily a utopian reading of university life. Christopher Findeisen, as we have seen, identifies the university as a fundamental driver of American class inequality.6 The American university continues to be a raced institution—originating as “the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage” alongside church and state, as Craig Steven Wilder demonstrates in Ebony & Ivory (2013), and continuing to fall short of its stated goals of inclusivity (11). Misogyny runs rampant through faculty hiring and promotion decisions. The conditions external to the university are dire. I note, for instance, the irony of my drafting this chapter in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic— as the college where I work struggled with lost revenue, faced the daunting task of recruiting students during an acute public health crisis in addition to a declining birth rate, and muddled through the general

the modernist künstlerroman is organized around the creation of something new (the modernist shibboleth “make it new,” a break from lived, material experience) provides a model for abstract Utopian thinking. 6 This is especially true of the most prestigious American universities. According to one study, students whose families are in the top one percent of the income scale “are 77 times likelier to go to an Ivy [League university] than someone from a family that makes less than $30,000 a year” (Fischer 2019).

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malaise of uncertainty and unsafety facing our campus community. Many colleagues across the nation fared still worse than this: hundreds of thousands furloughed and laid off,7 university administrations prioritizing revenue over public health, and so on. Ascendant neoliberal management by university administration, massive expenses departing wildly from core missions, a student debt crisis spiraling further and further out of control, academic freedom undermined and discarded, accelerating adjunctification—we’re all too familiar with the failings. The genre notes these shortcomings, too. Neal Stephenson’s The Big U (1984), for instance, satirizes the corporatization of American higher learning in its setting: the campus of American Megaversity is nicknamed “the Plex,” consisting of one hulking “campustructure” that occupies nine square city blocks, the only outlier being an athletics stadium. The Polish physicist Professor Sharon likens the milieu of the Plex to “certain, er, locations during the occupation of the Sudentenland” (Stephenson 1984, 44). Students discover that the administration has created an ecological disaster in a failed attempt to monetize nuclear waste on campus. A student protest in sympathy with a union strike turns into a hot war, with Megaversity’s President going on a shooting spree in the Plex. “Great fucking ghost of Rommel,” the President exclaims when students produce a tank at E Tower’s main lobby (Stephenson 1984, 248). Similarly, Geoff Cebula’s Adjunct (2017) skewers the nexus of corporatization and adjunctification with a madcap horror-mystery plot. Cebula’s protagonist Elena Malatesta, an instructor in a struggling Italian program, is sensitized to colleagues’ disappearances after coming across a podcast that asks, “If contingent faculty were being killed at your university at the rate of one per day, how many days would it take your administration to notice?” (2017, 23). In final exposition, readers learn that an occultist fanatic has created a higher education consulting firm to gain access to adjunct instructors for a human sacrifice ritual. The occultist’s angle was to identify and exploit laborers who wouldn’t be missed. Adjunct never answers the podcast’s rhetorical question, but Cebula’s readers are warned not to wait for administration to intervene on their behalves. Perhaps narratives such as Stephenson’s and Cebula’s feel more pertinent to our moment than this argument emphasizing utopia and hope. 7 See, for instance, Shawn Hubler’s “Colleges Slash Budgets in the Pandemic, With ‘Nothing Off-Limits’” in The New York Times, 26 October 2020, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/10/26/us/colleges-coronavirus-budget-cuts.html.

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Further, a claim for hope runs somewhat against the grain especially in critical university studies. In addition to the acute distress caused by the pandemic and the general distress inflicted by decades of corporatization and newly rekindled culture wars, we may be at the beginning of an inflection point in the politics of higher learning. Here I have in mind Marshall Steinbaum’s provocative suggestion in “The New Politics of Higher Education” (2021) that the political polarities of American higher education are beginning to shift, even to invert. The left, he argues, is trending toward an oppositional role to the university, decrying matters of corporatization and adjunctification, while the right may be moving to a more supportive position, cozying up to the goods of reasoned debate— if limited to the vision of a “classical” curriculum. In the cases Steinbaum reviews, the rightward polarity may be less interested in reasoned debate as a value unto itself and more interested in using “reasoned debate” as a cudgel against so-called “cancel culture” and other culture war shibboleths. I remain skeptical that this new polarity will take hold of the discourses of higher learning, given the stubborn and metastasizing antiintellectualism of the populist right. But one can also grant Steinbaum at least part of the premise—that the drift of the criticism of the university, while rightful and necessary, has clouded whatever goods of the university that such criticism aims to protect from corporatization and other ills. All the more important, then, to reassert the core values of the institution, lest we lose them in our critique of its shortcomings. An invocation of utopia runs optimistic, maybe even a little outrageous. However, a focus on concrete utopia also entails a focus on the failures and shortcomings of our lived, material situations. In other words, “utopia” provides an occasion to think about our present, our ideals, and the gaps between them. Perhaps it is naïve to project the label of utopia onto today’s higher learning system, given its manifold failings, given the genre’s premium on personal freedoms. But I also remember that utopia is place-bound: it is a world, not a personal scenario. And with that in mind, the university offers such a model, both for what it itself could become, as well as a set of potentials by which we might hope for other broader social organizations. Mustn’t we foreground our ideals if the academy is to move closer to them, if we are to close the gap between Exemption and utopia—especially in our disorienting times?

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Works Cited Badiou, Alain. 2005. The Century. 2007. Translated by Alberto Toscano. Cambridge and Malden: Polity. Bloch, Ernst. 1959. “The Conscious and Known Activity within the Not-YetConscious, the Utopian Function.” 1988. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Translated by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, 103–41. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Cebula, Geoff. 2017. Adjunct. Chabon, Michael. 1995. Wonder Boys. New York: Random House, 2008. Collini, Stefan. 2017. Speaking of Universities. London and New York: Verso. DeLillo, Don. 1972. End Zone. USA: Penguin, 1986. Demas, Lane. 2010. Integrating the Gridiron: Black Civil Rights and American College Football. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Findeisen, Christopher. 2016. ‘The One Place Where Money Makes No Difference:’ the Campus Novel from Stover at Yale through The Art of Fielding. American Literature 88 (1): 67–91. Fisher, Karin. 2019. “The Barriers to Mobility: Why Higher Ed’s Promise Remains Unfulfilled.” Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle. com/article/why-higher-ed-rsquo-s-promise-remains-unfulfilled/. Hegeman, Susan. 2017. “Oppenheimer’s House; or, the Contradictions of Academic Life from the Cold War to Neoliberalism.” A.A.U.P. Journal of Academic Freedom 8 (1) (December): 1–15. https://www.aaup.org/JAF8/ oppenheimer%E2%80%99s-house-or-contradictions-academic-life-cold-warneoliberalism#.XQFEiYhKhPZ. Jameson, Fredric. 1979. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” In Signatures of the Visible, 11–46. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Montez de Oca, Jeffrey. 2013. Discipline and Indulgence: College Football, Media, and the American Way of Life During the Cold War. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1953. Pnin. New York: Vintage, 1989. Porter, Lavelle. 2019. The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Pynchon, Thomas. 1983. “Introduction.” In Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, edited by Richard Fariña, v–xiv. Middlesex: Penguin. Steinbaum, Marshal. 2021. “The New Politics of Higher Education.” Boston Review. April. http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-politics/marshall-ste inbaum-new-politics-higher-education. Stephenson, Neal. 1984. The Big U . New York: Perennial, 2001. Storm, Christopher. 1965. Campus Motel. USA: Softcover Library. Wegner, Phillip E. 2020. Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Wilder, Craig Steven. 2013. Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014. Williams, Jeffrey. 2012. “The Rise of the Academic Novel.” American Literary History 24 (3) (Fall): 561–89.

CHAPTER 3

Anti-intellectualism, “Theory,” and the Reactionary Impulses of the Campus Novel

In signing House Bill 233 into law in 2021, Florida Governor Rick DeSantis enacted a measure designed to protect conservative views from censorship in public universities. The bill punctuates a longstanding, national, rightwing effort ostensibly to foster “intellectual diversity” in the academy—and of course to exploit a wedge issue in the culture wars. Including, for instance, provisions for “the exposure of students, faculty, and staff to, and the encouragement of their exploration of, a variety of ideological and political perspectives,” House Bill 233 demonstrates a pervasive and pernicious conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech that I explore further in Chapter 5 (2021, 2). Many were quick to note the irony that DeSantis, self-styled defender of intellectual inquiry, had two weeks prior to signing House Bill 233 into law championed a ban on critical race theory in public primary and secondary schools. The Florida State Board of Education followed suit with a rule meant to suppress such material.1 To enforce this “diversity” ideal, the

1 The Board’s rule states: “Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective, and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust [….], and may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence” (2021, 1). The Board’s rule singles out Holocaust denialism, “critical race theory,” and “the 1619 Project” as violations of this rule (2021, 1).

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bill mandates an annual survey “of the intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” of each university in the Florida system (2021, 3). Infusing this bill is a conspicuous and highly charged antiintellectualism. Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson described the bill to the Board of Governors of the state university system, noting the “socialism factories” that dot the landscape of higher learning in Florida (Ceballos 2021). In addition to establishing a new ideological survey, which may carry budgetary consequences for Florida’s universities and which may not even provide anonymity for its respondents, the bill also allows students to record lectures without a professor’s consent. The bill and the discussion around it raised the specter of the McCarthy period: a dim echo of loyalty oaths, a presumption of evil, un-American indoctrinators lurking behind every office door on campus. Anti-intellectualism is of course a longstanding American tradition, at least as old as the nation itself. For instance, in his guidebook Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville reported back to the continent that there is no class in America “in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary fortune and leisure, and by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor” (47). American class dynamics have shifted since then in myriad ways, including the development of ideologies to accommodate leisure time and idleness that were considered apostate in the early mercantile economy. But if the regard for intellectualism has improved in the U.S., it is still approached as an object of circumspection. The vast expansion of the university system in the postwar era marks a pendulum swing from Tocqueville’s description of the access to intellectual pursuits in American life—even if such university experiences are subject to a range of caveats as to their practical application and their intellectual inquiry. In fact, the U.S. class system now depends on the individual’s encounter with intellectual life, at least as a means to proper class credentialing. But as this intellectual apparatus grows, it is attended by a rampant and deepening anti-intellectualism: witness the anti-science lobby against climate reform, the cottage industries of antivaccination claptrap, the increasing efforts of state legislatures to regulate history and civics curricula in public schools and universities, the will to perform ignorance at the highest levels of American government. In fact, one feature produces the other. As Richard Hofstadter writes in his landmark study Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), the intellectual’s feeling of being resented “is a manifestation not of a decline in his position but of his increasing prominence” in society (6). If the

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intellectual’s prominence has only grown since Hofstadter’s moment in the chilling aftermath of the McCarthy trials, we may not be surprised to find that the appeals of anti-intellectualism have increased in proportion. Perhaps one may find this dialectical relation reassuring, a reminder of the value and influence of ideas and their thinkers in our times that seem consumed by anti-intellectual fervor. Likewise, perhaps there is comfort in Hofstadter’s findings that anti-intellectualism in America is subject to “cyclical fluctuations,” that anti-intellectualism is “pervasive” but not necessarily “dominant” in the U.S. (1963, 6, 19). This chapter takes some heart in those findings and also heeds Hofstadter’s principal caveats: that one wants not to foster a “cult of alienation” of the intellectual from society; that anti-intellectualism rarely occurs in a “pure or unmixed state”; that anti-intellectualism is rarely an end in itself and is more commonly “the incidental consequence of some other intention, often some justifiable intention” (1963, 21, 22). This final claim—that antiintellectualism is a bug, not a feature of an actor’s goals—may no longer apply in our era of culture war. And yet Hofstadter’s caveats are critical if intellectuals are to avoid an undue sense of martyrdom and victimization. They are important to bear in mind if we are to cultivate the habits of “generous thinking” that Kathleen Fitzpatrick advocates and that I will exhort in this chapter’s conclusion as a way to redress anti-intellectual impulses and to re-engage public audiences, perhaps also to engage our classrooms, as Jeffrey Williams exhorts in “Teach the University” (2008). One of the defining—and perhaps most distressing—traits of the campus novel is its enduring anti-intellectualism. I describe this function as anti-intellectualism rather than anti-academicism because, while campus novels purportedly represent professional academics and the students who study alongside them, they tend not to be invested in the details of academic work and if anything depict a generic life of the mind. This chapter focuses on intellectualism because the campus novel does, and not because intellectuals are in some magical way exempt from satire or criticism.2 One would not want to immunize intellectuals or intellectualism from critique. Such a move would of course be a paradoxical

2 Hofstadter writes, “I have no desire to encourage the self-pity to which intellectuals are sometimes prone by suggesting that they have been vessels of pure virtue set down in Babylon” (1963, 20). And later, responding to the charges of subversion among the intellectuals, Hofstadter writes that “it will not do to reply that intellect is really a safe, bland, and emollient thing” (1963, 45).

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marker of anti-intellectualism, placing arbitrary limits on critique. “Academics are in many ways a natural subject for satire because they are innately angry and fault-finding,” Janice Rossen argues, discussing the tension between the writers of campus novels and the academics who often surround them (1993, 184). If Rossen’s charge itself displays an objectionable essentialism, it also indicates the degree to which satire and critique are inevitable traits of the campus novel. The genre’s anti-intellectual traits warrant scrutiny, however. This antiintellectualism manifests in two patterns. First, the genre exhibits a soft form of anti-intellectualism, most often in titles with student protagonists, in which academic pursuits are subordinated to other worldly concerns.3 The final chapter, for instance, discusses how the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920) skips his classes in order to construct a reading list of his own. The skipping of class for this character is a means to another end, which happens to be an informal and intrinsically motivated intellectual pursuit. But there is also a fundamentally reactionary impulse in the genre, more and more common during the era of culture wars, to rebuke particular fields of intellectual engagement. This tendency undermines essential academic and intellectual principles, and worse, it poses a critical obstacle to fulfilling the utopian promises discussed in the preceding chapter. This chapter studies the genre’s reactionary anti-intellectualism of the late twentieth century, which responds to a relatively parochial development in the humanities: “theory”—or more specifically, the language fields called poststructuralism and deconstruction and associated with Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. While this field and its public scandals may appear to be an obscure, largely intramural affair, the “theory” event was an object of fixation in the press and played an important role in culture wars discourses, especially those of the 1980s, and it continues to cast a lingering shadow over the genre. “Theory” is usually incidental to the plots of these novels, including the two that I study below, but it is a motif that unifies the genre into an anti-intellectual position. Can one complicate or even reject the projects of “theory” and still be counted among the intellectuals? Clearly, I would not mean to suggest 3 The collection of essays in Anti-Intellectual Representations of American Colleges and Universities, edited by Barbara Tobolowsky and Pauline Reynolds (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) expands from my focus to consider also narrative representations of anti-intellectualism in campus life with studies of television, video games, and film.

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that one must subscribe to those projects in some uniform way or at all; I certainly don’t find constructive value in each of my engagements with materials that fall under this loose shorthand. The trouble so often in the genre, however, is that campus novels do not bother with qualified rejoinders to concrete claims made within the “theory” fields—the kind of engagement one hopes to find in intellectual discourse. Rather, the campus novel is far likelier, as we will see, to issue blanket refusals of “theory” projects. And in this way, the particular brand of “theory” refusal practiced by the genre is sometimes uncomfortably close to the rank, rote anti-intellectualism captured by Florida’s House Bill 233. The genre’s anti- “theory” material, then, demonstrates Hofstadter’s claim that anti-intellectualism is usually “not the creation of people who are categorically hostile to ideas,” but that the spokespersons of anti-intellectualism are likeliest to be “marginal intellectuals, would-be intellectuals, unfrocked or embittered intellectuals” (1963, 21). Or, as in the case of the onset of “theory,” we might say intellectuals who feel displaced by the arrival of a new field of inquiry. “Theory,” culture war, “marginal intellectuals”—here the genre mixes a range of resentments that correspond to ongoing culture wars and are exacerbated by the academy’s characteristic lack of “generous thinking.” This chapter holds that as a byproduct of contexts involving “theory,” the institutionalization of the creative writer, and the fraught experiences of Black intellectuals, the genre authorizes the anti-intellectualism that plagues higher learning and other pillars of our society today.

Identity, Resentment, and Resistance to “Theory” The only untenured member of the English department at West Central Pennsylvania University, Campbell Wheemer is the laughingstock of his colleagues. To be fair, his not yet having earned promotion isn’t the issue, tenure at West Central according to the narrator being “a little bit like being proclaimed the winner of a shit-eating contest” (Russo 1997, 27). Insult to injury, his colleagues have given him a not terribly affectionate nickname: “Orshee.” Poor Wheemer has fallen afoul of Richard Russo’s satire in Straight Man (1997): “In department meetings, whenever a masculine pronoun was used, Campbell Wheemer corrected the speaker, saying, ‘Or she’” (15). Russo’s narrator, Hank Devereaux, a creative writing professor and interim chair of the English department at West Central Pennsylvania, rather delights in the jibe, and Wheemer’s

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affectation has exhausted even the department’s feminists. “Orshee”—the gratuitous “e” signals a shrill tone to Wheeler’s delivery of the phrase or, likelier, to his colleagues’ aggravation at hearing it. What is at stake in this joke? It certainly chafes at so-called political correctness. It echoes newer discourses regarding pronouns for transgendered persons. It also captures a broad experience of the professional workplace: management of and adjustment to new generations in the office. Jeffrey Williams describes Hank as “a beleaguered middlemanager” caught between his administration and his faculty, part of Williams’s argument that the campus novel succeeds now because it speaks to the anxieties of the professional-managerial class (2012, 572). That may speak to the novel’s appeal for extramural readers who see in Orshee their younger colleagues, green and maybe a touch too obtrusive. Likewise, professors who have grown long in the tooth may recognize an upstart quality in young Wheemer’s refrain. Indeed, readers are encouraged to be sympathetic to Russo’s narrator throughout the novel, rather than to hold him suspect as a sneering anti-hero. Russo’s narration does not frame this ongoing joke as an attack on Wheemer by a band of savage, knuckle-dragging Philistines. Rather, the joke signals the displacement felt by Hank and his department colleagues, their suspicion of new methodologies and fields. This was surely a common enough feature of turn-of-the-century humanities departments that were renovating curricula and faculty ranks to adapt to changing fields of knowledge. But the effect in Straight Man and across the genre is more than wariness, and often amounts to an outright—and importantly, unqualified—hostility to this new form of intellectual engagement. Perhaps those departmental conditions are less acute today, but the genre continues to adopt this anti-intellectual position that Hofstadter describes as a property of the “marginal” intellectual. Notably, the delivery of this punchline is also nested in a paragraph that is rife with concerns over “theory” and the state of literature. At the first departmental meeting he attended, Orshee had informed his colleagues that “he had no interest in literature per se. Feminist critical theory and image-oriented culture were his particular academic interests. He taped television sitcoms and introduced them into the curriculum in place of phallocentric, symbol-oriented texts (books)” (Russo 1997, 15). Compounding the matter were his students’ assignments: “His students were not permitted to write. Their semester projects were to be done with video cameras and handed in on cassette” (Russo 1997, 15). Here

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Russo exaggerates the work of cultural studies in order to undercut it. Moreover, the direct invocation of “feminist critical theory” indicates the object of the joke. Russo’s title, then—putatively a nod at the novel’s comedic intentions, but not readily signaling any suspicion, so often associated with humanities studies today, of white male privilege—begins to ironize, if inadvertently, the status of the “straight man.” Even aside from Orshee, Straight Man is simply obsessed with “theory.” The novel follows Hank through departmental squabbles, a disastrous kidney stone, a portentous climate of faculty and staff layoffs, and the fallout of his unplanned media spectacle in which he holds a goose hostage in order to get a departmental budget to work with. Through all this, “theory” is an enduring menace. Hank lives in the shadow of his father, William Henry Devereaux, Sr., leaving the novel preoccupied not only with finding the protagonist’s place in the world, but also with the place of literature relative to the status of “theory.” Hank judges his father to be “an academic opportunist, always in the vanguard of whatever was trendy and chic in literary criticism” (Russo 1997, xii). By his middle age, the father “was already a full professor with several published books, all of them ‘hot’” (Russo 1997, xii)—the scare quotes indicating something suspect about scholarship that deviates from classical philosophy and canonical titles. The novel’s prologue, ostensibly a vignette about a young Hank going with his family to get a pet, also establishes a profound antiintellectualism aimed at its broad understanding of “theory.” The young Hank has been clamoring for a dog, only for his father to choose one at death’s door in order to escape the burdens of an exuberant pet. The dog dies on her first day in the Devereaux home. The coda to this vignette is not a bildungsroman-type reflection on mortality or on discovering the shortcomings of one’s parents. Rather, the payoff is intellectualism generally and “theory” specifically. The prologue winds down by aligning his father’s character flaws directly with this relatively obscure humanities field: “In the years after he left us, my father became even more famous. He is sometimes credited, if credit is the word, with being the Father of American Literary Theory” (Russo 1997, xvii). An adult Hank reflects that digging the dog’s grave was one of his father’s few experiences that “did not originate on the printed page” (Russo 1997, xvii). In sum, if we give credence to Russo’s sympathetic narrator, intellectualism and “theory” have dehumanized William Henry Devereaux, Sr. The only thing worse than an academic, the prologue suggests, is one who works in “theory.”

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Why the hubbub over “theory”? Next to Orshee’s blind fealty to a clearly delineated feminist critical theory, William Henry Devereaux, Sr.’s “American Literary Theory” is an omnibus term—a vague strawman devised as the object of a range of resentments that I have been marking in scare quotes to designate its questionable meaning. This omnibus “theory” is one of the many shibboleths of the university—and one of the few that have crossed over periodically into public discourse. In Theory at Yale (2016), Marc Redfield tracks “theory” as a minor media sensation involving a small but influential group of scholars at Yale University during the 1980s. Critical theory encompasses several hermeneutical methods, including feminism, Marxism, postcolonialism, and other intellectual fields, and it is also broadly construed to include more conservative hermeneutics such as, in literary studies, the New Criticism. “Theory,” Redfield argues, however, doesn’t capture a coherent intellectual movement, and the more the term is “taken to its limit” the more likely it is to code poststructuralism and deconstruction, the kind of work embodied in the 1980s by the Yale critics Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom and more broadly by Jacques Derrida (2016, 20–21). When the genre invokes “theory,” it also tends to use the term as a loose reference to deconstruction. In the American culture war and media environment of the 1980s, Redfield suggests, “theory” would be further winnowed down to refer simply to de Man himself (2016, 35). Some combination of this loose usage of “theory” resonates in Hank’s description of his father’s ignoble work in Straight Man. “Theory” created a media event in two ways. First, these scholars fell victim to public rebuke that criticized their writing as obscurantist, as excessive, as improperly aspiring to a literary project of creative and indirect expression. This was the gist of the charges in vehicles such as The New York Times and The American Scholar, as Redfield shows. The complaint about critical theory writing endures, especially but not exclusively that associated with French thinkers such as Derrida and Jacques Lacan, in whose writing jargon and dense sentence structures can make for challenging reading. For instance, the specter of bad writing appeared again, if in a less spirited echo of the 1980s scandals, in the spring of 1999 when the preeminent feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler was “honored” with an annual prize for bad writing. Butler responded in the New York Times, noting that the award from the journal of Philosophy and Literature had been assigned exclusively to Leftist thinkers of capitalism, race, and sexuality, that “common sense”—the supposed polar

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opposite of “bad writing”—notoriously harbors dangerous and regressive ideas, and that ideas that challenge the status quo must sometimes be conveyed through challenging language (Butler 1999). Second was the de Man Affair of 1988–1989, when after de Man’s death a researcher uncovered material de Man had written for collaborationist Belgian newspapers in the early 1940s. Nothing of de Man’s collaborationist writing is evident in his work as a theorist in the 1970s and 1980s, but—especially damning, Redfield demonstrates, because at the time de Man had positioned himself as the singular embodiment of “theory”—the association stuck in the minds of many. “Theory” is indifferent to matters of meaning and truth, so the thinking goes, is ambivalent to matters of evil, and it may well be evil itself. Both factors of the media frenzy over “theory” operate on assumptions of the moral function of the intellectual: the importance a democratic society places on being plainspoken, as well as the imperative to disambiguate questions of meaning and truth, good and evil. Indeed, one factor driving this anti- “theory” media sensation and anti“theory” sentiment generally is an unease with ambiguity. My goal in this chapter is to unpack a pervasive theme in the genre, not to litigate the values of critical theory despite my personal inclinations toward it, nor to evaluate the merit of dialectical sentences. And yet it’s incumbent upon me to provide at least a touch of direct evidence here—especially given the absence of such from genre representations and from most other discussions that put “theory” in their crosshairs. The project of thinkers such as de Man, if it were subjected to crude summary, is to explore the multiplicity, the contingency, the fluidity of meaning as it is produced in language. “Theory” is a philosophy of difference, as a colleague of mine frames it, and it studies the different, often unpredictably different, meanings that emerge from language.4 In fact, for de Man, this project is always working against itself, making “theory” a more salient foe to “theory” even than political detractors of “theory.” In his 1986 essay “Resistance to Theory,” de Man surveys the linguistic foundations of deconstruction and argues that “the resistance to theory is a resistance to the use of language about language” and especially “to the possibility that language contains factors or functions that cannot be reduced to intuition” (12–13). And since deconstruction itself performs this language 4 This is an ongoing conversation that defies conventional citation but that nevertheless demands attribution: James Martell, my friend and colleague and office-neighbor, takes credit for this succinct formulation of the myriad projects of “theory.”

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study, de Man concludes that “nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself this resistance” (1986, 19). Deconstruction, then, operates in a feedback loop of its own resistance. For many—many in the public, but also for many scholars in the humanities—this instability and ambiguity and self-reflexivity simply will not do.5 Of this recursive brand of “theory” thinking, Redfield says, “de Manian theory threatens to disturb what we think we understand about understanding,” and in so doing effects an anxiety about the fundamentals of communication and the human condition (2016, 15). Complicating rather than clarifying—the cardinal sin of “theory,” according to this framework, is its departure from the intellectual’s responsibility to provide disambiguation and to stabilize meaning for society. Another factor driving anti- “theory” sentiment is a pervasive anxiety about a changing intellectual canon. For instance, in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list and was the subject of a debate on The Oprah Winfrey Show, the philosopher Allan Bloom blames the 1969 student revolt at Cornell

5 See, for instance, a recent special issue of the journal boundary 2—volume 48, issue 1 published in February 2021. Paul Bové’s editorial note introducing the issue asks, “Behind this issue lies a question the editors hoped would provoke skillful writing: Does attention to language matter anymore?” (1). The issue rebukes criticism that has moved away from traditional literary methods associated with philology and especially criticism that has abandoned a clarity of writing. The issue’s closing article, Lindsay Walters’s “To Become What One is,” laments the displacement of criticism by “theory.” In essence, Waters exhorts readers “to leave the twentieth century behind us,” referring to post-structuralist criticism, associated with Jean François Lyotard and the disruption of the grand narratives, what he calls “an effort to escape Big Picture theorizing” (257)—occluding, evidently, major figures such as Fredric Jameson whose projects rest on totalization, part of his agenda to link culture and experience to broad, material systems of capital and social stratification. Setting aside Waters’s festschriftish self-aggrandizement and gossipy manner, he offers a sincere question that should always ground our thinking: what is criticism, what is scholarship for? But the essay’s reactionary repudiation of “theory” is surprising given its sources: boundary 2, established in 1972, its editorial board awash in academic celebrity, is well understood as the “theory” establishment and Waters himself was a major conduit of such work in his roles with the University of Minnesota Press’s Theory and History of Literature series.

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University6 on “theory” generally, describing the university as a “laundering operation for radical Left French ideas in comparative literature” (352). Bloom concludes his tome by aligning “theory” with Nazism. Western higher learning suffered a near-death experience, he argues, when the philosopher Martin Heidegger joined the German volk in espousing Nazism (Bloom 1987, 311). And the “theory” generation that emerged alongside the student movements like the one that Bloom witnessed at Cornell is little different, he argues, bringing a rabble of dangerous groupthink into the vaunted halls of academe. “The Parisian Heideggerians,” Bloom calls them, “in particular Derrida, Foucault and Barthes. The school is called Deconstructionism, and it is the last, predictable stage in the suppression of reason and the denial of the possibility of truth in the name of philosophy” (1987, 379). Conspicuously absent from Bloom’s writing, as from any representation in genre works such as Russo’s, is any direct evidence from the sources he summarizes. And in context of the rest of his work, which extols other great, canonical writers, it’s clear that the arrival of these new thinkers has caused a worrisome displacement—of the former standard-bearers of the Western humanistic traditions, of the stable meanings that they are taken to afford us. Above all, the genre’s anti- “theory” impulses are produced in the wake of the institutionalization of American creative writing. While the marginal sensation that “theory” caused in U.S. media during the 1980s may resonate with genre readers, this institutional relationship of the professionally trained creative writer and the professionally trained “theorist” accounts for the bulk of the genre’s anti-“theory” tropes. As the introduction chapter discusses, creative writing programs began to institutionalize the American literary voice during the postwar era. This is the seminal claim of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009), and it also impacts the production of the genre, as I argue in discussion of Fig. 1.1 of the data stemming from the Directory of the American Campus Novel. McGurl identifies the proliferation of creative writing programs in the early postwar era, programs culminating usually in master of fine arts degrees, as the foundation of the contemporary American

6 More than a personal trauma for Bloom, this student demonstration was a landmark event in both the Black Campus Movement and in the university’s entanglement in culture wars discourses. See Ibram X. Kendi’s The Black Campus Movement (2012) and Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America (2015), respectively, for more on the Cornell protests.

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literary voice. “Systematic excellence” is the result, according to McGurl, of the writing that comes from these programs. Widespread institutionalization, he argues, drives one of the central tensions of the fiction from the Program Era: the conflict between artistic autonomy and institutional bureaucracy. This productive tension, according to McGurl, leads Program Era writers toward a focus on “the culture of the school” and makes the campus novel a privileged vehicle for exploring “the ironies of institutionalization” (McGurl 2009, 30, 47). This tension derives much of its charge from the arrival of “theory” in the humanities departments— and especially in the English departments where literary scholars and creative writers sometimes coincide. It wouldn’t be quite right to say that Program Era writing universally opposes “theory,” but for many Program Era writers, “theory” is a troubling development. McGurl cites one graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop: “For the writer, literary theory not only is of no use but is detrimental to his progress and well-being” (2009, 342). The statement is extreme but captures a general writerly unease with “theory.” Behind this unease is, at least partly, a judgment on “good writing” akin to that which played out in newspaper coverage of “theory.” But there is also here a resentment stemming from the presumption of the rightful place of the author. Scholars such as de Man were making claims to a literary voice in their writing, they were accumulating vast prestige in a new system of academic celebrity—from which Hank’s father benefits in Straight Man, with West Central offering him a vanity hire even in a period of dire budget cutbacks—and their writing was perceived to be displacing the sanctified position of literature itself. John Guillory explores this last issue in Cultural Capital (1993). Simultaneous to the canon wars, in which Yale critic Harold Bloom will play a role as reinvented defender of Western literature, theory emerges in professional literary criticism as a canon unto itself—one that runs parallel to and at times subordinates the conventional literary canon, the crisis of these canons happening during a broader transformation of cultural capital in the U.S.7 In other words, there was 7 Guillory situates this canon war saga against the backdrop of shifting American class norms: “the category of ‘literature’ names the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie, a form of capital increasingly marginal to the social function of the present educational system” (1993, x). As the cultural value of literary education destabilizes, theory arrives, creates its own canon largely in measure to study the literary one, and provides cultural capital for an intellectual class that is no longer served—or is served less well—by the older values of literature alone (Guillory 1993, xii). As Guillory knows well, this new

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a feeling of lost ground as the traditional Western canon was felt to be displaced by the new canon of “theory,” and living writers aspiring to that canon may have felt themselves to be losing ground in kind. The seething resentment of McGurl’s Iowa graduate, then, marks the convergence of a generalized anti-intellectualism and a localized set of anxieties regarding the status of the author and of literature specific to the Program Era writer—all of it compounded by the arrival of “theory” and entangled in genre works such as Straight Man. It’s instructive that Straight Man pairs Hank’s father’s omnibus “theory” with the feminist critical theory that taints Orshee. While Wheemer also works in a cultural studies model that purportedly deprioritizes students’ experiences of canonical texts and even writing itself, his cloying feminism seems to be his greatest offense to his colleagues at West Central. What that feminism actually entails, what Wheemer has been reading and assigning to his students—materialist feminism, poststructuralist feminism, anti-colonial feminism, intersectional thinkers, the list expanding to Hank’s and his colleagues’ evident boredom—Russo is content to ignore altogether. The omission of such scholarly details is at least consistent with the rest of Straight Man or with the rest of the genre, for that matter. It would be wholly incongruous with the rest of the novel—typified by character development, themes of ennui, the ransomed goose—for Russo to provide a deep excursus on the historical development of feminisms over time, how they operate differently in different communities, the intersectionality of theory and practice. It is a consistent feature of the genre that it subordinates academic details to the development of character and other matters of somewhat wider readerly appeal. But the effect remains: a cavalier dismissal of scholarly work, a refusal of scholarly values of deliberation and exchange. If not engaging with the positions of a particular thinker or school of feminist theory, what exactly is the object of complaint in the name “Orshee”? Rather than an enriching engagement with challenging ideas, Wheemer’s colleagues offer a twofold refusal: of the intrusion

canon did not fully displace the traditional one, but created a new register for thinking— and a new de facto requirement for scholarly accomplishment in the humanities. Lost in Guillory’s study of this seeming paradigm shift is the appeal of “theory.” Many students and scholars surely found fulfillment in these works precisely because of their challenging nature, offering different challenges than those typically found within the traditional canon.

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of women into historically masculine spaces, captured in small part in Figs. A.5 and A.6 in the “Appendix I: Further Data” appendix, and especially the uppity presumptuousness of Wheemer’s insistence. What emerges in genre titles such as Russo’s is a contrary identity politics. This identity politics is separate from that of the academic or the intellectual, both of whom tend to be incidental to the American campus novel. It is separate from the conventional subject areas of the identity politics associated with women’s studies centers and Black studies centers that populate American universities and are often the object of culture war diatribes. Rather, the genre often extols the identity of the writer himself. In other words, starting in the late twentieth century, the genre offers the professionally trained creative writer as the privileged site of identity politics in the genre. “The writer” is an identity category unto itself— and a sacrosanct one. Another genre title, Francine Prose’s Blue Angel (2000), studied further in the following chapter, lays this out succinctly. The novel’s protagonist Ted Swenson, another creative writer teaching at a university, demonstrates this identity politics when responding with a particular writerly indignation to an editor’s suggestion that he write a memoir: “I’m a novelist. An actual writer. I’ve still got some…standards” (Prose 2000, 236). Even acknowledging that of course novels bear the preoccupations of their authors, this is a counterintuitive development for a genre whose putative focus is the university life which, during the culture wars, so often explores major questions of identity politics. Further, the emphasis on writerly identity may come at the expense of conventional identity categories such as those pertaining to racial and ethnic minorities, already historically marginalized by the university and subject to further white-washing in the genre. Drawn from the resentments specific to writerly identity, Straight Man’s concerns about “theory” eventuate in a wide-ranging antiintellectualism. The novel seems not at all aware of this anti-intellectual impulse. For instance, Hank posits anti-intellectualism as if it were the sole domain of troglodyte parents of West Central students: “Their parents have agreed to pay their tuition on the condition that they major in something sensible and pay no attention to people like me, who are, they warn their kids, intent on transforming their values and undermining their religious principles” (Russo 1997, 265). If the sudden renunciation of anti-intellectualism is galling, it also demonstrates Hofstadter’s principle of the “marginal intellectual,” Hank pitting his intellectual position against that of “theory” in a zero-sum relation. When it comes to

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intellectualism, however it is misunderstood or misconstrued, Straight Man posits not merely disagreement with one claim or another of a “theory” project, not merely a readiness to consider some claims before others. Rather, it posits outright disgust with “theory” itself, as Russo’s epilogue concludes that the academy serves as a form of onanist escapism. Pondering his father’s refusal to reflect on the father-son relationship, Hank concludes, “That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears” (Russo 1997, 382). Had his father been a proper philosopher rather than a disreputable practitioner of “theory,” Russo’s protagonist may have reached a more forgiving conclusion. These resentments are still more extreme in Ishmael Reed’s satire of the culture wars, Japanese by Spring (1993). Like other campus novels such as Straight Man, Reed’s novel depicts “theory” as a matter of lost ground for professionally trained creative writers, Reed himself having held a professorship in creative writing at the University of California from 1967 to 2005. During the course of the novel, for instance, a metafictional Ishmael Reed arrives in the plot. When this metafictional Reed meets the novel’s protagonist, Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt, the erstwhile Black nationalist turned neoconservative, in a faculty club, the narration laments that those in the lounge “were not interested in [Ishmael Reed], they were interested in Puttbutt. Remember, the author was dead in the age of theory” (Reed 1993, 129). The plot is busy. Puttbutt must navigate a precarious dual appointment to the African American Studies department and the Humanity department at Jack London College in Oakland, California, his tenure decision looming as rumors swirl that the preeminent feminist April Jokujoku may be negotiating a position at the College. Puttbutt is satirized as an Uncle Tom figure: Reed’s narration describes him as “a black pathology merchant” who has found a formula for the bestsellers lists, embodied in the title of his best-selling work, Blacks, America’s Misfortune (1993, 10, 14). Puttbutt’s survival strategy is made all the more reasonable by racial tumult on Jack London’s campus—swastika-clad students associated with the Amerikaner Student Society and the American Student Chapter of the Order of the Boer Nation write racist tropes on the blackboard before Puttbutt arrives to class to deliver a lecture and villainize him in an editorial cartoon in their campus newspaper, Koons and Kikes, in which Puttbutt has sex with an ostrich—by the threat Jokujoku poses

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to his position, and by the hostile takeover of Jack London by “the Japanese.” Here another of Puttbutt’s survival gambits seems to pay off: Puttbutt had begun taking Japanese lessons in order to be useful when the Japanese inevitably took over North America, and, sure enough, his tutor Dr. Yamamoto is named executive of Jack London College, appointing Puttbutt to an advisory position as he reforms the college to reflect a Japanese nationalist agenda. I want to focus here on the way Japanese by Spring posits a particular felt displacement: that of a Black intellectual during the arrival of “theory.” Threaded through this romp is an anti-intellectualism that is itself not the object, but the instrument of the novel’s satire. The narrator provides exposition for the reader, describing the English and African American studies departments as being “paralyzed by theory,” both units exhibiting a tendency to purge dissidents—presumably dissidents from the “theory” regime (Reed 1993, 82). This exposition sets up a joke about “theory,” as Puttbutt, newly re-empowered as an advisor to Yamamoto, creates a litmus test to enact a vendetta against all the “theory” adherents who had stood in the way of his tenure decision: “He had sent a letter to the campus deconstructionists, informing them of their termination. The letters said you’re fired. Those who believed that the words ‘you’re fired’ meant exactly that could finish the semester. Those who felt the words only referred to themselves would have to leave immediately” (Reed 1993, 132). Reed seems to know a good bit more about the object of his satire than Russo’s loose omnibus resentments. Elsewhere, Japanese by Spring disparages feminist theory, trotting out old canards about misandry as well as labeling feminism inherently antiBlack. There is no shortage of misogynist material to choose from—in Reed’s campus novel or in his other fiction, for that matter.8 Feminism, according to Reed’s narrator, had aligned itself with the right on pornography “and expressed a similar enmity toward black men” (1993, 24). The metafictionalized Ishmael Reed refers to the legal scholar Catharine. A. MacKinnon as “the crowned intellectual leader of northeastern feminism” and states that she attended a 1987 conference that was “so anti-male that a woman who said that she liked men was booed” (Reed 1993, 25). The “northeastern” modifier chafes at a presumptive whiteness of feminist theoretical work. The metafictional Reed notes that MacKinnon 8 See, for instance, Michele Wallace’s essay “Ishmael Reed’s Female Troubles” in her book Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (1994).

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had consulted with Anita Hill during the hearings for Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1991, and he concludes that “feminists like Ms. MacKinnon had used some of the vilest stereotypes against Clarence Thomas in order to derail the nomination” (Reed 1993, 26). There is little coincidence that Clarence Thomas and Puttbutt are victims of a similar feminist machine, both of them displaced Black intellectuals. What little readers know of Jokujoku is that she has “one article to her name. Something having to do with Clitoridectomy Imagery in the Works of Black Male Novelists” (Reed 1993, 57). Further, the novel’s misogyny operates quite clearly on a zero-sum accounting of gender and canonical standing. The chairman of the soon-to-be dissolved Humanity department chides Puttbutt with a jibe about writerly displacement: “You black guys had your chance,” he says to Puttbutt. “Wright and Baldwin were once the canon, but Zora overthrew them. Sent them hurling from the literary firmament. Cast them down” (Reed 1993, 93). This description of the canon is of course dramatically untethered from reality. But it provides another register of writerly identity politics, this time also entangled with race and gender. Amid all this resentment for theory, and especially for feminist theory, Japanese by Spring leaves plenty of room for other intellectual practices. The novel provides space for several essayistic asides, crossing into expository writing to supplement themes of the novel—for instance, in an excursus on MacKinnon and feminism in the charges of sexual harassment leveled at Clarence Thomas. Other asides discuss the labor market for Black academics, the news media’s role in distracting white Americans from contemplating pathologies of whiteness, the ironies of multiculturalism, and Americans’ hand-wringing over a putatively ascendant Japan. Each of these passages retains a strong polemical charge, just as we see in the dismissal of MacKinnon as a racist and misandrist. By gliding over these passages, I don’t mean to endorse these positions so much as to point out that while Reed’s novel displays a clear anti- “theory” agenda, it also construes itself an intellectual project. Indeed, the novel borrows the very concepts of relationality and marginality that typify the “theory” for which Puttbutt purges his erstwhile colleagues. In sum, this pattern offers further evidence of Hofstadter’s caveats that anti-intellectualism is rarely a sign of a person who is inherently hostile to “ideas” and that it is often the unintended byproduct of some other, often quite reasonable, project.

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If Japanese by Spring adopts a severe position against “theory,” perhaps it is for reasons that are at least partly rooted in Puttbutt’s fraught position. Reed names the college after Jack London not only for the author’s association with the Bay area where the College is sited, but also having identified the College’s namesake as “the apostle of Anglo-Saxon superiority” (1993, 9). This legacy of Jack London outweighs that of his socialism for the purposes of the novel. Puttbutt is situated, then, in an institution that is historically exclusive of, even antagonistic to persons of color. Lavelle Porter describes genre works that study the Black experience of the university in The Blackademic Life (2019), in which he identifies three tropes of “blackademic fiction”: the purported overeducation of Black Americans, colorism, and the politics of authenticity. Regarding this final trope, Porter writes that “all black academic novelists are forced to confront, in one way or another, the expectation that the black intellectual does or does not have a responsibility to the black community to apply his or her knowledge and talents to the social and political problems facing the African American people” (2019, 39). Reed lampoons the Black academic’s imperative to be “authentic” and to serve his community in the ruthless satire of Puttbutt’s “black pathology” writing. Aside from the broad institutional contexts of the university, what is so charged about “theory”? Surely a great measure of the anti-“theory” sentiment in Japanese by Spring is the result of Reed’s well-documented and troubling diatribes against feminism, and this sentiment also serves the novel’s purpose as satire of the culture wars in toying with one of the purported scandals of higher learning. Still more broadly, however, the novel may implicitly identify a perceived whiteness of “theory” itself—not only in its suspicious Frenchness and in its association with the humanities departments at the most elite, historically white universities, but also in its relationship to Black language, culture, and authors. This is far too complex a subject to wrangle into the scope of this chapter, especially given the extensive writing that has already explored this question. See, for instance, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s classic essay “Authority, (White) Power, and the (Black) Critic; It’s All Greek to Me,” published in 1987 in the heat of the theory wars. Gates studies the tensions between the uses of Black vernaculars and institutionalized literary criticism, which often manifests in “theory,” and he situates these tensions in the enduring racist tradition demanding that a Black person prove her humanity through mastery of cultural signs that are inevitably white and Western in nature.

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“Black literature, and its criticism, then,” Gates writes, “have been put to uses that were not primarily aesthetic; rather, they have formed part of a larger discourse on the nature of the black and his or her role in the order of things. The integral relation between theory and literary texts, therefore, which in other traditions has so very often been a sustaining relation, in our tradition has been an extraordinarily problematic one. The relations between theory, tradition, and integrity within the black literary tradition have not been, and perhaps cannot be, a straightforward matter” (1987, 28). Gates notes that he and other Black intellectuals such as Houston Baker were often chided for invoking “theory” in their work, signaling an entrenched resistance to “theory” of a sort separate from the rationale that de Man writes about. Gates acknowledges that there’s plenty to question in European intellectual history that is often logocentric and ethnocentric—not to mention completely blind to Enlightenment thinkers’ authorization of racialized violence, which the Martinican philosopher Aimé Césaire explores in the Discourse on Colonialism (1950). “For the critic of Afro-American literature this process is even more perilous,” Gates writes, “precisely because the largest part of contemporary literary ‘theory’ derives from critics of Western European languages and literatures. Is the use of ‘theory’ to write about Afro-American literature, we might ask rhetorically, merely another form of intellectual indenture, a form of mental servitude as pernicious in its intellectual implications as any other form of enslavement?” (1987, 30). Thorny questions such as this one continue to orbit “theory” even as the intellectual inquiries signaled by the term become more and more normalized in the humanities. One might also see a related challenge to the legitimacy of Black American intellectuals in the pushback against the very idea of examining systemic racism in the U.S., demonstrated for instance in legislation such as Florida House Bill 233. Reed’s satire of Black intellectual survival brings these two polarities to the fore. For our purposes in this chapter, we can see how the genre’s anti-intellectualism captures a distinct quandary for Black intellectuals such as Puttbutt. If Reed’s protagonist is hostile to “theory,” perhaps the novel challenges, however implicitly, “the university’s view of itself as an objective and disinterested center of knowledge production,” as Porter says of blackademic fiction (2019, 6). Parallel to that institutional critique is yet another case of writerly lost ground in Japanese by Spring, similar to that displayed in Straight Man but now compounded by the marginalized status of the author. Another

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campus novel, Jane Smiley’s Moo (1995), which I discuss further in a chapter related to academic freedom, puts the matter succinctly: Margaret Bell, a Black professor in the English department, balks at “theory” for its “ideas denigrating literary authorship,” but more to the point she is alert to the irony that “theory” emerged “simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publishing, had the deepest and most delicious possible meaning” (134–35). If it codes anti-intellectualism, then, Reed’s novel does so not only from the position of the creative writer, but also from a historically informed situation of a Black American intellectual. Where Straight Man demonstrates a jumble of reactionary resentments, Japanese by Spring pairs reactionary anti- “theory” positions with bids to create room for Black intellectualism. The resentments, however, remain thick in both novels and across the genre. What is the meaning of all this resentment? In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Friedrich Nietzsche describes ressentiment as an impulse to negate: its defining trait is that it “says no to an ‘outside,’ to an ‘other,’ to a ‘non-self,’” Nietzsche argues, “and this no is its creative act” (22). In other words, resentment is fundamentally reactionary, offering no positive content of its own and creating meaning or value only by the inverse of some other meaning or value. For Nietzsche, ressentiment is a tool of the weak—“slave morality,” he calls it—to take power from the strong, part of his austere argument that power is neutral, little more than an object of struggle. Because the academy operates on an economy of status, resentment is foundational to the institution, practiced by just about all participants in the university in a fully intersectional fashion. Whether in humanities departments, student athletic squads, a law school, a S.T.E.M. department, the residence life offices, or student government organizations, resentment is staple of university life. However, in identifying negation as the essential function of resentment, Nietzsche illuminates what is most troubling about the genre’s anti-intellectualism: it seeks little more than to close down intellectual fields. In Straight Man and Japanese by Spring, the impulse is not to engage ideas, to offer qualified rebuttal to arguments or claims, to find an argument’s strengths, to think through an argument’s contradictions, and to find value. The impulse, rather, is to issue a simple, flat Nietzschean “no.” This is the genre’s most anti-intellectual maneuver. And the genre does not depart from the lived experience of the academy in issuing such a negation. One might think of a political science department excluding

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political theory for a focus on quantitative empiricism, for instance, or any number of negations or exclusions that might issue from individual scholars toward other fields, subfields, or colleagues. The genre is not alone in disengagement from scholarly values, but I would also argue that the genre offers such disengagement alone, at least when it comes to “theory,” providing no other model of meaningful critique. Consider Straight Man’s manifold resentments alongside the novel’s sustained interests in property. Hank spends a lot of time reflecting on property, often about the declining prestige and market value of this or that neighborhood in town. His wife Lily traces the tensions in the English department to Hank’s decision to buy the lots adjacent to his suburban home to prevent encroachment, soon after rebuffing colleagues’ offers to buy and build on the land. Orshee gets further satirized as he discusses real estate options with Hank: he likes the open space of Hank’s prosperous neighborhood, but remarks, readers are given to assume naively, “we’d, like, have to give up our dream of living in an integrated neighborhood” (Russo 1997, 145). At the close of this conversation, Hank jibes Orshee for this idealism. “And there’s always a chance it will become integrated,” Hank chides. “I understand Coach Green is looking to build out there” (Russo 1997, 146)—a nexus of property value and casual racism in the toss-off association of athletics and “integration.” Hank worries that his daughter Julie has bought a house she cannot afford, and later in the novel he ponders the real estate implications of selling that house after Julie splits from her husband. In light of Jeffrey Williams’s argument about the centrality of the professionalmanagerial class readership to the campus novel genre, a reader might find in Straight Man’s property preoccupations the concerns of a midlife white-collar professional. But they also cast a backdrop of wealth that frames the novel’s anti- “theory” resentment as a struggle for establishment and prestige. This preoccupation with property also complicates the novel’s title. “In English departments,” Hank reflects, “the most serious competition is for the role of straight man” (Russo 1997, 106).9 That line 9 As an aside, I would argue that it’s not at all clear Hank plays—or even aspires to—the role of comedic “straight man.” Rather than setting up the material by which others might shine, Hank hordes most of the good lines. In scant other cases, Hank is not the setup man but the object of the joke. For instance, on the day when the department is scheduled to vote on a recall of the chair, a referendum on Hank’s service as interim chair, Hank awakes from a nap in his office to find that he has peed his pants. Further slapstick ensues as, unable to appear presentable for the meeting, he crawls into

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repeats with variations throughout the novel, calling attention to Russo’s bid for comedy, to be sure. But of course this can also be read as a marker of the privileged position of straight—and white and propertied—men in the academy, challenged routinely by the purportedly shrill rejoinder “Or she.” Read this way, Russo’s novel captures, but does not satirize, a kind of white-propertied-male panic about the changing nature of the humanities, the changing demographics of the university, as well as the changing demographics and politics of the U.S. Consider Japanese by Spring ’s manifold resentments alongside the satirical curricular reform at Jack London College. Yamato is quick to apply his new executive powers, renaming the school Hideki Tojo No Daigaku after the prime minister who oversaw the Pearl Harbor attack. And he unilaterally merges the Department of Humanity with the African Studies, Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies, and Native American Studies programs into a new unit: “Ethnic Studies,” which will soon be renamed “Bangaku,” following a series of reorganizations and renamings at Jack London. Puttbutt looks up the term in his language materials and finds it translates as “barbarian studies.” Reed parodies the primacy of European canons in the American core curriculum, as well as its inherent humanism. In using Yamato’s Nippocentrism to lampoon what the novel identifies as the Eurocentrism of higher learning in the U.S., Japanese by Spring may inadvertently essentialize Japanese culture—a potentially mixed or unclear signal that is all too common in satirical and other comedic works.10 At any rate, reading Russo’s and Reed’s novels in tandem encourages a breadth of understanding of anti-intellectual sentiments in the genre.

the ceiling to eavesdrop on the meeting, discretely dropping copies of the university’s policy manual into the conference room, cuing those in attendance to the fact that their two-thirds vote won’t in fact impeach him from the chair position. If in the main Hank is not the “straight man” but simply another straight male professor, the novel’s comic lines often appear to punch down, reinforcing the privileges that are at signaled in the novel’s resentments of “theory.” 10 Lavelle Porter unpacks the ambivalences and ambiguities of this satire: “But while the novel celebrates Japanese history and culture it also objectifies that history and culture, making it difficult at times to tell whether this is a novel that criticizes racism against the Japanese or reproduces it, particularly through its caricatures of Asians. Perhaps this is where the complexity of satire comes into play, as the use of humor to ridicule stereotypes can sometimes slip into that uncomfortable territory where it is difficult to tell whom the joke is on, and the artist can’t control how the joke is used” (2019, 137).

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Even contextualizing the genre’s anti-intellectualism as a manifestation of a highly particular anti- “theory” reaction, even contextualizing that reaction as part of a sub rosa dispute between professionally trained creative writers and “theory” or as a site of tension between Black American intellectuals and European intellectual histories—even acknowledging these contexts, a charitable reader must find a deep anti-intellectualism trundling through the genre. Through that thematic work, the genre authorizes the anti-intellectualism that we see rampaging through headlines in the U.S., threatening the viability of democracies worldwide, our public health, our home planet. Not only does this chapter situate the campus novel as itself a producer of a principal threat to the missions of higher learning. Further, the nature of this threat demonstrates again the fundamental antinomy of the genre. To the extent that its particular strain of anti-intellectualism originates in a sacrosanct writerly identity, in the personal feeling of lost ground, the genre’s antiintellectualism stakes out the private goods of the university where one’s putative Exemption has been challenged, even marginalized—prioritizing personal claims to its spaces and privileges, rather than public goods such as the production of knowledge or even the university’s role as bulwark of democracy.

“Competitive Thinking” and the Ends of Anti-Intellectualism What are the outcomes of this anti-intellectualism? What is the relationship between the resentments we see in Russo’s and Reed’s novels and those we see in Florida’s House Bill 233 and other public statements of anti-intellectual fervor? At the very least, close study of this principal theme of the campus novel indicates that anti-intellectualism is not purely external to the institutions of higher learning. Further, close attention to the genre may indicate that the university is not exactly blameless, either, in the American public’s mistrust of higher learning. Anti-intellectualism is generated largely outside of the university and most conspicuously in a propagandistic media environment—the media ecosystem that drives discourse such as Florida House Bill 233 and to which Governor DeSantis grandstands in touting that and similar legislation, as well as a wash of anti-intellectual rhetoric. Academics have very little or no influence over this media apparatus. The fact of this ecosystem and its durability is a

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dispiriting, uncontroversial truth. But anti-intellectualism is also generated in some measure within the academy in at least two ways. First, there are intramural sites of anti-intellectualism, as I’ve tried to show in the genre’s disputatious, ungenerous relationship to “theory.” Further, following Hofstadter’s injunction that we not exalt intellectuals as “vessels of pure virtue set down in Babylon,” we must also consider the ways in which the academy is responsible, at least in some measure, for Americans’ declining trust in the institution. Kathleen Fitzpatrick notes this latter source of anti-intellectualism in her call for a new mode of scholarly critique and public engagement. In Generous Thinking (2019), Fitzpatrick outlines the “competitive thinking” that has come to be associated with scholarship, especially in the humanities, and identifies it as a chief driver of public distrust of the academy. “Competitive thinking”—Fitzpatrick’s term captures a common scholarly disposition, the sort that creates meaning and, crucially, professional distinction from an against-the-grain approach, essentially producing one idea at the expense of another. One can still aspire to critical thinking, of course, in the sense of offering independent critique and analysis, while moving away from the “competitive” disposition. Fitzpatrick writes, “what I am hoping for in asking us to step away not from the critical, necessarily, but instead from the competitive—from the critique that is offered not in a spirit of generosity but instead as an attempt to create individual distinction—is that we might look for new ways of relating not just to ourselves and our work but to one another, and to a range of publics that we want to cultivate for the university” (2019, 41). Fitzpatrick calls for a move away from “competitive thinking” and toward “generous thinking”—a mode of analysis that “means working to think with rather than against ” and that requires a commitment to deep listening (2019, 34). This kind of thinking is rather anathema to the reactionary impulse to negate “theory,” as I have tried to show. The ideal of generous thinking is challenging, and I do not presume to have met it consistently throughout this project. I have tried, for instance, to exercise deep listening to the anti- “theory” material of these novels that, in full disclosure, I find troubling. Fitzpatrick makes a wide-ranging case for public intellectualism and for a paradigm shift in how the university understands its role in society, but for the purposes of this chapter, we will focus on the outcomes of “competitive thinking.” For Fitzpatrick, the prevalence of competition is the starting point for a new conceptualization of scholarly disposition.

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But “competitive thinking” is also a marker of public perceptions of the academy—and particularly the public’s declining trust in higher learning. Universities, Fitzpatrick argues, are too often “seen as privileging the negation rather than the creation of ideas and institutions” (2019, xi). Too often, Fitzpatrick argues, “competitive thinking” appears to those outside the university as “pure negativity, a rejection of the materials of our shared if contested culture, not to mention a seemingly endless series of internal arguments” (2019, 29). This is not to say that cornerstones of our shared culture and history are exempt from critique, of course. But Fitzpatrick has rightly identified a common scholarly disposition that is weaponized in culture war diatribes that describe academic work as anti-American, as anti-Western, or in other canards, and that result in the deteriorating public trust that we see, for instance, in ominous surveys of faculty’s ideological distribution. Further, recalibrating our approaches to the study and discussion of our shared culture and history may be vital to the success of civics and historical education in the U.S. as we confront dire forecasts for our democratic project.11 The “competitive thinking” disposition is perhaps tied to “theory” in its popular conception. Assuming one has in fact read any of this material—and that is not at all clear in most popular invocations of the dangers of “theory”—I acknowledge that a first experience of deconstruction might lead a reader to the initial perception that it operates on a blanket negation. What is one to think about Derrida’s declaration in Of Grammatology (1967), often taken as a shorthand mission statement for

11 Higher learning is in large degree a safeguard for our fragile democracy. This democratic function is born out in quantitative analysis. In “The Role of Education in Taming Authoritarian Attitudes” (2020), Anthony P. Carnevale and associates at the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University studied datasets from the World Values Survey and found that American college graduates are less inclined toward authoritarian worldviews such as those that emphasize “authority and uniformity” over “autonomy and diversity” (2). “On the whole,” the authors conclude, “higher levels of education are associated with stronger democracies—a country with an educated populace is more likely to become or remain a democracy” (Carnevale et al. 2020, 2). This is critical work, given the study’s findings that the U.S. is “moderately inclined” toward authoritarian perspectives, relative to international peers (Carnevale et al. 2020, 11). American public officials seem increasingly likely to adopt anti-democratic positions since the publication of these findings. Given this adverse baseline, the democratic function of the academy is all the more important, and the study indeed found evidence that higher learning reduces these authoritarian preferences—more so in the U.S. than in other countries (Carnevale et al. 2020, 18).

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deconstruction and widely referenced not least for its provocative brevity, that “there is nothing outside the text”? Derrida, in my view, invites us to think about the ramifying nature of discourse, a claim that I would imagine becomes less controversial in proportion to the increasing rate of media saturation in our society. But even a good-faith, first-time reader of a sentence such as that one may be forgiven for hearing a refusal of meaning, of the pillars of our shared civilizations, so on. Thinking is hard. And it becomes even harder when examining basic assumptions of meaning, as deconstruction does, or when examining basic assumptions about shared history, as the frameworks targeted by Florida’s House Bill 233 do. If thinking is hard, it is equally hard to invite multiple audiences simultaneously into such challenging work. Scholarship—“theory” being just one example—often operates on a first premise either that scholars generally enjoy the public’s trust or that scholars are speaking exclusively to each other, with public audiences completely indifferent to the debates. Put another way, such audiences—and often our students—may be discarded or overlooked in the production of scholarly writing. But even the campus novel, which one might assume to be at least a little bit sympathetic to the outcomes of scholarship, persistently displays anti-intellectualism, reacting out of a perceived affront to meaning, experience, and value. Read this way, the genre may raise the question: How would intellectual work be reframed if the first assumption were that higher learning lacks public trust or that public audiences were in fact interested in it—not for the sake of brutish censorship, as is so often the portent of anti-intellectual fervor, but interested for the sake of learning, for reflecting on our human conditions and our shared histories and cultures? All this clamor over “theory” indicates that such audiences are there, but that intellectuals could do a better job of engaging with them. The methodological negation inherent to “competitive thinking” bears an uncanny resemblance to the reactionary negation of “theory” in novels such as Russo’s and Reed’s. Satire of course is perhaps inherently incompatible with “generous thinking,” given more to skewering human foibles than to a collaborative disposition. A careful reading of the genre exposes the deep and multivalent resentments of the academy—rooted at best in methods of “competitive thinking” and at worst in a range of classed, raced, and sexed pathologies—leaving to readers the matter of how to deal with them.

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“Generous thinking” is not a panacea, as Fitzpatrick knows well and discusses throughout her manifesto. It is not designed to rebut the badfaith arguments of propagandistic media. Nor will it immediately redress the direction of anti-intellectualism in America, which in its current form we can see running for more or less sixty years now, inaugurated in one of the ur-texts of the culture wars, William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951). I name Buckley’s text not to delve into its puerile ad hominems or its unsupported—likely unsupportable—generalizations, but to posit the durability of the claims that the professoriate is typified by menacing communists and atheists, or that a customer’s rights12 should supersede professional expertise in matters of curriculum. While not a panacea, a wider adoption of “generous thinking,” for which the end is a more effective interface between intellectuals and public audiences, could have forestalled the emergence of the Alternative Right across the North Atlantic. The Alternative Right is the result of a raft of economic and demographic developments, of course, but also, crucially hinges upon a core of intellectualism that propagates white supremacy, misogyny, and authoritarian politics. Andrew Jones describes this movement, its factions, and its histories in The Kids Are Alt-Right (2019), arguing that a diverse range of intellectual traditions and a radicalized core of intellectuals act in tandem with broad public audiences. “If one understands the radical core of the Alternative Right as a selfdescribed Leninist vanguard party, which influences and radicalizes a broader population, which is receptive to the ideas of the Alternative Right’s ideological core,” Jones writes, “this allows the broader Alternative Right populist movement in the Anglosphere to be examined in conjunction” (2019, 8). Ranging from the NeoReactionaries of the Dark Enlightenment to outright white nationalists to calls for cultural isolationism, this constellation of thought is perverse and far from “generous” in any reasonable sense. But the core intellectuals of this movement have 12 Buckley can imagine academic freedom for a scholar’s research outside the classroom, but he manages not to see any relation between research and pedagogy and makes no allowance for expertise in the classroom. In fact, the only rights to be trampled in the classroom, in his view, are the student’s. Buckley creates a hypothetical scenario involving the dismissal of a socialist instructor, and with this straw-man in mind he claims, “No freedom has been abridged in the case of Professor Smith. Rather, the freedom of the consumer has been upheld” (1951, 168). A little further on he argues that “academic freedom must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools they oversee and support” (1951, 169).

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succeeded at facilitating a kind of public engagement that others have too long ignored. Further, while Florida House Bill 233 doesn’t display the language of the Alternative Right or refer to any of its intellectual core, it is hard not to see its convergence with principles that promote cultural homogeneity and the exclusion of historically underrepresented perspectives. Greater public engagement, then, manifests quite concretely. Everyone’s a little bit anti-intellectual, to paraphrase a rendering of the ubiquity of racism in the musical Avenue Q (2003). I have not devised this chapter to argue for or to defend some kind of purity of the intellectual. If, however, anti-intellectualism is one of the enduring traits of the American campus novel, it follows that the genre is also at least peripherally complicit in the American public’s declining trust in institutions of higher learning. And it would follow further that the genre’s antiintellectualism works at cross-purposes with its utopian promises. Empty self-aggrandizement, crushing social awkwardness, inscrutable fashion choices, a raft of neuroses and alienations—when it comes to our intellectuals, there’s plenty to laugh at. But are the genre’s anti-intellectual impulses, read in our time of inchoate authoritarianisms and climate disaster and global pandemic, a laughing matter?

Works Cited Bloom, Harold. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Bové, Paul. 2021. “Editor’s Note.” boundary 2 48 (1): 1–2. Buckley, Jr., William F. 1951 [2002]. God and Man at Yale. New York, NY: Regenery Gateway. Butler, Judith. 1999. “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back.” The New York Times, 20 March. https://archive.nytimes.com/query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage950CE5D61531F933A15750C0A96F958260.html. Carnevale, Anthony P., et al. 2020. “The Role of Education in Taming Authoritarian Attitudes.” Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/authoritarianism/. Ceballos, Ana. 2021. “DeSantis: Universities ‘Intellectually Repressive,’ Survey on Beliefs Is Needed.” The Miami Herald, 22 June. https://www.miamih erald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article252283988.html. De Man, Paul. 1986. “The Resistance to Theory.” In The Resistance to Theory, Vol. 33, 3–20. Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2019. Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Florida Department of Education: Required Instruction and Planning and Reporting. 2021. https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/19958/urlt/74.pdf. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1987. “Authority, (White) Power, and the (Black) Critic; It’s All Greek to Me.” Cultural Critique 7 (Autumn): 19-46. Guillory, John. 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. House Bill 233: An Act Relating to Postsecondary Education (FL). 2021. Hofstadter, Richard. 1963. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York, NY: Vintage. Jones, Andrew. 2019. “The Kids Are Alt-Right: The Intellectual Origins of the Alt-Right.” Ph.D. dissertation, York University, Toronto. McGurl, Mark. 2009. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1887 [2007]. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Porter, Lavelle. 2019. The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Prose, Francine. 2000. Blue Angel. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Redfield, Marc. 2016. Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Reed, Ishmael. 1993 [1996]. Japanese by Spring. London: Penguin. Rossen, Janice. 1993. The University in Modern Fiction: When Power Is Academic. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Russo, Richard. 1997. Straight Man. New York, NY: Random House. Smiley, Jane. 1995 [2009]. Moo. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1835 [2007]. Democracy in America. Translated by Henry Reeve. Edited by Isaac Kramnick. New York, NY: Norton Critical Edition. Waters, Lindsay. 2021. “To Become What One Is: Why I Seek the Revival of Criticism.” boundary 2 48 (1): 251–63. Williams, Jeffrey. 2012. “The Rise of the Academic Novel.” American Literary History 24 (3) (Fall): 561–89.

CHAPTER 4

Unauthorized Sex?: Sex, Power, and Privilege in the Campus Novel

Tucked into the middle of the exposé-documentary The Hunting Ground (2015) lies a montage of eight university officials’ interviews and public relations statements. The first administrator begins: “Any allegation of sexual assault is something that we at the university take very seriously.” A dean of students replies to an interviewer, “We take all incidents very seriously.” A television news anchor reads aloud a statement from the head football coach at the University of California at Los Angeles: “We take these accusations very seriously.” Another news anchor reads aloud a statement from Occidental College: “We take reports like this very seriously.” Edited this way, the phrase “to take very seriously” strikes a note of administrative cant rather than reflecting the exhaustion of an enfeebled idiom. Something dismissive, even sinister appears to be moving about behind the scenes. Framed to ironize, the montage supports The Hunting Ground’s thesis that university officials are complicit in the sexual assaults that are endemic on American university campuses. If the warrant for this passage rests largely on the effect of its editing, other passages provide damning data that contrast the numbers of known assault reports on prominent university campuses against the numbers of penalties provided there. The University of Virginia performs particularly badly at the end of a montage of reports-to-penalty ratios: from 1998 to 2013, according to the documentary, 205 sexual assaults were reported there, resulting in

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zero expulsions for sexual misconduct—while during the same period 183 students were expelled for academic dishonesty. The Hunting Ground punctuates a period of intense scrutiny of sexual misconduct at the American university in the post-Recession era. Premiering at Sundance and later airing on C.N.N. in edited form, the documentary itself was part of this zeitgeist, rousing calls for greater oversight of university policy as well as controversy about its accuracy and fairness in representing particular cases. In the same period, the Obama and Trump administrations both committed substantial political capital to rethinking implementations of Title I.X. of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in educational organizations that receive federal funding. National attention focused on both the 2011 “Dear Colleague Letter” from Obama’s Department of Education, which shifted Title I.X. enforcement from facilitating equity in sports to adjudicating sexual harassment and assaults on campus, and the 2020 “Final Rule,” in which the Trump administration clarified the process for adjudicating reports of sexual harassment and for which Secretary of Education Betsy Devos was criticized by many for giving too much protection to those accused of sexual misconduct.1 Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz’s 2014 “Mattress Performance (Carry that Weight)” symbolized for many the traumas and burdens carried by sexual assault survivors on American campuses. The Rolling Stone article “A Rape on Campus” (2014) featured a story of a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity, wallowing in salacious detail, generating extensive media coverage, leading to the suspension of all fraternities associated with the university—and within five months being retracted in its entirety after journalists found discrepancies in the reporting and after an investigation by the Charlottesville, Virginia police failed to find any credible evidence for the reporting. In 2016, news outlets and social media were awash in outrage when the Stanford University student Brock Turner received a lenient

1 The ethical philosopher and legal scholar Martha Nussbaum reviews the “Final Rule” favorably. In Citadels of Pride (2021), she writes that then-U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, despite being “a polarizing figure,” produced Title I.X. reform that is “arguably fair. It seems distinctly superior both to the draft rule and to the standards articulated by the Obama administration” (Nussbaum 2021, 121). DeVos was trounced for these due-process policies, accused of pushing a men’s rights agenda. Perhaps had her chief executive not famously boasted of sexual assaults, DeVos may have received a more even-handed review of her department’s “Final Rule.”

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sentence for his three felony counts of sexual assault. His trial was adjudicated, as many noted, by a Stanford alumnus on the bench. Sex is one of the rare issues for which criticism of the university is bipartisan, albeit in often competing registers. For all the public attention, not to mention all of the material hurt and trauma signified by these stories and by the statistics they invoke, the epidemic of campus sexual assault remains a complex issue. Studies of campus sexual assault, for instance, seldom discuss the American exceptionalism involved—the prominence of residential life and co-curricular programming in higher learning in the U.S., the particular cultures of binge drinking in America. These characteristics make for unique vulnerabilities to sexual misconduct at American universities. The university administrators of The Hunting Ground’s “very seriously” montage might have pointed out some of these complexities, had they the opportunity to discuss the difficult nuances of these situations. They might have noted, for instance, that one of the unusual elements of Brock Turner’s case— in addition to it having been judged by an alumnus of his university, in addition to the remarkable intervention by two other students to prevent Turner from fleeing—was that Turner’s rape of the unconscious fellow student took place on campus. The widely known statistic that one in five women are sexually assaulted during their college years, while borne out in study after study, obscures where those assaults have taken place.2 This confusion may in fact lead some to conclude that the university campus acts foremost as a “hunting ground” and to underestimate the risks that may await off-campus. Worse, L.G.B.T.Q. and non-binary students experience still higher rates of assault than those captured for college-aged women.3 The one-in-five statistic also refers to a wide range of sexual misconduct suffered by college women, including not only completed rape, but also attempted rape, forced kissing, and unwanted groping

2 In most of the studies that replicate the finding that one in five college women suffer sexual assaults, the figures conflate sexual violence that takes place on- and off-campus (Kaukinen et al. 2017, 21). 3 Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan suggest that this discrepancy may reflect a better

standard of affirmative consent among L.G.B.T.Q. students, as well as a more refined vocabulary for assault than that demonstrated by heterosexual, cis-gendered students. “The high rates of assault among L.G.B.T.Q. people,” they argue, “may in part reflect their refusal to accept heterosexual students’ normalization of sexual aggression” (Hirsch and Khan 2020, 134).

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(Kaukinen et al. 2017, 18).4 Any of those actions of course must be condemned and redressed, and universities’ compliance with Title I.X. policies must rise to the occasion.5 At the same time, one must also bear in mind that the university campus may be less likely than off-campus sites to be the place where sexual assaults happen. And misunderstanding the relative dangers of on- and off-campus settings may well lead a student to precisely the off-campus situations that seem to elevate her risk of assault.6 Even so, students’ exposure to sexual assault flatly repudiate the utopian spaces of Exemption described in the second chapter. One of the more troubling passages of The Hunting Ground is a nearly 15-minute discussion of rape allegations involving the student-athlete Jameis Winston in late 2012. Winston, a celebrated quarterback, would later become the youngest player to win a Heisman Trophy and would go on to lead the Florida State University Seminoles to a national championship. The details of the allegations are disturbing. The passage notes the student’s and her family’s excitement for her enrollment at Florida State; her account of being drugged at an off-campus bar and secreted away to an apartment off-campus where she was violently raped during her first semester; her recollection of discovering, months later, that her assailant was a star football player; and the records of contact with the Florida 4 Rennison, Kaukinen, and Meade trace the one-in-five figure across several studies, but also explicate its details. For instance, their study reaffirms that the one-in-five figure refers not only to completed rape, but also to a range of other sexual assaults (Rennison et al. 2017, 20). And it is not a yearly rate, but a “lifetime college risk” that a student runs across a four-year college career (Rennison et al. 2017, 21). Perhaps most importantly, the one-in-five figure does not determine where the assaults happen; it would be false to assume that these events take place exclusively on college campus, and the data indicate that assaults against college-age women take place slightly more frequently off-campus (Rennison et al. 2017, 21). 5 American universities’ performance in compliance is indeed unworthy of public trust.

A Senate inquiry in 2014, for instance, found that 21% of universities offered no sexual assault training for faculty, that 30% of campus security units had no specific training on sexual assault, that 73% of colleges and universities had no formal procedures by which to interface with local police, and most alarmingly that 41% of colleges and universities “had not conducted a single sexual assault investigation in the five years prior to the study” (Eigenberg and Belknap 2017, 187). The “Dear Colleague Letter” that reformed Title I.X. policies in 2011 may have improved this performance: in 2010 there were 11 Title I.X. complaints filed with the Office of Civil Rights, but and there that many complaints filed in February of 2016 alone (Smith 2017, 271). Still, the performance here is sorry indeed. 6 See, for instance, Kaukinen et al. 25.

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State University officials as well as the Tallahassee, Florida police department that suggest high-level protection of the star student-athlete against the student’s allegations. A year after the student reported, the rape kit that was taken the night of her assault was finally tested and confirmed the presence of Winston’s D.N.A. But after this long delay, prosecutors felt they had insufficient evidence to prosecute, and sexual assault charges were dropped. The passage juxtaposes this story being narrated by the accuser and others alongside images of Winston being feted by tailgating fans, hoisting trophies—“disturbing” hardly captures it. Complicating matters further, Winston’s segment of The Hunting Ground is by far the longest amount of time given to a single case of sexual assault in the documentary. The claim I will present here is somewhat uncomfortable to make: I don’t intend to discount the experience of a woman who has already suffered tremendous trauma and subsequent retraumatization, but I do want to evaluate an effect of The Hunting Ground’s outlining and editing. The documentary’s disproportionate focus on Winston is surely due to factors including the grim and conspiratorial details of the case, as well as to the abundance of news footage that the documentarians could pull from, such as a refrain from E.S.P.N. anchors decrying “how terribly, terribly unfair” the accusations were to this young man, whose career was on the line. But since it is the only segment of the film dedicated to a single case, the Winston material also has the unfortunate effect of reinforcing the myth of the Black predator. Understanding the documentary’s outline as implicit in this racialized mythology is instructive of how we talk about sexual assault. In Sexual Citizens (2020), their study of undergraduate sexuality and particularly the sexual assault of undergraduate students, Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan, argue: “The characterization of those who commit assault as sociopathic perpetrators and the portrayal of the greatest risk as coming from serial predators echo the 1990s ‘superpredator’ conversation. Both are built on a sometimes racialized imagination about a predatory other” (xxv). Read this way, the trope of the campus as a “hunting ground” encodes race as it dramatizes the risks of sexual violence. The campus novel is replete with mystifications such as this when it comes to representations of sex and power on campus. And in these representations, the genre often also undermines one of its own chief appeals—the utopian impulse discussed in chapter two as associated with tropes of the big man on campus and in chapter seven as antiwork themes. Here again we trace the fundamental antinomy of the

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campus novel, operating on a fulcrum that posits countervailing politics of Exemption: if the big man on campus is Exempt from, among other things, bourgeois social conventions, the inverse of this trope is that he may also have license to sexual assault. We have seen a version of this in the introduction’s study of Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966), in which our supposed hero sexually assaults not one but two of his women classmates—with the novel’s narration seeming to frame these acts as mere pranks. What place do such ideas have in the genre and in the universities that it claims to represent? This chapter demonstrates how the genre authorizes sexual power and even sexual assault in discussions of Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), which purports to document the oversexed environment of the American university and especially its big men on campus, in Francine Prose’s Blue Angel (2000), which suffuses an affair between a creative writing professor and his student with ambivalence about, or even reactionary refusals of, sexual harassment discourses, and in Julia May Jonas’s Vladímír (2022), which revolves around a pair of sexual predation plots, one between professor and student and the other between a senior professor and her junior colleague. The campus novel, we will see, tends to authorize sexual power and sometimes even sexual violence, often implicitly operating on raced myths of sexual predation and complicating its utopian promises of autonomy and self-determination.

Elided Assaults and Imagined Predators in I Am Charlotte Simmons Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons begins with an epigraphic passage from a fictional Dictionary of Nobel Laureates to establish the milieu for his sprawling novel of collegiate sexuality. He imagined the setting, Dupont University, after reconnoitering students, staff, and alumni at Stanford University, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Florida. The epigraph describes how a young assistant professor of psychology at Dupont, Victor Ransome Starling, removed the amygdala from some 30 cats. The results were shocking. Not only did the test-subject cats demonstrate “sexual arousal hypermanic in the extreme,” but so did the cats in the control group. “Over a period of weeks,” the dictionary entry states, the cats

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in the control group “had become so thoroughly steeped in an environment of hypermanic sexual obsession that behaviour induced surgically in the amygdalectomized cats had been induced in the controls without any intervention whatsoever” (Wolfe 2004, 1, 2). The discovery that social milieu would overcome biology in determining sex drive would result in Starling’s Nobel Prize years later, increasing Dupont’s already formidable prestige when he would become its twentieth professor to receive the accolade. Further, Starling’s discovery offers something of a thesis statement for Wolfe’s diagnosis of the conditions of American higher learning in the new millennium. That Wolfe begins this novel with a vignette about faculty life is perhaps fitting, despite the fact that Simmons involves several interwoven plots pertaining to Dupont undergraduates. Wolfe’s characters deal with a range of troubles: Charlotte Simmons, from a rural and poor family, simultaneously struggles with feelings of isolation and begins to experience sexual desire, evidently for the first time; Jojo Johanssen, the star basketball player, is trying to recreate his identity to allow for a burgeoning interest in philosophy; Adam Gellin is caught up in an academic dishonesty charge; and Hoyt Thorpe is trying to live his best life as a big man on campus in the vaunted Saint Ray fraternity. Saturating those threads is a milieu of wanton sex. If the plotlines appear like a mélange of bildungsroman narratives, Wolfe’s narrative voice always acts as a sociological observer—and a superannuated one at that: Wolfe was 74 years old when he published his documentary study of “hypermanic” undergraduate sexuality. Simmons, then, is a product of the pseudosociological pathologies of popular discourse to capture American higher learning, and particularly the sex lives of American undergraduates.7 7 Christopher Findeisen reads Simmons as a campus sports novel. Reading Simmons alongside Owen Johnson’s Stover at Yale (1912) and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2012), Findeisen studies the contrasts between the amateurism of a student-athlete on the lacrosse team, the professional ambitions of star basketball players such as Jojo, and Charlotte’s fulfillment of academic ideals to argue that Simmons demonstrates a dichotomy between business and education that “remains the genre’s fundamental antagonism, an opposition that college athletics either intensifies impedes, or resolves” (2016, 69). This is a worthwhile investigation of Simmons in addition to my focus on the novel’s treatment of sexual assault. I remain somewhat ambivalent about one of the readings therein—that “it would seem that true education cannot take place within institutions subsumed by business interests” (Findeisen 2016, 74), which seems to discount Jojo’s burgeoning, genuine curiosity. But Findeisen’s identification of the campus sports novel frames an important criticism of the genre, discussed in the first chapter: the genre’s fundamental

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By this late stage in his career, Wolfe had fully brought to bear journalistic experience to a distinctive style of realism—sociological in its goals of investigating American culture, while also at times indulging in wildly overdrawn social scenarios and bombastic sentences. These two traits are often at odds with each other.8 Readers familiar with Wolfe will not be surprised to find in Simmons excessive sentences, obtrusive narration, and a general lack of attention to character interiority that would seem to flout the cornerstones of literary realism, whether practiced in the late nineteenth century or during the Program Era. At one point, for instance, Wolfe’s narration describes students’ entry to bars via “a fake I.D., which was illegal” (377). Reviews of the novel were unimpressed at best and savage at worst.9 What Theo Tait says of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe’s 1987 break into fiction, also illuminates the documentary goals of Simmons, part of a vestigial New Journalism that defined the second half of Wolfe’s writing career: it is “powerfully mimetic, not of how the world goes round, but of how we idly and crudely imagine it does.” Simmons is a novel of sexual assault—though unknowingly, it seems, as its narration doesn’t acknowledge this reality. How could a novel polarity of business and learning sustains a myth for the reader that the university stands apart from the prevailing economic orthodoxies as an engine of democratic access and equality when in fact, in Findeisen’s reading, it is a driving factor of the inequalities of our society. 8 In coining the term “hysterical realism,” the critic James Wood lamented that in novels such as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), “The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked. Appropriately, then, objections are not made at the level of verisimilitude, but at the level of morality: this style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality—the usual charge against botched realism—but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself.” (2000) Simmons runs adjacent to hysterical realism in its outlandish and overdrawn passages, and similarly strains its claims to sociological verisimilitude. 9 Stephen Metcalf’s review for Slate holds little back: “This is an eminently foolish book, by an old man for whom the life of the young has become a grotesque but tantalizing rumor. It is overdrawn, overlong, underconsidered, and filled with at least one foreheadslapping ay caramba per page. (That adds up to 676, by the way. This is the predictable doorstop, perfectly timed for seasonal gifting.) At one point I wrote in its margins, ‘The stupidity here may actually be boundless’” (2004). Metcalf identified three failures of the novel, each dealing with mimesis: that “Wolfe has somehow run together Harvard with N.C. State, thus producing a complete chimera,” that Wolfe seems to have bought every piece of “sexual folklore” told to him on his tour of universities, that because Wolfe imagines the university as inherently debased, he must imagine his protagonist as completely pure (2004). This latter failure prompts Metcalf to reflect, “The novel hasn’t seen such a tediously guarded virginity since Richardson’s Pamela” (2004).

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published in 2004 misunderstand this central fact? One must first understand the way that Wolfe characterizes Charlotte Simmons as she enters the “hypermanic” sexual milieu of the American university. Despite being a high school valedictorian, Charlotte is ill-suited to Dupont: she is a virgin, and further she is particularly unprivileged. Wolfe’s narration hectors this last point in repeated over-explication of the Simmons family’s speech10 and in a cringe-inducing passage in which the Simmonses first meet the affluent family of Charlotte’s roommate, Beverly Amory, and commit an insufferable series of faux pas culminating in the poor Appalachians blundering their way into inviting the brahmin Amory family to a meal at the Sizzlin Skillet. Like many others, the Sizzlin Skillet passage is cartoonishly overdrawn and suggests that, despite his professed reconnoitering of Alleghany County, North Carolina, Tom Wolfe appears never to have spoken to a poor person. The sum result of this characterization defines Charlotte’s first semester at Dupont: the thrill of prestige and intellectual stimulation quickly giving way to feelings of isolation and loneliness and to a deep need to accumulate status. The novel is not only, then, a study of the oversexed American undergrad, but also an analysis of class status in America—a line of inquiry that typifies Wolfe’s writing career and that he attributed to the influence of the sociologist Max Weber. These two agendas fare unevenly in Simmons. At the core of Wolfe’s novel lie two passages that augur sexual assault. Both take place during Charlotte’s first semester at Dupont, and both are potentially traumatizing for readers who have experienced sexual assault, as may be the following paragraphs. The first of Wolfe’s sexual assault passages takes place at a party at the infamous Saint Ray house, to which Charlotte, whose pieties usually lead her away from indulgences of the flesh, is driven out of a developing fear of social isolation. The passage displays a rapid rising action, full of foreboding. Charlotte is separated from her friends almost upon entry; Hoyt pressures her to continue a house tour deeper and deeper into the fraternity complex, as they pass by other fraternity brothers hail Hoyt’s drinking reputation, and Hoyt successfully coerces Charlotte into accepting some wine. There’s an overt

10 Wolfe translates Charlotte’s father as he welcomes guests in her honor at a dinner during winter break: “‘Charlotte, we’re gonna put you right’—riot —‘here at the head of the table, so’s you can tell everybody’—everbuddy—‘about Dupont. Everybody’s gonna be real interested’—innerested. He looked about at the Thomses, Miss Pennington. ‘Isn’t that right?’ In’at riot ?” (2004, 590).

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reference to roofies being deployed against a woman nearby, and the narration suggests, though it ultimately doesn’t bear out, that Hoyt has drugged Charlotte’s drink, too. Hoyt brings her to a private room, and at what appears the last possible moment, Charlotte flees the building. This sequence is calibrated to make the reader recoil in apprehension of an imminent sexual assault. She is indeed wary and even fearful as Hoyt’s house tour progresses, but she becomes enamored of the status she accumulates by Hoyt’s side. As Wolfe’s narration has it, “the social striver won” over her sense of trepidation (2004, 229). The second passage unfolds in a similar pattern, though perhaps evoking less readerly horror, when Charlotte attends a Saint Ray formal as Hoyt’s date. By this time Charlotte has developed more curiosity about sexuality generally and some attraction to Hoyt particularly—part of a long arc toward sexual activity that Wolfe creates to describe her acculturation to the “hypermanic” sexual milieu of university life. If the passage is less calibrated to effect readers’ apprehension, however, its conclusion is still more distressing than Charlotte’s experience at the Saint Ray house. Charlotte learns that she is to share a room with Hoyt and another couple at the hotel that will host the formal, and once they check in she succumbs to peer pressure and takes to binge drinking. After the banquet, Charlotte finds herself on the dance floor with Hoyt, and when Hoyt asks her to go upstairs, she is willing—but she is unclear exactly how far she wants to go with him, and they never discuss any such parameters. Her feelings toggle between wary and curious. As they move from making out to undressing, Charlotte cannot calculate exactly when to “say something”—a phrase that repeats, its ambiguity showing her inexperience and lack of sexual vocabulary. When she begins to vocalize her reluctance, calling Hoyt’s name forcefully, telling him “I don’t know if we should do this,” Hoyt learns that Charlotte is a virgin (Wolfe 2004, 519). When Hoyt responds with reassurances of gentleness and proceeds, Charlotte relents. She quiets herself from vocalizing the pain he induces. She carries a twofold worry. First, there is a concern for status: “Did she dare become known as the teasing bitch who lets a guy get worked up, worked up, worked up […] and then waves a finger and says no–nono-oh? Ohmygod what would that look like—would that bury Charlotte Simmons for good?” (Wolfe 2004, 520). The second concern, occurring to her as she manages her pain, reflects an internalized, reactionary sense of feminine duty: “She couldn’t tell him to stop, couldn’t even tell him to slow down, because…because that look of rapture on his face was what

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she wanted” (Wolfe 2004, 521). Afterward, Hoyt is mostly indifferent to her presence in the room. The import of this second passage diverges widely for Wolfe’s characters—and likely for his readers, as well. Overheard by Charlotte boasting to his friends of the conquest and noting only the scandals of her virginity and of what he finds to be her inadequate grooming, Hoyt seems not to have registered any wrongdoing whatsoever. Charlotte soon afterward falls into a depressive episode that will last through the winter break and into the spring term. But Wolfe’s narration frames the matter as Charlotte’s grief for her fallen virtue, rather than as a post-traumatic response to sexual assault. Seeing that Charlotte clearly did not want intercourse with Hoyt even if she at some point relented to his desires, readers are likely—perhaps still likelier in the post-Recession era than Wolfe’s 2004—to label this episode a sexual assault. Hirsch and Khan provide a clean definition of sexual assault: “unwanted nonconsensual sexual contact” (2020, xxvii). In light of this definition, I cannot find a way to label the scenario at the Saint Ray formal as anything but an assault, given the interiority that Wolfe develops and despite whatever Hoyt’s experience of the matter may have been. One may charitably read Charlotte’s and Hoyt’s understandings of their roles that night as a predictable mix of miscommunication and the sexual scripts that in heterosexual relations encourage women to serve men’s sexual desires. Hirsch and Khan argue that sexual assaults are likely to stem from unclear “sexual projects”—one’s reasons for engaging in sex, which can include to seek libidinal pleasure, to explore one’s gender identity, to accumulate experience, and to accrue social status (2020, xiv). Hirsch and Khan identify a consistent failure in American society to provide young people the vocabularies and the frameworks by which to state, understand, and negotiate their own desires—a systemic failure that is particularly costly for Wolfe’s protagonist who enters the “hypermanic” sexual university directly from bedarkened, as Wolfe would have it, Appalachia. “What kind of society produces people whose sexual projects ignore the basic sexual citizenship of others?,” Hirsch and Khan ask (2020, 20). Further, reflecting on the large set of interview subjects who refused to label their unwanted and nonconsensual sexual experiences as assaults and referring to the Title I.X. programming that typifies university orientations, they ask, “What does it mean to be so unsure of one’s sexual boundaries, so without a language for physical and sexual autonomy, that you need a workshop on consent to understand that

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you’ve been violated?” (Hirsch and Khan 2020, 26). Reading Wolfe’s novel in light of questions such as these, capacious as it is to do so, does not distract from the fact of Charlotte’s assault or Wolfe’s unawareness of it. What does it mean that Simmons itself does not seem to understand or acknowledge this defining fact? Given the repetition of the rising-action device in the passages discussed above, with the first especially foreshadowing danger to Charlotte, one might reasonably assume that Wolfe is playing with readers’ knowledge of sexual assaults on campus. One might assume from these passages, in other words, that Wolfe is not creating tension merely for the sake of drama, but that these passages demonstrate his sociological ambitions—to document the peril facing undergraduate women as they enroll in American universities. But these readings do not square with Wolfe’s representation of the sexual assault’s aftermath. When Charlotte becomes depressed, the attending feelings are those of shame. Shame of course can attend trauma, but given Wolfe’s tendency to over-explication, the lack of discussion of trauma here is noteworthy. Charlotte is troubled to be disabused of her sincerely held belief that she and Hoyt were in love at the time of the Saint Ray formal. In her recollection of that night, she maneuvers the episode into active voice: “I let him grope and feel and explore practically my whole body on a public elevator,” Charlotte rehearses in an imagined confession to her mother (Wolfe 2004, 604). Later, she frames her depression in terms of violation of religious conviction, asking Adam, “Well, have you ever done anything that, I don’t know, was totally out of character or totally against your morals and everything you believed in and then regretted it afterward?” (Wolfe 2004, 616). This is a particularly vexing way for Charlotte to understand her assault, given that the text has not demonstrated her religious piety heretofore, instead perhaps leaving readers to make inferences based on her poor Appalachian upbringing. Simmons, then, presents itself as the narrative of a fallen woman—particularly one who loses her virtue as a result of the oversexed university milieu—at the expense of acknowledging its protagonist’s traumatic experiences. It is not entirely fair, of course, to judge the novel and its moment by a different era’s standards, which have evolved considerably in tandem with scrutiny from the Department of Education, student activism, and the global #metoo movement. But Simmons ’s moral critique of the university is fundamentally misplaced.

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Still more broadly, that misplaced critique may be read as perpetuating a common, and I think racialized, mystification of sexual assault: that only extremely predatory, extremely violent episodes—most likely those taking place between strangers—constitute sexual assault. This is the construction of sexual assault seen in the many anecdotes of The Hunting Ground, especially the one involving accusations against Jameis Winston, which corresponds to racialized ideologies of sexual violence. Simmons abounds with racial discord, even if the sexual assault described above takes place between two white characters. Wolfe, who was criticized for his discussion of the Black Panthers in his collection of essays Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970), spends an inordinate amount of attention describing the Black bodies of Dupont’s basketball team: the descriptor “chocolate brown” repeats in reference to skin color, for instance, as do marveling descriptions of Black student-athletes’ muscles. Black sexuality is demonstrated implicitly in Wolfe’s description of these bodies, and also in the music that he finds typical of the American undergraduate’s tastes. Wolfe tries his hand at hip-hop throughout the novel with lyrics from Dr. Dis, his approximation of the hip-hop megastar Dr. Dre. For instance, these lyrics greet Dupont basketball players as they return from practice to their locker room: Know’m saying? Fucking gray boy say, ‘Yo, you a beast.’ I take my piece, yo, stick it up yo’ face. Yo li’l dickie shaking, it won’t cease Faking you got heart. You ain’t got shit, yo. Know’m saying? (Wolfe 2004, 45)

The third line’s image of a gun brandished violently suggests Black aggression and criminality. The fourth line’s taunt about an insufficiently “li’l” penis plays on worn stereotypes of virile Black sexuality. While this Dr. Dis vignette doesn’t explicitly describe sexual assault, its violent and racialized phallic images circumscribe myths of Black predation. Lyrics such as these churn through Dupont’s locker room as well as the novel’s house parties and bars. Against this backdrop of Blackness, we might consider Hoyt’s role as exemplary Saint Ray brother. Fraternities are often imagined to be sites at which a woman’s risk of sexual assault is elevated, as we see in the rising action of Charlotte’s ominous tour of the Saint Ray house, replete

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with the binge drinking that puts her at risk. Hirsch and Khan, however, note that “Greek-letter organizations […] are actually only associated with higher rates of binge drinking when they are white men’s Greek letter organizations” (2020, 74). Aside from race-based evidence, data also show that wealthier students are likelier to engage in riskier behavior such as drinking to excess precisely because they can afford the risk (Hirsch and Khan 2020, 66). And yet Hoyt’s actions are uninterrogated by Wolfe’s novel—no further, at least, than his unchivalrous disregard for Charlotte after his conquest. Read alongside the novel’s concern for other dubious sexuality such as that posed in the Dr. Dis lyrics, Hoyt’s acquittal is noteworthy. The novel absolves Hoyt of the dishonor of labeling him a sex assaulter in part because of his and Charlotte’s unarticulated “sexual projects”—and also in part due to the privileges of whiteness. The evidence for that reading is circumstantial, one might say, relying heavily on the representation of Black bodies and Black culture unrelated to the Saint Ray formal. The end result is still further evidence, however: neither can Hoyt imagine himself as having committed an assault, nor can Charlotte imagine Hoyt as having committed an assault or herself being the victim of an assault. That is a fateful, and I suspect racially construed, ideological mystification about sex and especially about unwanted sex. And if it is indeed a raced conceptualization, it is yet another demonstration of the campus novel’s imagination of race and Othering to read along its broader relationship to the culture wars. This myth of the Black predator is not native to the genre, of course, but its appearance there has the effect of authorizing sexual assault that falls anywhere other than the most extreme situations of completed rape. Needless to say, this tendency, alongside its penchant for anti-intellectualism, is among the genre’s most reactionary traits—and like the genre’s anti-intellectualism, it is highly confounding for the lived experiences of university life.

Parables of Ambivalence: Ironies of Assault and Harassment in Blue Angel and Vladi´mi´r If Simmons is unknowingly a campus novel of sexual assault, Francine Prose’s Blue Angel and Julia May Jonas’s Vladímír overtly study campus sexual harassment and the discourses that attend to it. These novels approach campus sexual harassment with an ambivalence that underlines the systemic misogyny of the university. Blue Angel takes place at fictional Euston College: its physical setting rural Vermont, its milieu steeped in

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“the current political climate” (Prose 2000, 16). At the start of the novel, Euston is about to begin a sexual harassment seminar in response to developments at nearby “State,” where students are demonstrating against an art history professor who had commented “Yum” in response to a slide featuring a classical Greek marble of a female nude (Prose 2000, 18). This crisis, as well as the hectoring that ensues, echoes a similar device in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000): both texts provide disorderly jumbles of bids to freedom of expression, tinged with resentments of socalled political correctness and critical theory—in Prose’s case, applying this discursive muddle to a plot and set of themes that orbit sex and the disciplining of sexual behavior on campus. With this strained milieu as the novel’s backdrop, Ted Swenson, a midlife and professionally stagnant professor of creative writing, and his student Angela Argo begin a relationship that evolves from mentorship to sexual affair to campus scandal. Prose’s satire of these characters, of their private and public foibles, and of the academic discussions that suffuse it all amounts to, at best, an ambivalence toward the sexual misconduct that drives Blue Angel ’s plot and themes. Blue Angel begins as a satire. Though its punchlines are sometimes obscured in the haze of the complex and nuanced subject matter of sex, the novel announces this mission at its outset. The novel opens with Ted Swenson asking of his creative writing seminar, “Is it my imagination, or have we been seeing an awful lot of stories about humans having sex with animals?” (Prose 2000, 1). The challenge before him is simultaneously a high-wire act and a mundane chore: How is he to lead a productive conversation about a student’s submission for a critique session when it is full of technical flaws, not least its conceit “in which a teenager, drunk and frustrated after a bad date with his girlfriend, rapes an uncooked chicken by the light of the family fridge?” (Prose 2000, 1). Through this scene and the remainder of the text, the novel presents Swenson as a sympathetic character. The vignette succinctly lampoons professorial ennui, and from that ennui may well stem Swenson’s affair with Angela. But it also frames sex itself as a punchline. Blue Angel ’s satire diminishes as the novel’s sexual harassment proceedings develop. If Swenson’s affair with Angela conjures tropes of pathetic midlife crises, Prose is quick to lampoon him and the clichés themselves. He is no suave lothario: well before any affair develops, a colleague abruptly rebukes him, “Ted, if you sleep with Angela Argo, I’ll never talk to you again” indicating that Swenson is clumsily radiating clues to everyone

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but the reader that he’s interested in this student (Prose 2000, 79). When Swenson and Angela finally have sex, some halfway into the novel, they are interrupted by his own body’s deterioration. “What was that ?,” Angela demands. “I heard it through my skull” (Prose 2000, 171). Swenson has lost a tooth, which has been a constant irritant for him— losing in the bargain also his erection and his dignity. How do they arrive at this classic, perverse trope of the professor-student relationship? Angela’s writing project for Swenson’s course has earlier developed a teacher-student romance plot, and in a subsequent draft that relationship becomes sexual. From his campus office, Swenson dials a number for a phone-sex operation that Angela includes in one of her poems. “What will a call to a sex line at the college’s expense do for his professional reputation?,” he wonders, already having committed to dialing the number (Prose 2000, 123). He finds that the number indeed rings a phone-sex operator, but that Angela no longer works there. The answer to his rhetorical question is suspended until a campus harassment inquiry will take this call as evidence. Following their failed attempt at sex, the mood sours and the satire diminishes in kind: Angela’s classmates viciously critique her writing, resentful at least of the signs that Swenson favors her and maybe aware of more than that. Angela prods him for an introduction to his literary agent, and issues a barb: “The only reason I let you fuck me was so you would help me get this novel to someone who could do something” (Prose 2000, 236). Her secret recording of this conversation will eventually be featured in the campus inquiry, despite the fact that no such terms were discussed prior to or during their affair. Swenson is formally charged with sexual assault, he is protested by the Faculty-Student Women’s Alliance, the hearing is a public circus, and the proceedings are suspended without a formal decision. One might charitably read this sequence as Kafkaesque, our protagonist ensnared in a web of bureaucracies and discourses that result in his downfall. Corresponding to this plot trajectory, the novel’s tone shifts from jibing satire to somber polemic. This tonal shift is completed in Blue Angel ’s final action. Swenson’s sexual harassment hearing session has concluded, rife with manipulations of fact and taking the appearance at times of a show-trial, with Dean Bentham telling him that he will receive their decision within a couple of weeks. Swenson tries to confront Angela just outside the hearings, but is ushered away by the Dean. While walking across campus to leave, he hears bells tolling from Euston’s bell tower. But the timing is off. “It’s

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twenty-five past, so why are the ringing now?,” Swenson thinks to himself. “Then gradually, it dawns on him. It’s the Women’s Alliance, announcing their triumph over another male oppressor, one small step along the path toward a glorious future” (Prose 2000, 314). This moment is not subject to irony or satire: the professor has not misread his watch, nor is he cast as some embittered fool, lashing out in his disgrace. “Glorious future”— in the narration’s description of Swenson’s perspective, there is a distant rhyming echo of Maoist rhetoric describing the Faculty-Student Women’s Alliance and sexual harassment policies generally as exercises in raw power and group-think. The novel develops this polemic edge along a twinned axis of resentments—of feminism and theory, of sexual harassment policies and their disciplinary authority—that percolate through the text. The FacultyStudent Women’s Alliance provides a strawman for feminist theory and feminist activism throughout the text, not only in its triumphant seizure of the Euston bell tower. Soon after Swenson is informed of the harassment accusation, the activists demonstrate on campus, demanding that the college be made safe for women. “STOP SEXUAL HARASSMENT NOW. NO WHITEWASH FOR SEXUAL HARASSERS,” their banners read, draping the women’s residence halls (Prose 2000, 258). Swenson’s wife Sherrie, who works in Euston’s health center, walks past one demonstration and reports that its speakers were “ranting in that shrill, strained warble that she says could make you understand why guys hate women” (Prose 2000, 258). Swenson supposes that these women dream of “Amazon utopia” (Prose 2000, 261). Tropes of the maddened campus mob are not uncommon, driving for instance the campus tumult over allegations against a literature professor in the Netflix series The Chair (2021), which shares many tropes and plotlines with Blue Angel. Further, fitting the themes developed in the previous chapter, the novel pairs these rebukes of feminist zealotry with passages resenting critical theory. Swenson resents a colleague for being “the English Department’s expert in the feminist misreading of literature”; perhaps unsurprising for the polemic of this novel, she also serves as head of the Faculty-Student Women’s Alliance (Prose 2000, 20). This resentment spreads from feminist thinkers to other branches of theory. For instance, another colleague whom Swenson nicknames “Deconstructionist Jamie” is pilloried for supposedly decentering the sacred role of the writer: “He hates books,” Swenson thinks to himself, “or as he calls them: texts ” (Prose 2000, 97). Read charitably, perhaps Blue Angel ’s polemic may not foster sexist

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antipathy to women, but may stem from a writerly concern for feminist or other theory projects by which authors lose control of the meaning of their work. The theory polemics that are familiar echoes of the genre’s antiintellectualism, however, become still more regressive when paired with Blue Angel ’s themes and plots regarding sexual harassment. Effectively, the novel dismisses sexual harassment as a result of oversensitivity and disciplinary will-to-power. This is clearest in a tirade—shrill and warbling in equal measure to the tone his wife imputes to demonstrating feminists—that Swenson cuts loose at a dinner party at Dean Bentham’s home. Bentham hosts the dinner in order to assess the campus climate in light of the harassment proceedings that are unfolding at nearby State. This passage takes place before Swenson and Angela sleep together, before her accusations of sexual harassment and the subsequent hearings, before the Faculty-Student Women’s Alliance’s triumphant bell-ringing— and it could be read in a satirical tone, lampooning the drunken and curmudgeonly professor, lampooning the awkwardness that follows when coworkers share drinks after hours. The conversation has turned to students’ sensitivity to discussions of profanity and sexual content in literature courses, one colleague citing specifically a recent experience teaching Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” (1971). The students’ response was to turn “white as sheets,” a somewhat chilling development given the perception that sexual harassment charges are circulating freely (Prose 2000, 105). “I think we’ve been giving in without a fight,” Swenson says, a few drinks in. “We’ve been knuckling under to the most neurotic forces of censorship and repression” (Prose 2000, 107). Swenson provides a classic demonstration of free speech values here. And it is of course no coincidence that the Dean who will later prosecute his sexual harassment hearing is named Bentham: an unironic nod to Foucauldian discipline and power even if elsewhere the novel balks at the projects of critical theory. The tirade takes all the air out of the room, and Swenson and Sherrie drive home in awkward silence. In light of Swenson’s subsequent actions and the novel’s general antipathy toward the professors’ and students’ demands for safe campus environments, however, the effect of his tirade is to conflate two disciplinary regimes: the perceived pressure that students exert against a professor’s academic freedom to study Larkin’s poem, and the workplace standards that forbid, for instance, sexual intercourse between a professor and a student.

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Underlying Swenson’s concern for “censorship and repression” is a related concern about student fragility, anticipating the discourses of safe spaces and trigger warnings that would appear some fifteen years after Blue Angel. He proposes to his colleagues a regime of desensitization: “So why don’t we do something like that for these wimps, these…whiners bitching about sexual harassment. Lock them in a room and shout dirty words at them until they grow up. Shit shit shit. Fuck fuck fuck. Like that. You get the idea” (Prose 2000, 107). Other colleagues at the dinner party had lamented student fragility, for instance one student’s complaint, after learning of Edgar Allan Poe’s marriage to a minor, “Are you telling us that we’ve been studying the work of a child molester? I think we should have been told that before we read the assignment” (Prose 2000, 101). Swenson, however, in indicting “whiners bitching about sexual harassment” again conflates classroom matters of academic freedom with workplace matters of sexual misconduct. Problematically, Blue Angel ’s narration treats this statement as no different than the other professors’ classroom laments, and in so doing confuses its own textual statement about freedom and discipline. There is, to be sure, reason to believe that Swenson has not sexually harassed Angela. If she had understood sexual intercourse as part of a transaction for which she would gain access to a literary agent in return, Angela only raises that issue after they had had sex. Further, there’s little reason to discredit Swenson’s reaction to hearing the news of the sexual assault charges: “But this wasn’t about power. This was about desire. Mutual seduction, let’s say at the least” (Prose 2000, 245). Indeed, most definitions of sexual harassment emphasize “unwanted” sexual attention, and given that Angela initiates their tryst these charges seem ill-suited to the event in question, though the Dean takes her tape-recorded conversation indicating a quid pro quo as evidence to the contrary. From a reader’s omniscient perspective, perhaps, a policy handbook clause about “moral turpitude” would more readily apply. But, despite the surveillance evoked by his name, Dean Bentham does not have the benefit of omniscience, and anyway Blue Angel is more concerned with sexual harassment as a social principle than with Swenson’s tawdry affair. This tangled development demonstrates a perversion of what Aristi Trendel in Pedagogic Encounters (2021) calls the “master-disciple” novel, a subgenre of the campus novel that occupies the zone of uncertainty created by university

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policies that wobble between student accountability and administration of student behavior.11 Coursing through this polemic seems to be a simple disbelief that sexual harassment is all that much to worry about, or even that it is little more than an excuse to discipline sex.12 This is most evident in Blue Angel ’s implicit contrasts between rape and the text’s sexual harassment cases, State’s establishing the novel’s milieu and Swenson’s motivating the plot. The effect of this polar contrast is to dismiss sexual harassment as a non-issue—or, worse, to condemn the very idea of sexual harassment as a tool that has been invented solely for the exercise of disciplinary power. Driving his daughter, a student at State, home for winter break, Swenson learns that she has been working at a rape crisis center. This discovery promptly results in “ten, twelve miles of silence” going by—a lacuna that suggests the grim realities of rape, as well as a father’s difficulty in talking to his daughter about her work in its orbit (Prose 2000, 229). Over Thanksgiving break, she had told him about her concern about the harassment case at State, and robust conversation follows, Swenson dissenting from the idea that teach-in activities about harassment there were commensurate to their use in protest of the Vietnam War (Prose 2000, 209). The “ten, twelve miles of silence” passage, in other words,

11 Trendel traces this ambiguity to the fundamental tensions created by prohibiting consensual sexual relations between professors and students on university campuses. Drawing from Philip Lee’s “The Curious Life of In Loco Parentis at American Universities,” published in Higher Education in Review in 2011, Trendel notes that the “facilitator model” of pedagogy “tries to find a balance between the students’ responsibilities over their actions and the universities’ involvement in them, contrary to the in loco parentis doctrine in force until the 1960s” (2021, xii). The absolutism of this prohibition, in Trendel’s view, prompts a range of works that explore the ramifications of policing not only sexuality but also the relationships that attend the production and conveyance of knowledge. 12 Trendel offers a different view of the novel—that it is not at all polemical, but that it offers readers an opportunity to see Swenson’s and Angela’s failings in some equal measure. “It may not be productive to ask whose side Francine Prose is on,” Trendel writes, “for she is on the side of literature” (2021, 38). Citing passages from the text that demonstrate concern for the fates of literary fiction, Trendel argues that Prose writes a nuanced master-disciple novel that demonstrates Martha Nussbaum’s argument in Poetic Justice (1995) that literature exercises the reader’s moral imagination. This is a compelling alternative to my reading of Blue Angel, though I remain persuaded that Prose’s polarities of forced rape and “mere” harassment lead to a different conclusion about the text’s moral positions.

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takes rape very seriously, giving it its solemn due, marking the unspeakability of violence and trauma—and suggesting it is an extreme outlier of sexual violence, rather than part of a spectrum of sexual assaults. Perhaps the most succinct phrasing of this position is Swenson’s reflection on his students’ writing projects, including the one regarding the uncooked chicken, that “that’s all sex is to these kids. Rape and abuse and incest” (Prose 2000, 183). Part of the trouble here may correspond to the often-misunderstood ways in which rape and sexual harassment are treated under the law: the former subject to criminal prosecution, the latter subject to civil law with the workplace held accountable for the investigation of harassment cases. This difference is further muddied by the varying standards of evidence required by criminal and civil law—“proof beyond a reasonable doubt” for the former and a “preponderance of the evidence,” meaning anything over 50% certainty, for the latter. As Martha Nussbaum explains in Citadels of Pride (2021), the campus process for adjudicating matters of sexual misconduct “typically runs together the two things our legal system has carefully kept apart” (118). In separating rape and sexual assault from sexual harassment, however, Blue Angel isn’t making a case for the rights of the accused. Rather, by posing rape and harassment as binaries, the novel suggests that “censorship and repression,” as Swenson puts it at the Dean’s dinner party, suppress academic freedom in the classroom and academics’ sexual freedoms alike. In other words, Blue Angel, like so many other campus novels, offers a reactionary authorization of sexual harassment that, like Simmons ’s mystifications of sexual assault, confound the very experiences that the campus novel purports to lay claim to. Tucked into the middle of Julia May Jonas’s Vladímír is a passage that may be understood as a rebuke to my reading of Blue Angel ’s ambivalence. Having watched Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) with her adult daughter Sydney and thinking on the film’s misogyny and racism as well as Sydney’s generation’s impatience with the apologia that “it was a different time,” Jonas’s unnamed narrator thinks to herself: I believed that art was not a moral enterprise. The morality in art was what happened when the church or the state got involved. That if you insisted on infusing art with morality you would insist on lies and limits. Truth could be found only outside the confines of morality. Art needed to be taken and rejected on its own terms. Art was not the artist. (2022, 134)

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For the narrator, this is also a generational criticism, her students’ tendency to moralize leading her to dissatisfaction in her teaching career, and corresponding to the generational dividing lines of the highly moralized sex scandal in which she is entangled at her small college in upstate New York. The statement serves as a classic demonstration of autonomous art corresponding with the novel’s writerly disposition and to the genre’s tie to Program Era politics. Jonas’s narrator, then, might say that Blue Angel ’s ambivalence is its greatest aesthetic achievement. The narrator’s concern with moralizing generally also reflects the narrator’s disapproval of the absolutism that suffuses the campus sex scandal involving her husband John—an unwillingness, she perceives, to think about sex and power with nuance, a hastiness, one might say in the 2020s, to “cancel.” However, the bids for autonomy and ambivalence are also convenient and self-serving for the protagonist, who will later drug and shackle a junior colleague with sexual exploitation in mind. Vladímír’s narrator holds to this moral ambivalence as the novel develops two plotlines. First, the narrator, a 58-year-old professor of literature and creative writing, develops a crush for her colleague Vladimir Vladiniski, a recent hire by far her junior by rank and by years, his career seemingly headed toward literary stardom. In this framing Jonas reverses the polarities of tropes of male sexual predation, the object’s name itself suggesting a note of Nabokovian sexual transgression. If the narrator is not the conniving sexual predator conjured in Wolfe’s novel, her plan to drug Vladimir in the chase of some dimly imagined sexual outcome certainly suggests outright predation. The second plotline involves the narrator’s husband, John: a petition seeks to remove him from the college, citing affidavits from seven women who claim to have “engaged with him sexually” during their undergraduate years. “To engage with”—Jonas’s narrator favors this phrase in order to assign agency to these women. John’s scandal plot absorbs most of the novel’s consideration, but illuminates the fraught meanings of the narrator’s own implications in the institutional misogyny typified by sexual assault and sexual harassment. John’s scandal, in Vladímír’s amoral accounting, colors a generational divide, situating the narrator as askew from a changing feminist politics. “At one point we would have called these affairs consensual, for they were, and were conducted with my vague understanding that they were happening. Now, however, young women have apparently lost all agency in romantic entanglements,” the narrator thinks to herself. “Now my husband was abusing his power, never mind that power is the reason they

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desired him in the first place” (Jonas 2022, 10). This beginning frame is crucial to the novel’s understanding of sex, feminism, and the university: “at one point” there was a different politics, to which the narrator is now somewhat anachronistically attached. She sees this in the conduct of her students and also in her daughter, who states that John had exploited a power dynamic with his students. To that the narrator patiently responds, “You’ve got to understand, and I’m not saying this right, but we were all still thinking about sexual liberation—about freeing women from feeling that if they were sexual they weren’t serious or good, or that they would be judged. We didn’t think of sex as trauma” (Jonas 2022, 95). The jeremiad that closes that statement soon escalates to generational antagonism when the narrator suggests that John’s accusers are merely “reacting to a moment now” (Jonas 2022, 95). Jonas’s narrator is quick to identify generational difference, often feeling disappointed or stymied by it. At a pool party, Vladimir’s sculpted torso tantalizingly displayed before her, she and Vladimir lament “how neutered the kids were now, calling their moms every day, prizing friendship over romance” (Jonas 2022, 46). “The kids”—if generational thinking is a notoriously loose heuristic, the narrator finds concrete evidence for it in the censorious milieu of John’s scandal. After students ask her to step aside from classroom duties, suggesting that the very presence of someone in John’s orbit could be too triggering for students, the narrator imagines her students as a mob: “Picturing them in the cafeteria, I started to view their utensils as little pitchforks that they moved up and down. I understood not only the bonding that comes out of complaining but also the incredible sense of identity that comes with discovering why you think something is wrong” (Jonas 2022, 117). The narrator can generate empathy for the younger generation, as in the close of that passage acknowledging the mission and identity that derive from self-righteousness or in another passage lamenting the speed of life that prevents students from experiencing the self-exploration the narrator had enjoyed as a young adult. If she occasionally bends toward empathy or appreciation of her students’ dispositions, however, it sometimes reads as willfully practicing mindfulness to counterbalance her first position: fear and distrust of the young, and especially of her students. At its most extreme, we might read this as a kind of identitarianism displayed by the narrator.

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This generational antagonism also betrays a measure of antiintellectualism, akin to that explored in the previous chapter. The narrator’s wariness of the young is not a conventional disapproval of young fashion or music, nor is it even only a disapproval of the personal dispositions of the young, disputatious or presumptuous as some of the narrator’s students can be. Instead, the narrator is wary of the knowledge this generation has generated and has subscribed to, particularly that associated with sexuality and sexual identity. This wariness is reinforced by Sidney, who displays an abrupt volte fascia. Early in the text, Sidney subscribes to a younger sex-morality, calling her mother “an enabler, an accessory” to her father’s liaisons, which she at this point understands as exploiting the power differential between professor and student (Jonas 2022, 39). After students press the narrator to step aside from classroom instruction, however, Sydney balks: “It’s not about them being uncomfortable. Trust me. It’s about them winning” (Jonas 2022, 124). In the bravado of the phrase “Trust me,” readers detect that a spell has been broken and Sydney is now able to speak as an insider to reveal the truth of the youth’s sex discourses: no substance, only a will to power. In other words, in responding to the perceived censoriousness of students’ sex discourses, the narrator and Sydney display a censoriousness of their own, taking no account of the knowledge that may underlie newer discourses of sex, sexuality, and power. To empathize with that new knowledge production is perhaps too much to ask of the narrator, who is undergoing professional and domestic crises simultaneously. But Sidney’s statement, and especially its punctuation of an abrupt change in her character arc, raises this question: How would the narrator’s position change or benefit from even a cursory exploration of the ideas driving “the kids” and their sex discourses? Or to put the problem in a more general frame pertaining to higher learning writ large: what happens when students bring knowledge with them, in addition to working on that which is set before them in the university? In addition to the gap in taking students’ knowledge seriously, Vladímír creates a conspicuous gap in the debate about sex and moral accounting. This develops in a minor subplot: Sydney has returned home, her partner Alexis having thrown her out after tiring of her affairs. The first woman, it turns out, was an intern at Sydney’s law firm, and Alexis issued an ultimatum after the woman got a permanent job working with Sydney. During a heart-to-heart with her mother about this turmoil and hurt, Sydney detours briefly, sensing her mother’s judgment: “You of all

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people should not be judging me,” she says of her own deteriorating relationship. When the narrator replies that she and John had an understanding, Sydney quips, “You had an understanding about him power raping women?” (Jonas 2022, 85). Her “power raping” framework aligns Sydney with the younger generation’s understanding of sex and power that the narrator finds so troublesome. But it’s noteworthy that this quip arrives in the middle of Sydney’s narration of the affair and her domestic strife—and that it doesn’t occur to either character during this passage or elsewhere in the novel’s narration that perhaps Sydney had exploited a power differential in her own affair with an intern. In this gap, the novel invites readers to consider: is an intern at Sydney’s prestigious law firm any less precarious than one of John’s undergraduate women? And moreover, what does it mean that in all this concern about the power dynamics that infuse sex lives, Jonas makes her characters oblivious to Sydney’s own power? These questions hinge on a formal matter of exposition: by establishing John’s scandal in the first chapter—the effect of the allegations on the narrator, the details of the petition, how she talks about it all with the younger colleague Vladimir—the novel anchors its thematic work on John’s situation: its implications for the narrator, what it reveals about “the kids,” what it reveals about the political climate of higher learning in America. Read this way, Vladímír may at first appear to be reworking some material established in Blue Angel, as if an homage updated to account for new student discourses and written from a woman’s point of view. The placement of this exposition, however, despite the establishment of the narrator’s desire for Vladimir’s body in a brief prologue, effects a sly sleight of hand, deepening the reader’s shock when the plot twist arrives: the narrator drugs Vladimir with stolen Seconal, having lured him to a remote lakeside cabin, with designs of sexual opportunity in mind. In doing so, the narrator trundles over all the nuance with which she had understood John’s scandals—“He didn’t drug them or coerce them,” she explains to Sydney earlier (Jonas 2022, 95). Though the narrator ultimately does not rape Vladimir in the lakeside cabin, the plan she hatches for him certainly foreshadows a grim sexual assault, holding forth the fulfillment of the gender-reversed sexual predation narrative. Vladímír, one might say, ironizes the narrator’s position of moral ambivalence. For all the narrator’s aspiration to a dispassionate high ground, apart from the mob-like emotional energy of her students, the narrator demonstrates the need for exactly the knowledge that she resists

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in her students—not by her mere proximity to John and his scandals, but in her inability to recognize the same behavior in her daughter and most obtrusively in her predation on Vladimir. Read alongside the deep ambivalence of Blue Angel and despite its reversal of tropes of male sexual predation, Vladímír demonstrates the systematic pervasive misogyny of the university, with even the narrator, while adhering to her generation’s tenets of sexual liberation, ignoring the implications of sexual violence—against her daughter’s intern and especially against her own junior colleague.

On Sex and Resentments In other words, campus novels such as I Am Charlotte Simmons and Blue Angel and Vladímír tend to authorize both sexual assault and sexual harassment. This is one way in which the genre explores the systemic misogyny of the university, which of course reaches also into hiring and promotion outcomes as well as manifesting in a range of discriminatory working conditions, discussed further in the seventh chapter. If the campus novel is more interested in sex than in these more technical features of the academy, it is in keeping with the genre’s general tendency to skimp on the details and minutia of scholarly life. The manifestations of institutional misogyny discussed in this chapter are no less valuable for being incomplete in this way. But perhaps we are taking sex too seriously in these readings? That’s one possible application of Campus Sex, Campus Security (2015), in which Jennifer Doyle argues that “the management of sexuality has been sewn into the campus. Sex has its own administrative unit” (46). To contextualize this argument, Doyle explains that university policies regarding sexual assault and sexual harassment are motivated by paternalistic risk management principles, suggesting that “Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the presentation of the college campus as a dangerous place for the ‘very young girl’” (Doyle 2015, 24). This is perhaps what some readers may conclude from Blue Angel ’s disciplinary and Kafkaesque sexual harassment narratives: that sex has become overdetermined to its own diminishment. Doyle argues that campus security is a structure of feeling that defines both university policing units and universities’ implementation of sexual assault and sexual harassment policies. “Campus security” for Doyle refers to both the university office associated with campus policing and with

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the ideological frameworks that fixate on the student’s vulnerability. She demonstrates a dialectic of university policing and university policies regarding sexual assault and sexual harassment in parallel readings—of her experiences of having filed a Title I.X. complaint about a student who was stalking her and a subsequent complaint about the handling of that case, and of the infamous pepper-spraying episode at an Occupy demonstration at the University of California at Davis in 2011. Doyle provides evidence that Linda Katehi, the university’s chancellor, deployed campus security out of fear that off-campus demonstrators might join the Davis students and put the university in violation of Title I.X. compliance. Whatever would an Occupy demonstration on campus have to do with Title I.X. policy? In Doyle’s reading, the Chancellor was worried that “Occupy Davis might turn into Occupy Oakland” and that “a metonymic chain of associations” would accumulate: Oakland, Black people, drugs, sex, Title I.X. violation (2015, 16). In the context of Doyle’s argument, the Chancellor’s Oakland reference is further evidence that university policy is motivated far more by compliance and liability than by the wellbeing of their students and employees—but it also demonstrates yet again that what Hirsch and Khan call the “racialized imagination” of sexual predation continues to haunt campus policy and campus representation alike. Further, the genre’s authorship may demonstrate another source of its reactionary representations of sexual assault and sexual harassment. The authorship data I’ve pulled from the Directory of the American Campus Novel demonstrate that sex demographics may be an underlying issue as well. Figure A.5 in the “Appendix I: Further Data” appendix, for instance, shows that from 1828 to 2002, 69% of genre titles were authored by men and 29% by women—the remainder a mix of texts with multiple authors or texts written by authors using untraceable pseudonyms. If that binary is a dubious framework for understanding gender identity, it nevertheless demonstrates the sexed territorialization of the genre, corresponding unsurprisingly to the historically sexed limitations of the professoriate and of university admissions. These data imply the sexed barriers of the university and the campus novel alike. They may well explain some of the anti-feminist resentments demonstrated by Richard Russo’s Straight Man (1997) and Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring (1993) in the previous chapter, as well as the ambivalence about and even hostility toward sexual assault and sexual harassment demonstrated by Simmons and Blue Angel and Vladímír. A

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generous understanding of these novels might argue that it’s not that they are unconcerned with sexual assault or sexual harassment or the base sexism that often attends them, but perhaps that they are troubled by proliferating identity politics—not least that of Blue Angel ’s “expert in the feminist misreading of literature” who doubles as head of Euston College’s Faculty-Student Women’s Alliance. Such identity politics, as the previous chapter explores, compete with or even displace the privileged identity of the professionally trained creative writer. Swenson demonstrates this identity politics when responding to a suggestion that he write a memoir. “I’m a novelist. An actual writer,” Swenson says, indignant. “I’ve still got some…standards” (Prose 2000, 236). I’m not entirely sure I’m persuaded by that generous reading. Taking these novels very seriously, I find the disregard for sexual assault and sexual harassment displaces the utopian possibilities regarding the genre’s character eccentricities and its anti-work themes, discussed, respectively, in Chapters 2 and 7. “She is real and she is imagined,” Doyle says of the American undergraduate woman and the sexual danger she must navigate on campus (2015, 24). The reactionary imaginations we see in the genre—if they make those material dangers no more or less real, they cloud those dangers with specters of racial predation and sexed resentments.

Works Cited Dick, Kirby. 2015. The Hunting Ground. Roco Films, Blu-ray. Doyle, Jennifer. 2015. Campus Sex, Campus Security. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series, 19. Eigenberg, Helen and Joanne Belknap. 2017. “Title IX and Mandatory Reporting.” In Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses, edited by Catherine Kaukinen, Michelle Hughes Miller, and Ráchael A. Powers, 185–201. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Findeisen, Christopher. 2016. “‘The One Place Where Money Makes No Difference:’ The Campus Novel from Stover at Yale through The Art of Fielding.” American Literature 88 (1): 67–91. Hirsch, Jennifer S., and Shamus Khan. 2020. Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. New York: W.W. Norton. Jonas, Julia May. 2022. Vladímír. New York: Avid Reader. Kaukinen, Catherine, et al. 2017. “Violence Against College Women: Unfortunately, It Is Not a New Problem.” In Addressing Violence Against Women

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on College Campuses, edited by Catherine Kaukinen, Michelle Hughes Miller, and Ráchael A. Powers, 1–13. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Metcalf, Stephen. 2004. “The Three Hopeless Flaws of I Am Charlotte Simmons.” Slate, 17. https://slate.com/culture/2004/11/the-threehopeless-flaws-of-i-am-charlotte-simmons.html. Nussbaum, Martha. 2021. Citadels of Pride: Sexual Assault, Accountability, and Reconciliation. New York: W.W. Norton. Prose, Francine. 2000. Blue Angel. New York: HarperCollins. Rennison, Callie Marie, Catherine Kaukinen, and Caitlyn Meade. 2017. “Sexual Violence Against College Women: An Overview.” In Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses, edited by Catherine Kaukinen, Michelle Hughes Miller, and Ráchael A. Powers, 17–34. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Smith, Meredith M. 2017. “Title IX and ‘Rehabilitated Schools.’” In Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses, edited by Catherine Kaukinen, Michelle Hughes Miller, and Ráchael A. Powers, 271–84. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Trendel, Aristi. 2021. Pedagogic Encounters: Master and Disciple in the American Novel After the 1980s. Lanham: Lexington Books. Literature, and Film series. Wolfe, Tom. 2004. I Am Charlotte Simmons. London: Picador. Wood, James. 2000. “Human, All Too Human: On the Formation of a New Genre: Hysterical Realism.” The New Republic, 23 July. https://newrepublic. com/article/61361/human-inhuman.

CHAPTER 5

Subordinations of Academic Freedom: “Speech” as Campus Keyword and Codeword

In the late 2010s, the U.S. university system once again becomes the major site of struggle between competing ideas about the nature of “speech.” At the center of the tension was a failed Free Speech Week event that was planned for the University of California in 2017. Organized by a famed provocateur of the Alternative Right, it was conceived as a four-day rally, a platform for reactionaries to provoke in the name of an absolutist free speech. But Free Speech Week never came to fruition because the organizers failed to complete paperwork to book the campus venues. That same fall and into the spring of 2018, white supremacist events led by another famed Alternative Right persona paraded through the University of Virginia, the University of Florida, and Michigan State University. “Jews will not replace us,” attendees chanted, bearing torches as they marched across the Grounds in Charlottesville; one woman died in the ensuing counterdemonstrations. A mix of professional celebrity trolls and genocidal white supremacists, the organizers of these events sought out public universities as hosts, aiming to retake the mantle of free speech from the clutches of so-called political correctness. National press and higher learning trade publications wrung their hands: who was obligated to pay for security at such events, where counterdemonstrations were combustible? Less attention was paid to the tragedy and farce of these events’ perversions of the Free Speech Movement that began in 1964 in Berkeley. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 W. Beal, Campus Fictions, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1_5

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The white supremacist campaign and the failed Free Speech Week rallies were only the most extreme symptom of a broader conflagration of speech and academic freedom that continues to play out on American campuses. In the summer of 2014, the University of Illinois withdrew a job it had offered to Steven Salaita to join its American Indian Studies Program, citing the incivility of his tone in social media remarks on Israel and Palestine. In the fall of 2015, Black women undergraduates formed Concerned Student 1950 to demonstrate against racial antagonism at the University of Missouri. After their demands were boosted by the football team’s threats to boycott the remainder of the season in the competitive and lucrative Southeastern Conference, the system president was forced to resign. In the spring and the fall of 2017, students at Middlebury College and Harvard University shouted down the social scientist Charles Murray, co-author with Richard Herrnstein of The Bell Curve (1994), which is often criticized for promoting scientific racism.1 In the summer of 2021, the University of North Carolina deferred the tenure and promotion of the investigative journalist Nikole HannahJones, creator of the 1619 Project, after the donor for whom the school of journalism and media is named had raised concerns that her work might be “highly contentious and highly controversial” (Foreman 2021). After public outcry, the university’s trustees scheduled an emergency meeting and voted to award Hannah-Jones tenure, upon which announcement Hannah-Jones declared that she would be taking a chaired professorship at Howard University.2 Punctuated with events such as these, U.S. universities and colleges are at times paralyzed by a debate on civility, interrogating the degree to which calm and polite speech is an inherent precondition for rational discourse. And outside pressures are mounting to regulate speech on campus. For instance, in 2017 the Goldwater Institute issued model legislation for states to consider: the Campus Free 1 The cases are endemic enough to be enshrined in satire. In the murder mystery plot of Adjunct (2017), Geoff Cebula creates a traveling lecturer named Murray Otis solely to distract the college campus from the deadly goings-on. Student protesters flock dutifully to the lecture. One student, voicing Cebula’s irony, says to Otis in mock deference, “I’m a great admirer of your work on the importance of traditional family structures to Black America” and avers, “Other people are afraid to speak the truth about same-sex adoption, but you don’t let compassion get in your way” (Cebula 2017, 115, 116). 2 Salaita’s and Hannah-Jones’s cases are causes célèbre, but not unprecedented. For many, they call to mind Angela Davis, whose contract as philosophy instructor was not renewed by UCLA in 1970 in response to her off-campus political speeches.

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Speech Act would prohibit the disinvitation of speakers, require schools to abolish policies regulating speech on campus, and require schools to remain “neutral” on controversial issues of public policy (Reichman 2019, 165).3 It isn’t hard to foresee the irony that emerges when public universities feel compelled to host white supremacist rallies but also to police the speech of its faculty, staff, and students: Free speech for me and civility for thee? Free Speech Week and the white supremacist campus campaign of 2017–2018, then, manifest an extreme demonstration of the long held conservative view that the academy’s commitments to inclusivity and open critique in effect reject conservative values and repress conservative speech. In renewing culture wars discourses of identity and privilege, this white supremacist campus campaign advances on two separate fronts. First, the campaign locates universities as the settings of unruly speech where liberal speech is uninterrogated, where conservatives’ First Amendment rights are trampled, where academic freedom has proven its ugly partisan edge. Second, given their white supremacist content, by turns coy and unambiguously anti-Semitic, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant, the campus events use “speech” to disguise their true concerns, which often hinge on white grievance. The fact that universities are the settings for these performances is no coincidence, as the white supremacists clearly intended to put higher learning itself on trial for its inclusive politics, for its open inquiry. An inconvenient fact persists: the scandal around the planned Free Speech Week events, the white supremacist campus tour and the riotous counterdemonstrations that ensued, the prominent disruptions of Charles Murray’s lectures, the presumptive necessity of legislation such as the Campus Free Speech Act—these are anomalous events, and in the main the university remains a highly effective setting for free inquiry and the free exchange of ideas in the U.S. I’m tempted to say it’s the best, and perhaps even the only forum for such inquiry and exchange. Like Henry Reichman, then, I wonder “whether all this hand-wringing is even about free speech” at all (2019, 193). This manifold crisis organized around “speech” affords us as an opportunity to investigate academic freedom and its representation in the 3 See also “Campus Free-Speech Legislation: History, Progress, and Problems.” AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, April 2018. https://www.aaup.org/report/campus-free-spe ech-legislation-history-progress-and-problems.

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academic novel. When white supremacists come to campus with a range of codewords pertaining to free speech, they aren’t there to investigate the independence of an engineering lab from its corporate grants, nor have they arrived to study whether students are truly free to design and implement their own capstone projects. Instead, they challenge the university’s commitment to open-ended inquiry that is embodied in the principles of academic freedom and inclusivity, both signaled informally by “speech” as a codeword. To whatever extent the white supremacist “free speech” events—or for that matter David Horowitz’s The Professors (2006) or President Trump’s 2019 executive order “Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities,” and similar initiatives— critique so-called political correctness and academic freedom implicitly or explicitly, they should also occasion a reminder that academic freedom holds a very specific operating definition and emerges from a very specific historical context. These dynamics are misunderstood by many who work on university campuses, to say nothing of general public perceptions. The term “academic freedom” is somewhat slippery. As Susan Hegeman explains, the term in its conventional sense refers to a scholar’s right to determine the content and methods of her teaching as well as to set her own research agenda, and it may also loosely refer to a sense of scholarly culture “in which academics have traditionally enjoyed self-governance in the workplace and wide personal latitude in regard to such things as dress, sociability, communication, comportment, and time management” (2017, 3). Further confounding the term is the popular assumption that academic freedom is a sort of augmented free speech, as if a still more ironclad exercise of First Amendment rights. This misconception is captured succinctly in a popular Tweet comparing high school and university settings: “High school teachers: I’m not going to share my political beliefs, it’s unprofessional [/] College Profs: what is the square root of fuck trump” (@LocalGoblin 2017). Joan Scott disambiguates the terms in Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom (2019). Academic freedom has nothing to do with free speech, Scott clarifies. Academic freedom is enjoyed only by scholars and likely not even students, she explains, whereas freedom of speech is a constitutional right afforded to all Americans. A scholar’s freedom is in fact curtailed in some ways by the limitations stipulated by her field, Scott explains, whereas free speech is most often construed as a noholds-barred absolute. “Free speech makes no distinction about quality;

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academic freedom does,” Scott writes (2019, 118). Or, as Reichman puts it in The Future of Academic Freedom (2019), academic freedom is “not founded on the ‘free marketplace of ideas’ but on professional expertise” (2019, 174). And this is why the authorization of discipline is key, the foundation of academic freedom being devised to protect scholarship from interference by powerful trustees, donors, legislators, the press, and other potential meddlers.4 Not only is this a fairly narrow construct, then, but the emphasis on disciplinary authorization paradoxically results in a kind of unfreedom or at least a highly circumscribed freedom.5 In the details, then, academic freedom skews widely from the perception that it entitles a scholar to any manner of speech or conduct—far from the “anything goes” assumptions of the term. This conflation is systemic,6 and I also elide the distinction between free speech and academic freedom above when I place the cases of Steven Salaita and Charles Murray and Nikole Hannah-Jones alongside those of Alternative Right provocateurs such as Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos touring public universities. These cases appear in the same tumultuous moment, but they are different in both kind and degree—the former two operating in relation to professional expertise, and the latter two probing the limits of the “free marketplace of ideas,” to paraphrase 4 “Disciplinary authorization,” Scott writes, was devised during the Progressive era “to defend those whose work was unavoidably controversial against charges of partisanship and from political retribution. If their colleagues attested to the soundness of their methods and the plausibility of their interpretations, these faculty could be represented not as interested parties but as objective seekers after truth” (2019, 49). 5 The paradox of disciplinary authorization plays out spectacularly in the culture wars. For the humanities during this period, Scott explains, the discipline itself was simultaneously the guarantor of academic freedom and an object of academic critique. “Discipline,” she argues, “usually figured in these debates either as that which must be restored in its most dogmatic form—foundational assumptions are taken to have fixed, enduring, and inherent value—or as that which must be exposed as the mask of oppressive power and replaced by a more emancipatory politics whose authority is based in personal experience. Discipline was either fetishized as immutable or rejected as an instrument of repression” (2019, 26). 6 See again Florida’s House Bill 233 from the 2021 legislative session. Designed to prohibit the censorship of conservative viewpoints, the bill also flatly mistakes academic freedom as Constitutionally protected free speech. The bill lists “faculty research, lectures, writings, and commentary, whether published or unpublished” under an article titled “right to free speech activities” (5). Professors are free to open any line of inquiry they choose, of course, in Florida or anywhere else that follows the principles of academic freedom, but it is up to a jury of peers to determine the quality of any such research.

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Reichman. The cases of Salaita and Murray and Hannah-Jones also occasion a difficult conversation for higher learning: is “professional expertise” an absolute guarantor of the public good? This conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech springs from the obscurity of the former term, the association of the Free Speech Movement with campus politics, perhaps even a general apathy among scholars who have come to take its protections for granted. It’s further confounded by policies of the American Association of University Professors (A.A.U.P.) that offer some protections for “extramural speech.” As Reichman, a longtime servant of the A.A.U.P., explains, “Faculty members are unlikely to believe that an institution that would curtail their expression as citizens will adequately defend their expression as teachers or researchers” (2019, 63). It’s easy to take those protections for granted when the principal antagonists of academic freedom have become less openly villainous. As Hegeman explains in “Oppenheimer’s House” (2017), through the late twentieth century the principal threats to academic freedom were a mix of McCarthyist personal attacks—not only about scholars’ free speech and political activity, putatively guaranteed to all citizens, but also about the specific professional inquiries of humanists and social scientists—and the sometimes chilling effects of Cold War-era arrangements between universities and the military-industrial complex. Those situations have been replaced in the neoliberal period, Hegeman argues, by threats to academic freedom that “seem both less acute and more diverse” while attacking both “the funding structures of research and of the university as a whole” (2017, 4).7 Public defunding of higher learning has led universities to be more amenable to privately funded centers, which often involve unseemly interventions of donors into academic affairs.8 Neoliberal philosophy may

7 “Concomitant with these changes in the funding structure and the understanding of the social function of higher education,” Hegeman writes, “the university’s organization and culture has also changed. It is increasingly patterned after corporate business, with its management model of profitability, efficiency, hierarchy, accountability, and measurable results. All of which has had a significant impact on academic freedom, in terms of both faculty governance and relaxed worker discipline” (2017, 11). 8 See, for instance, Reichman’s chapter “Can Outside Donors Endanger Academic Freedom?” in The Future of Academic Freedom. Here Reichman studies centers such as the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies, both at George Mason University, and concludes: “An analogy can also be drawn between the kind of funding provided by Koch interests and the China-sponsored Confucius Institutes” (2017, 134).

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also be present in the new discourses of safe spaces and trigger warnings, which Scott describes as emphasizing individual discomfort at the expense of scholarly inquiry (2019, 83). Most of all, this shift from Cold War to neoliberal threats to academic freedom is perhaps most acute in the adjunctification of the instructional ranks, which results in part in stripping any aspiration to academic freedom from vast swaths of the academy. In addition to dampening the individual scholar’s capacity to exercise open inquiry, adjunctification also weakens the voice of faculty as a body, effecting what Hegeman describes as a shift from “faculty governance” to “shared governance,” in which faculty’s oversight of key components of their universities is now understood to be shared with administrators whose credentials are less and less likely to be academic (2017, 11). To this I would add that assessment is another manifestation of neoliberal order in its demand for the accountable and that it’s as pervasive a threat to academic freedom as other neoliberal pressures: in supplanting the discipline’s role as guarantor of quality with a nondisciplinary bureaucracy, in aspiring to regulate course design without the legitimacy of an authorizing discipline, assessment dislocates the arbiter of quality of academic production and therefore removes the principal foundation of academic freedom. “Under neoliberalism,” Hegeman asserts, “the central struggle over academic freedom is not with the government but with the neoliberal university itself” (2017, 12). In sum, there’s the sexiness of causes célèbres such as Steven Salaita or Charles Murray or Nikole Hannah-Jones. And there’s ideologically driven political antagonism, such as the Department of Education threatening to withhold federal funding from the Duke-U.N.C. Consortium’s Middle East Studies program over criticism that it insufficiently glorifies the “positive aspects” of Christianity and Judaism (Satisky 2019). But the greater danger to academic freedom lies in the steady and bureaucratic stuff of adjunctification and other neoliberal processes. “How did we arrive at a situation in which, in the absence of the kind of direct attacks experienced under McCarthyism, academic freedom in both senses is now seen in some quarters as an unneeded luxury?” Hegeman asks (2017, 4). Hegeman points to a general apathy among academics toward their exceptional professional rights, and she also illuminates a subtext for the Alternative Right campus demonstrations—aimed at silencing the “unneeded” and “luxurious” freedoms exercised by putatively liberal culture warriors. The sites of those culture wars are no longer confined to the arts and humanities, as they may once have been, but

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now also spread across a vastly expanded terrain to include the sciences, perhaps most importantly stifling research on climate change. How we arrived here, I will argue below, is not only the result of economic and political transformations from Cold War to neoliberal organizations of state, society, and the university. We also arrived here in some measure with the help of the campus novel, which has tremendous difficulty grappling with this nuanced subject and most often bothers with it not at all. Studying two novels that span these periods, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1951) and Jane Smiley’s Moo (1995), we’ll see that even earnest attempts to delve directly into academic freedom plots in fact undermine core principles of scholarly inquiry, and afford us new vehicles for discussing the meaning and practice of academic freedom, as well as its central role in the public good of the university.

Speech and Manners in The Groves of Academe “Your appointment will not be continued beyond the current academic year…” reads the letter that Professor Henry Mulcahy opens in the first paragraph of Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe. Groves, one of the most famous titles in the genre and the most closely associated with academic freedom, is careful to conceal the rest of President Maynard Hoar’s letter, creating a gap that the plot rushes to fill with the conjecture, gossip, and backroom strategizing that rock Jocelyn College’s faculty and students. Is it true that Mulcahy is a Communist Party member? Did that motivate the termination? And will it affect his colleagues’ willingness to advocate for him? The novel withholds the reveal—that Mulcahy is not in fact a Party member, never was, and is simply invoking political freedom to manipulate colleagues into defending his position—while holding its premise of academic freedom at the forefront of readers’ and characters’ minds. For some readers, the Red Scare angle may cloud the issues of scholarly academic freedom and the citizen’s First Amendment rights even before they discover Mulcahy’s depraved lie. Indeed, Groves ’s 1950s milieu may strike readers as incommensurate to other passages of this book, but I include it here because Groves provides a rare depth of discussion of academic freedom and because its mid-century publication provides a wider historical frame for readers who might be interested in teaching a historical range of genre titles. Aristide Poncy, professor of French and German at Jocelyn, asks this clarifying question, typical of Groves ’s milieu,

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as the literature faculty debates Mulcahy’s merits: “Can a Communist under discipline have intellectual freedom?” “We hear that they cannot,” Poncy continues, “that they are under strict orders to promote their famous doctrine; their minds are not as free as ours are” (McCarthy 1951, 104). Poncy’s question is typical of 1950s discussions of academic freedom and Communist doctrine, and his formulation shows that the two in fact are intertwined—no simple matter of separating political activity from academic inquiry. In this regard, or at least in the particular contexts of the Red Scare, academic freedom and general freedom of speech correspond tightly. The manner in which Groves ’s characters forcefully blur the issues, or in some cases disregard the distinctions that Scott so dutifully preserves, effectively undermines the exceptional qualities of academic freedom. Within its first few pages, Groves sets itself up as a study of academic freedom, appealing to readerly sensibilities of its precarity in the early Cold War era. Mulcahy’s termination letter abruptly announces the plot. Soon after, a short passage provides exposition on the Red Scare’s impact at Jocelyn College, referencing Alger Hiss and Joe McCarthy before detailing that Hoar had recently been pressured to remove his signature from the Stockholm Peace Petition. By the third chapter Mulcahy has confessed to his colleague Domna Rejnev, a 23-year-old instructor of Russian literature and French, that he has been a member of the Communist Party for ten years. Only later will Domna and readers discover that this confession is in fact a lie. But in the moment of “confession,” the conclusions to be drawn from this confluence—that Hoar uses Mulcahy as a sacrificial lamb to clear his own reputation of the stigma of liberalism—are all too easy to follow, given the circumstances of the day. The novel slowly drifts from this conceit, however, as McCarthy’s readers and Mulcahy’s colleagues learn more about his past and better understand his behavior, setting Groves at the intersection of academic freedom and the conventions of the novel of manners. The novel mostly disregards its characters’ scholarly prerogatives of research and teaching, however, leaving the issue of academic freedom perilously abstract. Mulcahy’s bid to make his situation a cause célèbre for academic freedom is quickly set aside by his colleagues. They debate the case passionately, but while doing so they subordinate the academic freedom angle to “some collateral issue” (McCarthy 1951, 84). These collateral issues bear an uncanny alignment to the needs and interests of each speaker. For instance, John Bentkoop, a neo-Protestant, advocates for

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Mulcahy because the pair often discusses “race and theological despair” and Bentkoop values having another theist on campus—the author’s cunning jibe at academics’ parochial behavior. When a group of faculty agrees to support Mulcahy, they determine that it’s best to exercise “the existing machinery” of process and bureaucracy and to “leave the political thing dormant for the moment” (McCarthy 1951, 94, 95). And when Domna—the novel calls her and other women by their first names, the men by their surnames—and Bentkoop gain an audience with Hoar to present the faculty’s support for Mulcahy, Domna feels the discussion drawing to its close and realizes that they had not yet spoken on “the main point—the issue of political freedom” and that they will not during that meeting (McCarthy 1951, 159). “The main point” is continually muted or deferred throughout the novel, and as “political freedom” it signals an important slippage from the academic freedom at the heart of Poncy’s question and theoretically at the heart of the novel to the First Amendment privileges extended to all citizens. In disentangling these threads, Domna’s “main point” uproots the source of Groves ’s drama. While his colleagues show no interest in defending Mulcahy on the grounds of academic freedom and perhaps even shift the terms to constitutional protections, the novel also continually chips away at the legitimacy of Mulcahy’s lie. Waiting for the result of the colleagues’ meeting to discuss his situation, Mulcahy considers how he never joined the Party, as he explicitly told Domna he had, and rationalizes the lie by imagining himself an artist who has merely dramatized: “Contemplating what he had done he felt a justified workman’s pride” (McCarthy 1951, 89). The rest of the campus won’t be privy to that disclosure, but Mulcahy’s colleagues do hear a different angle to the termination from Howard Furness, chair of the literature program and therefore Mulcahy’s immediate supervisor. Furness bats away the academic freedom argument and explains to Mulcahy’s advocates that he simply didn’t meet expectations. “In the two years he’s been here, how many times has he turned in his achievement sheets on schedule? Or reported class absences? Or filled in the field-period reports? How many conferences has Hen missed? Have you any idea?” Furness asks, reminding them also of the student who nearly didn’t graduate after Mulcahy mislaid her thesis—and then lied about it (McCarthy 1951, 101). Hoar presents to Domna and Bentkoop a letter indicating to Mulcahy that he was accepting a temporary, nonrenewable position, and explains Mulcahy’s behavior this way: “I foresaw, as it turns out, exactly what would happen. With the wife and kids

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installed here, he’d fight like an old-time squatter […] for his title in the job” (McCarthy 1951, 152). In short, administrative shortcomings and contractual terms creep into the picture, further obscuring any discussion of Mulcahy’s academic freedom—whether or not in this milieu it would be considered viable alongside Communist doctrine. At each juncture, readers are presented a challenge to decipher what’s really unfolding. Is Furness simply toeing the administrators’ line in order to dump an unruly professor? Perhaps Hoar’s letter is misleading, and despite Mulcahy not being a Party member, Hoar perceived him as such, and the effect is the same regardless of the cause? But as Mulcahy becomes an increasingly problematic protagonist over the course of Groves ’s plot and narration, and as no counterevidence arrives to debunk claims such as Furness’s and Hoar’s, Mulcahy’s academic freedom case, such as it is, dissolves. Groves, then, might be read not so much a novel of academic freedom as a study in depravity that might be altogether incidental to its campus setting. Mulcahy is a gaslighter and a liar, and he proves also to be a particularly vicious bully. He seeks out the young and innocent, such as Domna and the student Sheila McKay, in order to manipulate them into support. With Ellie Ellison, another young colleague under his influence, Mulcahy plans a poetry conference with the sole intention of denouncing the invited representatives of “contemporary” poetry. In the waning stages of the novel, rumors emerge that he demands free babysitting labor from his students. Underneath this bullying lies, predictably, resentment: challenged by Hoar to account for the truth, Mulcahy responds, “I’m concerned with justice. Justice for myself as a superior individual and for my family” (McCarthy 1951, 254). His colleagues’ responses to this behavior speak also to their neglect of academic freedom as a common cause. For his colleagues, Mulcahy’s behavior is disgraceful but not subject to action. Considering the rumor that Mulcahy had forced a student into a false confession regarding a broken serving dish, Domna reflects that the scene “belonged, all too horribly, to the purlieus of private life; it was not the department’s business to regulate Mulcahy’s personal relations with his students nor to pry into the details of his hold on them” (McCarthy 1951, 208). What might fall under the purlieus of public life, then? Apparently, it is reasonable to ask whether or not Mulcahy is “the right man for Jocelyn,” as Furness does (McCarthy 1951, 112). Furness, in stating Mulcahy’s absenteeism, also argues that Mulcahy’s scholarly renown is in fact a shortcoming.

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“Great learning can be an impediment” to the faculty-student relationship, Furness intones; “it opens up too great a hiatus, as in Hen’s case, between the student and the instructor. Hence, we don’t insist on the Ph.D. or even the Master’s; in fact, we regard advanced degrees as a liability” (McCarthy 1951, 112). “Fit”—Furness touches on one of the enduring and most problematically evasive terms in university personnel concerns, though managing not to address disciplinary questions of the particular content or methods of Mulcahy’s teaching and scholarship. While it is convenient for his colleagues not to take an interest in an academic freedom case that turns out not to be an academic freedom case, their reluctance to do so, like their reluctance to censure misconduct, remains one of the novel’s most important details. Prioritizing other appeals, these colleagues do not know—or only learn very late in the plot—that Mulcahy is in fact a secret not-Communist. Read this way, the unconcern at Jocelyn College for academic freedom has the effect of transforming academic freedom into a personal issue, a private commodity, an “unneeded luxury” as Hegeman has it. When colleagues find it a less persuasive call to action than, say, Mulcahy’s theism or students’ opinions of his classroom work, there’s an implicit statement that a violation of Mulcahy’s academic freedom, had there in fact been one, wouldn’t constitute a violation of their own. As with his abusing a student into a false confession, it appears that it is “not the department’s business to regulate” incursions against academic freedom. This, however, ironizes the claims about Mulcahy’s “fit” at Jocelyn. “Fit” too often indicates a euphemistic breadth that may encompass free inquiry, “civility,” and general comportment.9 If a person critiques an institutional tradition or norm, and if the person’s “fit” is understood to be the problem, it is all too easy to see speech and academic freedom abridged. In parallel to what Furness understands as a mismatch between Mulcahy’s strengths and Jocelyn’s mission, Mulcahy has just that record of open dissent at faculty meetings—most notable in his call for an investigation into waste 9 And of course “fit” at the same time can refer to legitimate concerns. Given the wide variety of institutional profiles across U.S. higher learning, it’s true that a given institutional culture needs confirmation and participation in order to persist. For instance, teaching-centered colleges often need their professors to cover areas outside their specialization, sometimes even to act as generalists, and it might be seen as a poor “fit” to have a colleague who prefers to work entirely within his specialization. In its vagueness, however, “fit” is often viewed as a term that may paper over questions of inclusion—code for certain ethnic and sexual identities that one might not want around.

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and mismanagement in the grounds department. Groves, then, offers two equally dubious views of academic freedom: Mulcahy’s call to arms is predicated on a spectacular lie about his Party affiliation, and the concern about him that resonates most with his colleagues is a “fit” issue that quite likely effects the silencing of scholarly culture if not directly the autonomy of his research and teaching. McCarthy’s narration also sidelines matters of academic freedom in its intense focus on the intricacy of social exchanges at Jocelyn. The novel seems to take very seriously Furness’s appreciation of the small college, which charms him as “a microcosm of high society” (McCarthy 1951, 193). In other words, Groves delivers a novel of manners in the tradition of Jane Austen and Henry James and literary realism’s formal investment in interiority. A great deal of the text follows characters’ interior thoughts as they size each other up and evaluate murky social terrain. Here’s Mulcahy deciding how best to maneuver Domna into his cause, weighing whether or how much to leverage his wife Cathy’s ill health for sympathy: If Domna were satisfied that Maynard, knowing of Cathy’s condition, had determined in cold blood to fire him for shabby political motives, she would fight for his reinstatement straight up to the board of trustees; even so, he frankly hesitated, being sharp enough to see that the knife cut two ways. If Cathy’s condition or the knowledge of it imposed on Maynard Hoar the moral obligation not to fire him, should it not have imposed on her husband an even stronger obligation not to behave in such a way as to get himself fired? (McCarthy 1951, 46)

Or here’s another examination of social graces. In her meeting with Hoar and Bentkoop, during which she realizes they have yielded “the main point,” Domna suspects that Hoar has lied in disclaiming any knowledge of Cathy’s condition. Mulcahy’s political freedom, she reflects, seemed, in fact, irrelevant to the friendly understanding which had finally been established among the three of them. As upright young people, moreover, brought up in an old-fashioned tradition, they had a trained distaste for outright lying that extended to the outright act of catching another in it; to come on the President in a lie, to see him flush up and betray himself, would be to come on Noah in his nakedness and commit the sin of Ham; they felt a prudent loyalty to the President’s façade. (McCarthy 1951, 159)

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Here intersect a formal emphasis on private thoughts and the compelling social force of personal dignity. And these small passages have nothing on the chapter detailing a dinner at the Mulcahy home when Domna learns that Cathy’s health is fine and that she has been brought to advocate for Mulcahy under false pretenses—a prolonged, cringe-inducing examination of social niceties, the finesse of social rules regarding decorum and confrontation, nearly an entire chapter aimed at putting readers on edge. As a novel of manners emphasizing interior thought and the opacity of social exchange, Groves effectively puts its content in resolute ambiguity. This is especially true of the debates over academic freedom, which invite the reader to second-guess each character’s statement as conjecture, rumor, lie, and which arrive at no truth besides the revelation of Mulcahy’s depraved character. Even in the last stages of the novel during the ambush at the poetry conference, when a “poet of the masses” appears, exuding Red bona fides in his body odor and his hitchhiking tales— when this poet briefly recognizes Mulcahy, a reader may be forgiven for briefly wondering if there is some truth to Mulcahy’s Party affiliation after all. There is not. The fact that a case of dismissal such as Mulcahy’s would be in some fundamental way unreadable, unknowable, would be no surprise today: administrators know far better than to put into writing that someone is dismissed because of an inconvenient scholarly finding, party affiliation, or religious orthodoxy. Instead, language is crafted to circumscribe academic freedom, find some other justifiable cause, as with the letter that Mulcahy receives at the outset of Groves. McCarthy’s novel of manners, then, resists a kind of agitprop impulse that might otherwise propel a plot involving academic freedom, much less such a novel in the early Cold War. But given the McCarthyist setting, when any career would be imperiled by a Red smear, when Party membership was widely construed not just as apostate politics but a genuine obstacle to open inquiry, when academic freedom would provide no cover for a professor— for Groves to leave “the main point” in such limbo has the effect of making academic freedom unspeakable, deserving of a kind of dignity such as that which Domna provides for Hoar when she suspects him of lying. As a result, Groves places academic freedom behind an unassailable curtain of privacy, discretion. And yet through all of that, academic freedom still retains a special appeal, at least for Domna. At the Bentkoop home, discussing the disastrous dinner during which she learned the fullness of Mulcahy’s treachery, she manages to break finally from his influence. She unburdens herself of

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the entire ordeal. She describes Mulcahy as quite possibly insane, especially his delusional belief in “Joyce’s life as a Ministry” (McCarthy 1951, 180). She accepts Bentkoop’s conjecture that Mulcahy suffers from a “persecution psychosis” (McCarthy 1951, 181). And yet after rehearsing all this trauma and accepting Mulcahy as truly grotesque, the specter still lingers as they conclude their visit: “‘And Communism,’ she murmured, ‘do you think that had nothing to do with it?’” (McCarthy 1951, 185). This is no matter of a young instructor’s brutal initiation into academic politics. Rather, it is another demonstration of the book’s inscrutable politics of academic freedom. “No one has intellectual freedom,” Domna responds flatly to Aristide Poncy when he wonders if there is such a thing as academic freedom under Communist discipline (McCarthy 105). Poncy has noted that no one objects to having Catholic colleagues, who bring their own organizing principles, but here Domna quickly closes down this angle of discussion as if the implications were too dangerous, whether for Communists or Catholics, as if no one wanted to find where that line of questioning might lead. An awkward pause follows, punctuated by Alma’s cough before she reframes the debate, and in that pause readers have a glimmer of a convergence of the introspective conventions of the novel of manners and the core questions of academic freedom. Often we think of assaults on academic freedom as originating from outside the university: meddlesome trustees, intrusive donors and legislation, outrage manufactured by sensationalist news organizations or, worse, anti-academic lobbying groups. But in bringing the novel of manners to bear on academic freedom, Groves prompts an essential question: What are the obstacles to open inquiry, and how might faculty themselves—not their opponents, not bureaucracy—thwart the mission of higher learning?

The Hog, the Governor, and the Mining Magnate; Or, Academic Freedom in Moo “When I die,” Dr. Bo Jones, professor of animal science, thinks to himself, “they’re going to say that Dr. Bo Jones found out something about hog” (Smiley 1995, 5). The plot of Jane Smiley’s Moo doesn’t reach Jones’s obituary, but it affords several opportunities to follow his experiment with

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Earl Butz, the hog at the center of one of the novel’s many plots.10 The results tracked in a secret file labeled “16TONS.doc,” the entire scheme unknown to anyone on campus except his work-study student Bob Carlson, Jones’s project aims simply to find out how big Earl might grow if given license to eat at will for the remainder of his natural life (Smiley 1995, 6). Subsequent action finds Earl “hard at the trough” and “getting monstrous big” (Smiley 1995, 79). Smiley offers a few passages from Earl’s point of view, such as the climactic demolition of the Old Meats building, from which he makes a frantic run for freedom: he had only been “going through the motions, chow-wise” before he goes on the lam, “head down, trotters blazing, squealing like a wild razorback on the remotest Asian steppes” (1995, 369, 371). So ends Earl Butz, and Jones’s 16TONS project. Jones’s piece of this plotline registers Moo as a work of satire. 16TONS is a farcical project, after all—the joke being a hog’s incongruity with higher learning, or more cruelly the presumed incongruity between lofty scholarly exploration and debased practical sciences. But the 16TONS project also registers Moo’s investigation of academic freedom. Here Moo University’s public and agricultural profile moves beyond a regressive hierarchy of modes of knowledge production and into the pressurized situations of the university at the turn of the century. Jones’s project, however farcical, demonstrates a commitment to open critique. How “monstrous big” can Earl grow? It’s an open-ended question—no strings attached, and a question Jones asks for the sake of knowledge. This is made clear in Moo’s waning action, when Provost Ivar Harstead and his highly capable assistant Mrs. Lorraine Walker discover the final cost of Jones’s experiment: $233,876.42 spent over five semesters and, crucially, without any grant support. Harstead is dismayed by the blow to the university’s fragile budget, made more precarious by successive budget cuts from the state legislature throughout the text. But it is also a sign of Jones’s academic independence, especially given the

10 The name “Earl Butz” itself conjures speech discourses. Smiley’s ill-fated hog shares

a name with the Butz who served as Secretary of Agriculture for Presidents Nixon and Ford. Secretary Butz was forced to resign his position in 1976 after reports of a racist comment he made, its substance so offensive that most newspapers censored it in their coverage. Smiley’s hog, then, conjures another example of the close correspondence between “speech” scandals and racist content.

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plausible interest of the pork industry to fund, and perhaps to control, such a study. Moo develops academic freedom principally through the contrast of two professors and their projects: Jones and the 16TONS project and Dr. Lionel Gift, the economics professor whose collaboration with the mining magnate and prospective donor Arlen Martin scandalizes the university. Gift, the university’s highest-paid professor and the novel’s whipping boy, rationalizes all goods according to their profit potential, and he so slavishly extols “the market” that a student attending his lectures hears in his enunciation an echo of her hometown minister’s intonation of the word “Creation” (Smiley 1995, 145). No mere punchline, Gift is enmeshed in a nexus of threats to the university. He is mechanically devoted to the Chicago School of economics—shorthand for a cluster of scholars working in the University of Chicago’s economics department, closely associated with Nobel Prize-winner Milton Friedman, and broadly related to the development of neoliberal economic policies worldwide through a purportedly apolitical focus on the market as site of free individual exchange and on monetarist policy.11 Gift’s adherence to Chicago School tenets aligns him with a state government that antagonizes its institutions of higher learning and with an industry magnate seducing Moo University from its mission during a precarious period. Read this way, Moo is not only a novel of academic freedom. It’s also a novel of the academy’s struggles with neoliberal stressors. In the entanglement of the two,

11 Chicago School economists branded themselves as prophets of a purely objective

system of analysis. Ideology, however, was always a major driver of their thinking. See, for instance, the opening lines of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962), in which he takes aim at the famous chiasmus from President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Friedman replies, “It is a striking sign of the temper of our times that the controversy about this passage centered on its origin and not on its content. Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic ‘what your country can do for you’ implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own destiny. The organismic, ‘what you can do for your country’ implies the government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary” (1962, 1). The neoliberal conflation of economic and political liberty does not, then, render the commons mere collateral damage to its pure science. Rather, antagonism to the public good is a first premise. This has been understood since basically the inception of the program, as seen in H. Lawrence Miller, Jr.’s “On the Chicago School of Economics” (1962).

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Moo illuminates the elusive nature of academic freedom as well as the difficulties in defending the university’s ideals today. Moo’s academic freedom plots—and the romances, and the trials of Moo’s Black faculty and students, and the tempestuous “campus melee,” and the soft anti-intellectualism,12 and the other threads that comprise its sprawling narrative—are set against the backdrop of dire cutbacks and a clownish, hostile state governor. At the outset of the novel, Moo University faces a budget shortfall of some $7 million, and administrators contemplate wholesale closure of several departments to balance the books: nuclear engineering, women’s studies, oceanography, no field is safe (Smiley 1995, 22). This situation is compounded by budget cuts announced by Governor O.T. Early, some $200 million statewide, raising Moo’s deficit to around $10 million. The governor lays the ideological case for reforming higher learning in the state. “Education is an investment,” he’s quoted saying in the state paper. “The trouble is, they don’t run it like an investment over there with the students as customers, because that’s what they are, you know. Now they run it like welfare, but I’m telling you, if they won’t turn it around themselves, we’ve got to turn it around for them” (Smiley 1995, 112). A flurry of campus memos details emergency measures such as raising course enrollments, charging log-on fees in computer labs, and assigning janitorial responsibilities to faculty. Still later, after the “campus melee” that begins in protest of Gift’s project with Arlen Martin, Governor Early proposes another $5 million cut to the university, geared to prompt the university to “fire all those bozos up there” (Smiley 1995, 331). The overt politics, the naked retribution of the second cut is a somewhat fanciful rendering of neoliberal political machinations. But the pairing of the budget lines and the Governor’s open anti-intellectualism—blaming the “closet deconstructionists” in the newspaper for campus unrest—raises another set of questions for

12 Smiley’s anti-theory content is more reserved than many campus novels of this period—and more nuanced. For instance, Margaret Bell, an African American professor in Moo’s English department, balks at theory for its “ideas denigrating literary authorship” and is alert to the irony that theory emerged “simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publishing, had the deepest and most delicious possible meaning” (Smiley 1995, 134–35). Here again “literary theory” seems confined to “deconstruction,” but Smiley offers an empathetic rendering of the experience of theory in the academy. Nevertheless, I note the irony that this critique of deconstruction takes place in a book titled “Moo” that features a giant hog for its cover art.

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academic freedom (Smiley 1995, 328). Is academic freedom at stake in Governor Early’s reprisal budgeting? In the larger neoliberal discourses of higher learning and the public? Governor Early openly threatens academic freedom in his first ideological budget allocation and his second retaliatory one. This is clear enough in his comments about the “welfare” nature of the academy and the “closet deconstructionists” who run amok at Moo. The issue is muddied, however, by another of the governor’s responses to the “campus melee” at Moo: a ban on political organizations across the state university system. Here the principle of academic freedom—the capacity of Moo’s faculty to conduct their research and teaching without outside interference such as budgetary reprisals—blurs into the general First Amendment rights enjoyed by Moo’s faculty, staff, and students. The blanket ban foregoes even the pretense of concern for academic freedom relative to political orthodoxy, fraught as it is, posed by Aristide Poncy in Groves. And perhaps it’s not a coincidence that these two edicts overlap, Governor Early announcing the second round of budget cuts to punish the “closet deconstructionists” at the same time as the ban on political activity. The co-occurrence in fact further devalues academic freedom by stripping it of its exceptional qualities, by generalizing the scholar’s right to open inquiry to a blanket right enjoyed by all citizens. In this blurring, the scholar’s right to be evaluated by disciplinary peers simply vanishes. Governor Early, then, represents two broad threats to academic freedom at Moo: a naked anti-intellectualism in his budget formulations, and a misunderstanding of, if not a disregard for, the concept. Early’s place in Moo’s academic freedom material is that of satire—the bombastic, clownish political hack. Far more nuanced is the relationship between academic freedom and the project conducted by Gift and Arlen Martin. Put bluntly, Gift rivals Governor Early for greatest hack of the novel. He judges the impact of his lectures according to the fees he can charge to deliver them. Of a prospective lecture engagement, he notes “the unwisdom of services and knowledge given gratis (which devalued them in the marketplace and persuaded buyers that they were of little worth)” (Smiley 1995, 65). The project that he undertakes with Arlen Martin is framed as nothing less than an ethical disaster. It is a disaster for having partnered with Arlen Martin at all. Some ten years prior, Martin had underwritten a study on chicken nutrition that was supposed to endorse the processes used in his factories; when the study’s results came back adverse to his interests, Martin “attempted to destroy

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the reputation” of the professor and graduate student who conducted the study, even the journal that published the results (Smiley 1995, 71). The project is a disaster on its own merits: to exploit a gold mine under the last prehistoric cloud forest of the Americas. Gift’s report providing academic legitimacy for this project is muddied by tortured logic,13 and his support of Martin is further troubled by a suspiciously sycophantic attitude. Smiley’s sly narration has it that until Arlen Martin, Gift “has never met so Godlike a figure, either consumer-wise or production-wise. And his glad duty […] will be to serve” (1995, 105). A preventable ecological trauma, an act of imperial violence—in this subordination of open inquiry to industrial interests, we are invited to read Gift’s contribution to the Costa Rica project as another case of academic freedom in distress. Moo’s administrators openly discuss this quandary, its repercussions for academic freedom, its potential for reputational hazard to the university. Having been apprised of Arlen Martin’s past of botched partnerships with the university, Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek, Associate Vice-President of Development at Moo, says of the prospects of a renewed donor relationship channeled through the Costa Rica project: “I’m sure he knows that any research funded by his group of companies must be done according to academic standards of disinterestedness. I’m sure we can rely on that” (Smiley 1995, 75). The repetition—“I’m sure”—demonstrates the precarity of “disinterestedness” in the situation. When Gift’s report begins to leak across campus, and ultimately into major international news outlets, Provost Harstead defers to Gift on grounds of academic freedom. “It would be very dangerous for the university to act,” he tells

13 “Gold, even more than petroleum, holds a hallowed place in the human psyche,” Gift writes in his report. “It is both useful and beautiful. It could perhaps be said that the search for new sources of this precious life substance has fueled human history and the rise of civilization itself. As the old sources are played out, few new ones have been found. Does this eventuality define the end of human civilization, perhaps the end of human history? While such speculations may seem far-fetched at this point, it is well to weigh in the balance the meaning of this ever-precious, ever-vanishing source of human wealth against the readily renewable, not to say relentlessly burgeoning, natural abundance of the forest” (Smiley 1995, 204). Though Gift fails to deliver any of the quantitative data one would expect from an economist’s research, Provost Harstead ultimately defers to his academic expertise anyway.

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his assistant Mrs. Walker, who leans toward intervening (Smiley 1995, 206). Putting this material among the forefront of its many themes, Moo makes the case for the public value of academic freedom, entangled as it is in the public concerns of state budgeting allocations and sweeping environmental degradation. Situating the academic freedom narrative in the person of an economics professor, rather than one of the professors of the more abstract fields, raises the stakes of academic freedom—and its restrictions, violations, curtailment—with concrete results. Gift’s abandonment of those ideals in his zeal “to serve” frames him as the novel’s villain. Despite all the ways in which Gift freely subordinates his rights to open academic inquiry to Martin’s industrial interests, however, his project in fact exercises academic freedom. Smiley savages Gift’s piety to extreme market fundamentalism, but—and I cringe as I write this—Gift’s discipline in fact authorizes his work. The spirit of free-market absolutism is what drives the satire of Gift’s character, it’s what motivates him to partner with Martin to despoil the Costa Rican cloud forest, and that spirit itself enjoys the favor of the field of economics. “The principle of academic freedom was not, as critics sometimes describe it, an endorsement of the idea that in the university anything goes,” Scott writes of the formation of academic freedom during the Progressive era. “The call for faculty autonomy rested on the guarantee of quality provided by disciplinary bodies” (2019, 48). That guarantee—again, I cringe behind my keyboard—is issued to Gift by the Chicago School of economics, broadly understood. With Scott’s description in mind, we’re better off reading Moo as ironizing the Chicago School itself rather than Gift and his obsequious kowtowing to Arlen Martin. When Harstead says that it would be “very dangerous” to intervene into Gift’s project with Martin, readers are to understand that the provost wants to avoid conflict and bad public relations, to assume a reading of academic freedom as unassailable lifelong employment, to consider the idea of academic freedom that Scott rejects: “that in the university anything goes.” But with a closer grasp of the foundations of academic freedom, the situation is perhaps more fraught. The issue at play in Moo is not one bad actor, but the banner-carrier for a field of knowledge production.

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There’s plenty to cringe at in Moo, the cringe being a ready marker of satire, where the jokes tend to cut to the quick. And this is setting aside a few truly appalling moments, such as when Mary, the African American student rooming in Dubuque House, suffers the humiliation of hearing a racial epithet at the cafeteria. Moo generally reads as a loving defense of the academy, suffering antagonism from the state executive and legislature, repelling the tentacles of corporate interference, muddling through it all as resources dwindle and professional dissatisfaction mounts. But what exactly are we cringing at in Gift’s supposed abandonment of scholarly freedom? There’s a mystification here: on the one hand, the novel’s satirical voice, which isolates Gift as a punchline, and on the other hand, Harstead’s “anything goes” formulation of academic freedom, which is unchallenged within the novel. Perhaps this is the most wounding of Moo’s satire: the outside threats from Governor Early are bombastic and more easily shrugged off than the penetrating claim that even inside the academy—with Gift, the object of easy ridicule, enjoying the protections of disciplinary authority—academic freedom as an ideal to pursue is as precarious as it is thorny. In other words, it’s not so much that the threats to academic freedom originate inside the academy. Rather, they tend to originate at the boundary line between the academy and the public. The celebrated cases of Steven Salaita and Charles Murray and Nikole Hannah-Jones, as I mentioned earlier, raise some doubts among the public as to what on earth academics are up to. The cases play to different political audiences, but the doubts run along similar veins: is this what professional expertise looks like? Less sexy but carrying far greater impact are the dire consequences of the Chicago School. Salaita’s and Murray’s and Hannah-Jones’s cases raise important questions of academic inquiry and identity, which for better or worse are readymade for adoption into culture wars disputes. The Chicago School, meanwhile, has lent scholarly credibility to a range of polices that have driven the wealth gap to radical disparities. While the Chicago School’s economic philosophy deals mostly with monetarism and inflation, its implementation in policy is associated with deregulation and cuts to public spending on social programs. It’s little wonder, then, that, simultaneous with the rise of finance capital at the end of the twentieth century, the neoliberal policies legitimated by Chicago economics preside over the ever-widening income inequality in

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the U.S. and abroad.14 The most vocal Chicago economists ultimately found inequality not a bug, but a feature of economic policy.15 In the most notorious case of its influence, the University of Chicago partnered with the Universidad Católica de Chile,16 using the developing nation as a laboratory for its economic principles shortly after Augusto Pinochet imposed military rule over the country. As Juan Gabriel Valdés writes in Pinochet’s Economists (1995), a cadre of “Chicago Boys”— Chilean alumni of the Chicago economics department—returned to Chile to deliver “shock therapies” to the economy and public infrastructure. Many of the Chicago Boys were attached to Universidad Católica, and gradually they took over all of the principal state economic posts (Valdés 1995, 10). Under the guise of curbing Chile’s runaway inflation, they eliminated government control of pricing, opened the country to foreign investments, and dramatically reduced public employment and agricultural subsidies, all while maintaining a dubiously “free-market” regulation of labor (Valdés 1995, 20–23). As Valdés puts it, the Chicago Boys effected a coup within Pinochet’s coup: while national attention was on inflation and unemployment, they gutted the state and achieved “almost imperceptibly, the most profound transformation of the Chilean economy” (1995, 21). The Chile Project then was an experiment large in scale and sweeping in social cost that originated, Valdés argues, “directly from what the Chicago Boys termed ‘economic science’: a science to be found mostly in their textbooks” (1995, 2). And of course the backdrop of this experiment gives it an ominous tone. “The reforms faced neither criticism nor opposition since they were carried out in a framework of total deprivation of public liberties and citizen’s rights,” Valdés writes. “A

14 Mariana Mazzucato debunks narratives of capital “creation” and replaces them with studies of extraction in The Value of Everything (2018), where she also finds a nexus of financialization, deregulation, and inequality, each feeding the other precipitously. This is most evident in income inequality rates and household debt-to-income rates in the U.S. and the U.K. (Mazzucato 2018, 127–34). 15 In Chicagonomics (2015), Lanny Ebenstein describes Chicago economist Friedrich Hayek’s thinking this way: “the right kind of inequality—or diversity of social outcomes— emerging from a free market order is precisely what leads to and constitutes progress” (150). 16 If Chicago economists enjoyed academic freedom in the U.S., guaranteed by peers in their field, their partnering agreement did not extend it to the Chilean colleagues. The guiding terms of the agreement granted Chicago total oversight of the Chilean Project, as well as over selecting its staff and students (Valdés 1995, 133).

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military dictator set the context in which economic policy could advance regardless of the social costs incurred” (1995, 10). Read in this extreme case, the Chicago School’s principles are anathema to the public good— specifically to human rights. Are these then the signs of academic freedom having run amok? Do the Chicago School’s legacies in policy show that “professional expertise” has failed to police itself? Despite the gravity of policies related to the Chicago School or the incendiary nature of flashpoints in the culture wars, academic freedom is far better off with “professional expertise” than with an outside body weighing in. I note this with irony, as an English professor having just described the broad outcomes of a field in whose methods I have no training. How best to read academic freedom in light of the Chicago School? The failures of the Chicago School—or to say it more charitably, their deleterious effect on real human lives—are more attributable to the failures of public policy imagination than to academic freedom per se, given that other qualified voices of expertise compete within the field economics.17 There are other leading economists besides the Chicago Boys, of course: Nobel Prize-winner Elinor Ostrom and Thomas Piketty are likelier to emphasize the political economy, for instance, and Lanny Ebenstein warns against overgeneralizing the diversity of thought even within the University of Chicago’s economics department.18 The problem, then, is not a matter of “academic freedom” run amok, but a pressure point that takes place at the intersection of academic knowledge production and the public consumption or application of that knowledge. It’s not that we should render the academy a “free marketplace of ideas” by pitting different schools of, say, economics, against each 17 There is a whiff of academic freedom struggle within the Chicago School—though a faint one. Founded by John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago had a relatively conservative, pro-business reputation, so much so that some journalists and politicians dubbed it “Standard Oil University” (Coats 1963, 488). However, the codification of Chicago School principles seems to happen more as a reaction to the interwar dominance of Keynesian economics than it does from any particular patronage. 18 Ebenstein distinguishes between different competing ideologies within the Chicago program as it rose to fame as a policy engine. For instance, first-generation, classical liberalism Chicago economists such as Jacob Viner, Frank Knight, and Henry Simons “typically advocated public policies that are intended to result in the highest standard of living possible for all people—not a small group among them” (Ebenstein 2015, 11). Contrast these with the libertarians who tend to carry the banner of “Chicago”: Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, whose postwar careers Ebenstein describes as “virtually neoanarchist” (2015, 18).

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other. Rather, academic knowledge production—whether in the natural sciences, humanities, or social sciences—needs a greater foothold in public discourse. In other words, for academic freedom to mean anything, we must also commit to defend academic knowledge production—must commit, in short, to public scholarship.

Dithering on Academic Freedom To situate the stakes of the academic freedom, consider the case of scholars in Hong Kong in the aftermath of the Umbrella Revolution. Also called the Occupy Central movement, the Umbrella Revolution unfolded throughout the fall of 2014 as Hong Kongers demanded more democratic processes for city government. During England’s colonial rule and continuing after the 1997 Handover under the city’s Legislative Council, Hong Kong has never had political autonomy, has less now after the implementation of the National Security Law imposed in 2020, and will have still less when it fully assimilates into China in 2047. Its scholars, however, have long enjoyed academic freedom akin to their colleagues in North America and Europe, guaranteed along with freedoms of speech, publication, and assembly under the Basic Law that facilitated the city’s famed “one country, two systems” codes. But since the Umbrella protests, academic freedom in Hong Kong has been abridged, with several of the city’s professors removed from posts, blocked from promotions, or subject to public calls for removal, as Kevin Carrico studies in “Academic Freedom in Hong Kong since 2015” (2018).19 Since 2014, the

19 Complementing these pressures against scholars is a steady campaign to control the classrooms of Hong Kong’s public primary and secondary educational system. In “Education and Transnational Nationalism” (2016), Shui-Yin Sharon Yam details the central government’s failed attempt at mandating the Moral and National Education curriculum in Hong Kong, proposed in 2012 with implementation planned for 2015: “This 34page handbook discusses what a Chinese Model entails in terms of governance, economy, foreign policies, and culture. In particular, this handbook focuses on China’s economic superiority in the global economy. Although the Hong Kong government insisted that teachers could freely design the curriculum for national education, the governmentsponsored M.N.E. handbook was seen by most citizens as reflecting the ideology of the pro-China Hong Kong government. Teachers, particularly those who worked in public schools, worried that if they did not follow the Curriculum outlined by the handbook, they would suffer political consequences. At the same time, many educators and activists criticized the handbook for ideologically indoctrinating Chinese students through the soft power of education” (43).

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city has moved to curtail political activity, including in 2018 banning the National Party whose principal platform was a call for independence. Critically, in many scholars’ cases, the issue is framed not as deviant politics, but as deviant scholarship. For instance, Benny Tai Yiu-Ting (戴 耀 廷), formerly a professor of law at the University of Hong Kong who is also considered a co-founder of the Umbrella movement, was subjected to a petition calling for his removal with one legislator accusing him of “teaching students how to maintain the rule of law under the spirit of advocating civil disobedience” (Carrico 2018, 5). In the spring of 2019, Tai was sentenced to 16 months in prison for conspiracy to commit public nuisance with many others, several of them fellow academics, receiving similar judgments. In the summer of 2020, the University of Hong Kong terminated his contact, citing his criminal conviction. Tai argued that the decision “marked the end of academic freedom in Hong Kong,” and a spokesperson at the Beijing liaison office all but confirmed Tai’s suspicions, claiming, “Tai has used the sacred position of an educational institution to spread fallacies and confuse right and wrong, as well as promote illegal [activities] which had misled and poisoned a group of young people” (Chan 2020). Still worse than a case of retribution against a discrete group for a discrete public action, the aftermath of the Umbrella Revolution has rendered Hong Kong’s independence virtually off-limits for discussion amid the city’s universities.20 These conditions continue to tighten in the aftermath of the antiextradition demonstrations that rocked Hong Kong and destabilized its semi-autonomous relationship with China throughout the summer and fall of 2019, affecting not only civil government but especially the universities whose students widely populated the street protests. The campus of Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Poly U.) was the site of a siege for nearly two weeks after protesters retreated to it and fortified the entrances from police entry. For a speech describing the Poly U. siege as a “humanitarian crisis” and likening it to the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, Sam Chun-Wai Choi, a lecturer at the Education University of Hong 20 Carrico details how the city’s Chief Executive called on university leaders to “take appropriate actions” against students’ banners advocating independence. They complied. In 2017, 10 of the city’s universities released a joint statement decrying “abuses” of free speech and stating flatly that “all universities undersigned agree that we do not support Hong Kong independence, which contravenes the Basic Law” (Carrico 2018, 8). While Carrico here focuses on the abridging of student’s inquiry, the chilling effect would be felt through the faculty ranks, as well.

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Kong, was twice reprimanded: the city’s Communications Authority ruled his address “hate speech” for inciting a backlash against the police force, and the city’s Police Commissioner wrote to the President of the Education University of Hong Kong and to the Education Bureau, requesting sanctions against Choi that would “ensure the professional conduct of educators” (Yam 2020). Invoking the Education Bureau, through which the University Grants Committee administers the funding structures of the city’s eight universities, has a direct chilling effect on the exercise of academic freedom, already precarious in Hong Kong. I refer to Hong Kong’s post-Umbrella milieu not to engage in a facile kind of reductio ad hitlerum,21 but to establish the stakes of the principle that the genre has left to whither on the vine. Academic freedom is probably drier, wonkier fare than many readers are anticipating when they seek out a campus novel, but the fact that it seems such a low priority for the genre—rigorously devalued in Groves, the putative banner-carrier of academic freedom—is noteworthy. Put bluntly, academic freedom is integral to a healthy democracy. Whether exercised by scientists or humanists or in the professional fields, it allows scholars to produce and disseminate the knowledge that drives our social and political institutions. “The denial of academic freedom to its universities, of permission to pursue truth wherever it leads, signals the ultimate failure of democracy,” as Scott says. “And it does not bode well for the future prosperity and health of the nation” (2019, 105). What we see in the genre’s treatment of academic freedom is somewhat the inverse of what Hong Kong’s scholars are experiencing in the postUmbrella milieu. The genre demotes academic freedom to a secondary interest, or even refuses to investigate the term beyond the popular misconception that “anything goes” in the academy, whereas Hong Kong’s scholars suffer overt and portentous machinations to silence them and to create docile universities. In the genre, academic freedom rots from the inside; Hong Kong dramatizes the clash between democratic and authoritarian, repressive institutions. These are divergent sources of antagonism, but the genre and the post-Umbrella situation in Hong Kong yield similar results: academic freedom falls further into neglect, and its public 21 Though discussions of academic freedom under authoritarian rule are not rare and serve important purposes. See, for instance, Andrew Ross’s “Repressive Tolerance Revamped? The Illiberal Embrace of Academic Freedom” in the Journal of Academic Freedom, volume 8, 2017.

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utility, undefended, creeps further into a disrepair that becomes harder and harder to rehabilitate. For the U.S., as in so many other crises menacing its higher learning, neoliberal ideology impinges on academic freedom. The issue is not only the fiscal side of neoliberal order, seen in the steady deprioritization of research in legislative budgets or the weakening of faculty autonomy via adjunctification or in donors’ intrusive influence over academic matters, the latter epitomized by the Charles Koch Foundation’s funding of programs such as the Program for the Study of Political Economy and Free Enterprise at Florida State University.22 It is also the pernicious conflation of two separate democratic virtues: academic freedom and freedom of speech. These axes again demonstrate the university’s fundamental contradiction between its social functions and its private privileges, complicated further by the genre’s commitment to Exemptions, such as Mulcahy’s and Gift’s manipulations of professional standards for personal gains. Scott puts it succinctly: “When redefined as an individual right—a marketized free-for-all, no different from the right of free speech—academic freedom loses its purchase” (2019, 14).

Works Cited @LocalGoblin. 2017. Twitter post. 26 January 2017, 12:29 p.m. https://twi tter.com/localgoblin/status/824716006606016512?lang=en. Carrico, Kevin. 2018. “Academic Freedom in Hong Kong Since 2015: Between Two Systems.” Hong Kong Watch (January 2018): 1–17. https://static1.squ arespace.com/static/58ecfa82e3df284d3a13dd41/t/5a65b8ece4966ba242 36ddd4/1516615925139/Academic+Freedom+report+%281%29.pdf. Cebula, Geoff. 2017. Adjunct. Chan, Ho-him. 2020. “University of Hong Kong Governing Council Sacks Legal Scholar Benny Tai over Convictions for Occupy Protests.” South China Morning Post, 28 July. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/ article/3095043/university-hong-kong-governing-council-sacks-legal-sch olar. Coats, A.W. 1963. “The Origins of the Chicago School(s).” Journal of Political Economy 71 (5): 487–93.

22 See, for instance, the review of the establishment of this program led by the Florida State University Faculty Senate in 2011: “Koch Foundation Memorandum of Understanding Ad Hoc Committee Review Report” at https://ia800509.us.archive.org/24/ items/2015FSUKoch/FSSC%20Report%20Standley.pdf.

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Ebenstein, Lanny. 2015. Chicagonomics: The Evolution of Chicago Free Market Economics. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Foreman, Tom, Jr. 2021. “Nikole Hannah-Jones Chooses Howard Over U.N.C.Chapel Hill.” Associated Press, 6 July. https://apnews.com/article/nikole-han nah-jones-unc-howard-university-6e192586fbbc0b8788db9613314a444e. Friedman, Milton. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hegeman, Susan. 2017. “Oppenheimer’s House; Or, the Contradictions of Academic Life from the Cold War to Neoliberalism.” A.A.U.P. Journal of Academic Freedom 8: 1–15. https://www.aaup.org/JAF8/oppenheimer% E2%80%99s-house-or-contradictions-academic-life-cold-war-neoliberalism#. XQFEiYhKhPZ. House Bill 233: An Act Relating to Postsecondary Education (FL). 2021. Mazzucato, Mariana. 2018. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. New York: Public Affairs. McCarthy, Mary. 1951. The Groves of Academe. Signet, 1963. Reichman, Henry. 2019. The Future of Academic Freedom. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Satisky, Jake. 2019. “Duke Reaffirms Academic Freedom in Response to Middle East Consortium Controversy.” The Chronicle [Duke University], 26 September. https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2019/09/duke-uni versity-academic-freedom-middle-east-consortium-controversy. Scott, Joan Wallach. 2019. Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press. Smiley, Jane. 1995. Moo. New York: Anchor Books, 2009. Valdés, Juan Gabriel. 1995. Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School in Chile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yam, Shui-Yin Sharon. 2016. “Education and Transnational Nationalism: The Rhetoric of Integration in Chinese National and Moral Education in Hong Kong.” Howard Journal of Communications 27 (1): 38–52. ———. 2020. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: We Need to Defend Intellectual Freedom in Hong Kong.” Hong Kong Free Press, 22 May. https://hongko ngfp.com/2020/05/22/pedagogy-of-the-oppressed-we-need-to-defend-int ellectual-freedom-in-hong-kong/.

CHAPTER 6

Identity and Culture War on Campus

In November 2016, a scuffle broke out at Gibson’s Bakery, which was popular with the Oberlin College community as a place to buy pastries and alcohol. A Gibson’s clerk had observed an underage Black student allegedly attempting to leave the store without paying for two bottles of wine. News of the student’s arrest spread across the street to campus, and the next day many Oberlin students led a peaceful protest in front of the bakery. One leaflet decried Gibson’s as a “RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION” (Volk 2019). The leaflet typifies the charges leveled by many Oberlin students, who progressed from storefront protests to boycotts of the bakery, which in turn litigated for injury after Oberlin College suspended a contract with Gibson’s for bagels and donuts (Volk 2019). A year later, Gibson’s initiated a civil case against Oberlin College, aimed at the dean of students rather than any of the protesting students. Gibson’s sued for libel and in late 2019 won an initial judgment of $44 million. Surprisingly, Oberlin College was held responsible for its students’ speech (Volk 2019). The story splashed across national media outlets, probably because it so tidily mapped onto inflamed, culture war-inflected racial grievances: the day before the incident at Gibson’s, Donald Trump had been elected President of the U.S. The transformation of this petty, local case into a multimillion-dollar, national sensation speaks to the nature of campus discourses of race and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 W. Beal, Campus Fictions, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1_6

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ethnicity. The student had agreed in December 2016 to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of attempted theft. But in an extraordinary move the Municipal Court Judge Thomas Januzzi refused to accept the plea bargain and insisted that the charges be raised to felony level. Stephen Volk, an emeritus professor of history at Oberlin, puts it this way: If the students saw Gibson’s alleged racist practices as a stand-in for much larger racist incidents roiling the country, the judge also appeared to see the case as the vehicle through which he could deliver a much larger message about students at (all) liberal colleges and how they interact with the (often) more traditional environments in which they are located. His message: he wouldn’t let Oberlin College bully the merchants, even if the merchants appeared ready to settle. (2019)

The saga of Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College, then, exemplifies the tangled meanings of race on campus: a nexus of race, the thick resentments typical of the genre, and the specter of political correctness tying together racial grievances, culture war divisions, and higher learning. The Gibson’s case feels like a typical, if exorbitantly priced, vignette in the unrelenting saga of American culture wars. Culture war events and discourses are routinely attended by matters of race, whether explicitly or implicitly. There are of course many discourses that develop during the culture wars: sexual liberation, women’s liberation, gay liberation, religious freedom, political correctness and free speech, and more. It’s impossible to separate these matters entirely, either in the specific contexts of the 1960s liberation movements or in the general frictions of modernity, but matters of race, especially the standing of Black Americans, almost always closely attend culture war discourses.1 And the campus setting of the Gibson’s case is also typical of the raced dimensions of 1 For instance, the Christian Right, which along with elite neoconservatism animates the right wing of the culture wars, is likely as motivated by matters of race as by the religious freedoms it extols explicitly. The movement is popularly understood as beginning with the anti-abortion crusade following the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But a clearer history of the founding of contemporary American evangelicalism finds that it originates partly in response to secularization of the schools—to public policies on school prayer—but especially as a reaction to desegregation of the schools. See Chapter 3, “Taking God’s Country Back,” in Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America (2015). It’s dicey to proceed with the premise that matters of race can be disentangled from other identity experiences, especially those involving gender. These issues are fraught with complexity. But it’s also true that the discourses of the culture war often obscure their

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the culture wars: the American academy is renowned, or infamous, for its identity studies centers and programs that blossomed after the social unrest of the 1960s, and conservative Americans often consider it the major locus of so-called political correctness or its echo, so-called wokeness—this, another site of the unthought assumptions of free speech on campus, which also channel through matters of academic freedom, as the previous chapter discusses. Beyond these axioms, it is important to remember the tangible histories of American higher learning—its historic relationship with slavery and other racial exclusions, as well as the peculiar relation to the origins of the culture wars in postwar America. The shibboleths of the institution hinge on race, not only with a presumptive whiteness, but also with foundational ties to white supremacy. In Ebony & Ivy (2013), Craig Steven Wilder argues that higher learning never stood apart from American slavery, whether during its founding in the colonies or during the antebellum period. For Wilder, the university stood beside church and state as “the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage” working to produce, refine, and legitimate the social ideas that would transform the nation and its peoples “from revolutionaries to imperialists” (2013, 11, 182). Likewise, the insurgent field of the Abolition University identifies the continuities of slavery in American universities up to the present day.2 These records alone might be enough to make the academy central to the culture wars. But in addition to this history and to the belated course corrections that begin in the academy after the social unrest of the 1960s—the slow processes of opening the faculty to persons of color and founding identity studies programs and reformulating canons—the academy is itself a point of origin for the culture war, both in the historical sense and as a continuing engine of cultural conflict. As Andrew Hartman indicates in A War for the Soul of America (2015), the core of the New Left and 1960s liberation movements in the U.S. was “found on the nation’s campuses” and was understood by some at the time as an attack on the fundamental principles of academic exchange and free speech, and as an assault on the old universals which higher learning were supposed to extol (11).

relationship to race—a fundamental tie that I hope to clarify in this chapter with its strategic focus. 2 For instance, see Eli Meyeroff’s overview of this framework at https://lareviewofbo oks.org/article/beyond-educated-ignorance-a-conversation-with-eli-meyerhoff/.

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For budding neoconservatives, Hartman argues, “the American university stood for all that they valued about American society: beyond being a forum for free inquiry, it was a meritocratic melting pot where smart people, even working-class Jews, could thrive. An attack on the university was an attack on them. For this reason, student uprisings arguably did more than any other issue to galvanize formerly liberal intellectuals against the New Left” and into the fray of the culture wars (2015, 56). In this light, it’s unsurprising that the Gibson’s case would escalate as it did, especially given Oberlin’s profile: a prestigious predominantly white institution, but also the U.S.’s first interracial and coeducational college and a college that continues to be an avatar of progressivism. In other words, the situation at the bakery was perfectly suited for conscription into the culture wars and their fixations on race, free speech, and resentments. The academy and its humanist thinkers have been rethinking the meanings of race for decades now, and yet the campus events and trends referred to above tend to confer on race a decidedly settled meaning. Perhaps this is no coincidence? Scholars have explored the ways in which race is not a set ontological category, and tend to understand race as a cultural construct, as a performance. The public—and the genre, for that matter—have not moved in tandem with this scholarly vanguard. This chapter will proceed, then, with an outdated and regressive understanding of race, suited to the terms of the political battles and culture wars that invoke race.3 The genre tends to mystify these culture war frictions and in doing so lays the university bare to further rightist critiques—critiques which are increasingly given in bad faith. The genre addresses race broadly, of course, including through novels set at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, such as Cyrus Colter’s A Chocolate Soldier (1988). These works have less applicable ties to culture war questions, perhaps because they are insulated from the friction points that may be more common at predominantly white institutions. Accordingly, the texts I study in this 3 This is how Andrew Hartman describes the legacy of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Gates knows as well as anyone the leading scholarship on race. But he sought out the room to work in the gaps between this knowledge and the lived experience of race in the United States. “Because most people understood racial identities in ontological terms, and because the racist regime from which such understandings had yet to be dismantled,” Hartman says of Gates’s positioning, “political battles about racial inequality had to be fought on older terms” (2015, 133).

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chapter are set at predominantly white institutions: Joseph E. Green’s Pseudo Cool (1988), set at a Bay area university modeled after Stanford, and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), set at a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts. With both novels published during and setting their action in the heat of the culture wars, we will see the genre’s waffling relationship to identity studies through the university’s production of knowledge itself and through its alleged ties to political correctness. The results of such work, I argue, are a weakening of the pluralism that the academy aspires to—a goal that is ever more important in our tumultuous times.

Pseudo Cool and the Fates of Western Civilization “So next year’s freshmen will not have to submit to a year long exclusive examination of ‘great’ literature written by dead white men,” Starks thinks to himself. “He’s glad he’s not the one who has to decide on next year’s reading list, though” (Green 1988, 176). One of the half-dozen college seniors at the core of the Black Student Union (B.S.U.) in Joseph E. Green’s Pseudo Cool, Starks provides us a summary—a noticeably cursory one—of the faculty meeting that concludes the B.S.U.’s struggle to reform their university’s required Western Civilization program which began even before Starks and his fellow seniors arrived on campus. The B.S.U.’s struggle over Copeland University’s core curriculum threads through Pseudo Cool as its characters deal with other issues unique to their experiences. Porsche deals with an unwanted pregnancy which has been fathered by Barry, who is coming out of the closet, while Ashley resorts to sex work in order to pay tuition, and Jason becomes disenchanted with the B.S.U. and in the last pages is thwarted from graduation by a late-semester hospitalization due to appendicitis. Through all this, there is precious little schoolwork—though, as the following chapter studies further, work avoidance hardly distinguishes Pseudo Cool in the genre, which does its level-best to obscure academic inquiry from its plots and characters. Green delivers a study of the intersections of Black identity and academic inquiry despite, or perhaps because of, the novel’s setting at a predominantly white institution. In its persistent, wonky regard for the university’s catalog requirements, Pseudo Cool subordinates school work to curricular politics, which is more than you can say for the work-aversion of most campus novels. The stakes of these curricular politics are rooted in the very identity of the academy: as Wilder shows, one foundational

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charge for the American university was to assure the knowledge production, such as scientific racism and other platforms, that would sustain “the peculiar institution.”4 But the novel’s hold on these politics—as they trace back to the academy’s founding, as they manifest in the campus struggle at Copeland, and as they signal national culture war discourses—is quite tenuous: Pseudo Cool ’s closing action signals ambivalence about the cause, either taking a reactionary disavowal of collegian activism or repudiating the significance of the core curriculum or perhaps indicating the deep exhaustion of such work. Pseudo Cool is something of an outlier in the genre. Lavelle Porter refers to this set of material as “blackademic” fiction. In The Blackademic Life (2019), Porter identifies three consistent tropes for such works: the overeducation of Black Americans, colorism, and the politics of authenticity. These themes are common in African American fiction, but Porter shows how they are compounded by relationships to the academy especially in the campus novel. There are hints of the first two tropes in Pseudo Cool, but they appear mostly at the edges, such as a brief episode when Starks is antagonized by a townie on a city bus or a brief discussion of colorism at the Nyumba house where many B.S.U. students live. But in each case, the blackademic tropes appear as minor annoyances, not driving plot and not really moving the characters beyond dispassionate statements. But despite the divergence from Porter’s tropes, these characters are firmly ensconced in blackademic life in their consistent struggle to reform the Western Civilization curriculum and with plans for a push to establish an ethnic studies program. “For the black academic fiction writer the university cannot be an innocent, disinterested site of knowledge production,” Porter writes. “Rather, the university is repeatedly revealed to be an institution for reproducing white heteropatriarchal norms that either rejected black intellectuals as incapable of assimilating to such

4 “Students from North America crafted a science that justified expansionism and slavery—a science that generated broad claims to expertise over colored people and thrived upon unlimited access to nonwhite bodies,” Wilder writes. “They did not abandon the search for truth; they redefined truth. Atlantic intellectuals had deployed science to prove the prophecies of the Bible, and now, with similar vigor, they pursued the visible and manifest truths of the material world” (2013, 182). Wilder also details how early American scholars of this sort became public intellectuals, primarily as spokespersons for twisted apologias of white supremacy (2013, 226, 242–43).

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norms or included the black intellectual under a permanently provisional status in which her presence is always questioned and contested” (2019, 16). As disinterested and “cool” as Green’s characters tend to run, the work of Copeland’s B.S.U. indicates a deep understanding of the university’s raced relation to knowledge production. Their criticism of Copeland’s curriculum may not explicitly state the shadow cast by the academy’s historic ties to white supremacy, as Wilder studies, and it may not deploy Porter’s sophisticated theoretical language. But it nevertheless demonstrates a strong commitment to the core academic functions of the academy—the politics of knowledge production itself—whose stakes are routinely underrated in public debates about higher learning. The B.S.U.’s campaign to reform the Western Civilization curriculum appears principally in two passages: first in a public campus debate and second in an office visit that Jason pays to a dissenting professor. The debate occupies a few scant paragraphs conveyed almost exclusively in third-person narration that summarizes the discussion. It appears to be a civil in its tone, the introduction of the Copeland Students for Western Civilization opposition group notwithstanding. The B.S.U.’s platform gains faculty support, but the substance of the debate is mostly muted by Green’s narration, which generally discounts dialog and detail in order to focus on Jason’s perceptions of the heat of the argument. “Can’t they see that the very reason for this debate is the failure for people to understand one another?” Jason wonders as the debate trundles along (1988, 98). While the narration of the debate takes for granted that readers may already know the terrain of the culture war arguments embroiling “the West” in the academy, Jason’s meeting with Professor Roberts, the classicist, provides greater detail. The professor holds to a canard that the B.S.U. wants to replace the Western Civilization course “with some sort of an ethnic studies course” (Green 1988, 111); in fact, the B.S.U. has not posited any kind of curriculum, only critiquing the shortcomings of the current curriculum. Jason clarifies the B.S.U.’s position: it’s not only that the current reading list fails to offer texts by nonwhites or by women; it’s that “it’s a required course that teaches only one viewpoint: the white man’s viewpoint” (Green 1988, 111). As the conversation unfolds and Professor Roberts’s presumptuousness becomes increasingly offensive, the dialog with Jason’s reasoned argument is increasingly displaced by narration of his inner thoughts—rage at the professor’s blithe obliviousness, fantasies about “gouging his eyes out and snatching away his heart” (Green 1988, 113). Yet across all the material dealing with the B.S.U.’s

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signature campaign, there’s very little demonstration of the foundational thinking about what makes an effective—and just—core curriculum. This is not to object to the B.S.U.’s diagnosis of Copeland’s core curriculum, but to observe the incompleteness of the critique. Green’s narration can be economical in part because its popular market may have had less interest in the details, but especially because it could draw on the sensationalist headlines involving Stanford University’s reform of its Western Civilization curriculum. Stanford, not coincidentally Green’s alma mater, began to reevaluate its core curriculum in the late 1980s at the behest of its students, including especially Bill King, the president of the Stanford Black Student Union, who in 1986 lodged a formal complaint with the faculty senate that its core curriculum was “racist” (Hartman 2015, 227). In a memorable and inflammatory moment in this saga, Jesse Jackson marched with students on campus in early 1988 as they chanted “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western culture’s got to go.” The cheap politicization of Stanford’s curricular reform was swift. Newsweek, for instance, ran a story under the headline “Goodbye, Socrates”—and drew upon the grievances and jeremiads already laid out in culture war diatribes such as William Bennett’s pamphlet “To Reclaim a Legacy: a Report on the Humanities in Higher Education,” published in 1984 as he chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities, or Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987). The fact that very little ultimately changed for Stanford students seemed not to appease pearl-clutching critics: where the former “Western Civilization” course required first-year students to read the same fifteen texts, such as the Bible and selections from Homer, Galileo, and Darwin, the new “Culture, Ideas, and Values” curriculum—“CIV,” for short—offered more flexibility along with only one departure from its predecessor: “a small number of authors representing minority, female, and non-Western perspectives were required” (Hartman 2015, 228). Likewise, lost in the noise was the fact that Stanford’s curriculum was not some age-old standard: “Western Civilization” had only been installed at Stanford in 1980.5 The particulars of 5 And the framework for a “Western Civilization” curriculum doesn’t reach back much further than 1980. Far from a timeless universal, the course arrived in a particular context to offer a particular politics. Columbia University is generally credited with piloting the first such course in 1919. As Frederick Rudolph explains in Curriculum (1977), Columbia was trying to bring coherence to the elective system and reassert liberal learning against the pressure to specialize. And the course that developed as a result carried highly nationalistic and imperialistic content: “Not until after the war, partly as

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the canon wars ebbed out from faculty meetings and scholarly publications into public venues slowly and unevenly, often mischaracterized and sensationalized by bad-faith demagoguery, but the stakes of these debates were clear. It was the very idea that “the West”—whatever that term meant to members of the debate—might be displaced or transformed. Green’s narration of the struggles over Western Civilization—and indeed, his voice throughout Pseudo Cool —is increasingly removed from the passions of the action. Aside from Jason’s view to the campus debate and his meeting with Professor Roberts when we have access to his interior thoughts and can see his angst and frustration at the classicist’s unmindful privilege, there is little to register the characters’ personal feelings on the Western Civilization campaign. After the meeting with Professor Roberts, the narration of this material becomes more and more remote from personal experience. Starks makes a passing reference to an upcoming meeting of the faculty senate, for instance. And in another reappearance of the matter, Porsche buries it in her pre-graduation to-do list: “She has plenty of time to go see Ashley. But now she has to study and tomorrow they will be announcing the results of the spring elections and there’s the final meeting of the Western Civilization committee and she has to call….” (Green 1988, 154). The run-on structure and the ellipsis signal her distraction from the issues. The passage captures the harried life of the undergraduate student approaching finals week, but it may signal a declining investment in the B.S.U., which we might also detect in the students’ nonplussed acceptance of the news that Copeland’s student government has defunded the B.S.U. Even the news of the B.S.U.’s victory in the curricular reform is muted and remote. Jason wakes up one morning with a dim recollection: “Starks called him last night, and although he’d been incredibly drunk at the time, Jason remembers Starks mentioning something about having won the battle” (Green 1988, 165).

a consequence of the Army-required ‘War Aims’ courses that taught in Students’ Army Training Corps programs, did comprehensive survey courses take on the character of a movement. Columbia’s required contemporary civilization course in 1919 was a product of the university’s wartime Students’ Army Training Corps course” (Rudolph 1977, 237). Further, Hartman explains the affinity for Europe as an acute need after the Great War: “Prior to World War 1, Americans had sought to distinguish themselves from Europeans, a desire the nation’s humanities curriculum tended to echo. But when American politicians committed the United States to war in Europe, American curriculum builders followed suit, hitching the nation’s cultural fate to Europe” (2015, 229).

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Like any students enrolled in American universities today, Green’s B.S.U. students endure manifold stresses that are most often undetected by their peers and others on campus. Passages such as Jason’s visit with Professor Roberts take place at a highly fraught moment in their lives, as they approach high-stakes final exams, prepare emotionally for graduation, and search for gainful employment—and anyway, the late stages of the Western Civilization debate take place behind the closed doors of the faculty senate. Perhaps it’s no wonder that Green’s characters are increasingly separated from the heat of the debate. Nevertheless, the effect of this narration toward the end of the novel is to relegate the politics of the B.S.U. to the status of little more than an afterthought in the lives of the principal characters. To put this turn in perspective, consider the visibility and importance of Black student unions in the annals of American higher learning. This movement, while undervalued in American history and even in critical university studies, demonstrates a tremendous power for Black students in the postwar era. For instance, in The Black Campus Movement 6 (2012), Ibram X. Kendi argues that it wasn’t Brown v. The Board of Education in Topeka in 1954 nor was it the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that effected change in the academy. Rather, Kendi writes, “the Black campus movement forced the rewriting of the racial constitution of higher education” (Kendi 2012, 4). This movement is remembered today for the tragic Orangeburg Massacre of 1968, when police opened fire on students at South Carolina State University after a peaceful civil rights demonstration, or for the spectacle of armed Black students being escorted from a student center at Cornell in 1969, captured by Steve Starr’s PulitzerPrize winning photograph. The work of the movement was driven mostly by Black student unions—at predominantly white institutions but also at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, where Black students often chafed at the white paternalism of their trustees, administrators, and curricula. Black student unions across the country made similar demands, including changes to admissions policies for better representation from minority communities, the development of Black studies programs, the recruitment of Black faculty, and the establishment of Black residence halls (Kendi 2012, 112–18). And while none of it came fast or easily, many of these demands were eventually met. Indeed, Martha Biondi explains in 6 This book was published under the name Ibram H. Rogers, but the author now goes by the name Ibram H. Kendi.

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The Black Revolution on Campus (2012) that “students—not scholars— were responsible for the creation of Black studies programs,” though this point of origin would continue to bedevil perceptions of such programs’ academic legitimacy (184–85). In sum, Biondi argues that Black students’ protests in the 1960s and 1970s had far more dramatic effect on American higher learning than white demonstrations such as Vietnam protests and the Free Speech demonstrations at Berkeley (2). In light of the towering legacy of Black student unions, the increasing disaffection of Pseudo Cool ’s Black students takes on still greater weight. At any rate, this reading—that Pseudo Cool depoliticizes its characters, or perhaps even that it suggests a reactionary backlash against B.S.U.’s politics—depends on supplemental passages from the end of the novel. Earlier established as one of the most outspoken and radical of the B.S.U. crew, for instance for choosing partners who have “strong enough faith in the cause,” Porsche discards her afro in the last action of the novel (Green 1988, 26). Similarly, in the later stages of the novel, Jason relaxes his hair with a singular determination: he applies the solution and “leaves it on for forty-five minutes instead of the recommended twenty” (Green 1988, 149). In addition to the fraught politics of hair, the novel’s penultimate paragraph sees Starks packing up his room after graduation, taking note of a survey from the university’s Committee on Minority Affairs among his papers. “They want to know what Copeland University can do to improve the quality of life for minority students on campus,” the narration explains (Green 1988, 192). Starks impassively trashes the questionnaire. Is Starks no longer interested in the cause that he had struggled for with the B.S.U.? Or does he feel that such an institutionalized committee cannot achieve such goals as well as organizations such as the B.S.U. had? His motivation is unclear, but the summary dismissal of the survey in the last paragraphs of the novel is conspicuous. The depoliticization of Porsche’s and Jason’s hair, the trashing of the minority affairs survey—in these passages Green develops a bildungsroman element that is common across the genre. But where the narrative of development often indicates an opening of the world and all its possibilities, for Pseudo Cool that bildungsroman form suggests closure: that the politics of racial identity may well be germane to one’s formative years, but that they have less of a place in “the world.” On the other hand, however, Pseudo Cool allows a reading of the toll that activism takes on students such as those involved in the B.S.U. In this reading, the novel’s waning action may not indicate ambivalence so

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much as it shows the deep fatigue that results from activism. In a flashback to his time in high school, Starks recalls the Halloween when one white student came to school dressed in the white hood and robes of a klansman and another came in blackface. Starks was one of three Black students at the private school, and it fell to them to explain to white faculty, staff, and students the hurtful, scary, and demoralizing experience of that Halloween, as well as other racially-charged events on campus: casual invocations of racial epithets in discussion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, racial taunts during athletic events, a racist joke overheard being told between teachers, a “senior slave day” fundraiser, the general pressure of being race-exemplars in a private, predominantly white school. After that meeting, Starks recalls being “physically drained and emotionally worn out” and feeling like it had been “a mistake to have poured out his feelings to a group of white people” (Green 1988, 50). The Huck Finn reference dates Starks’s experience to a discrete 1980s battle of the culture wars, but remarkably the blithe use of blackface continues even a quarter into the twenty-first century—a fair demonstration of the unbelievable, wearying burden of activism. Starks concludes the chapter turning back to the present, wondering if the burden of that meeting, the burden of educating others on matters of identity, explains why he never ran for B.S.U. president and why he finds himself somewhat disaffected from the cause. “Is this why he’s tired of speaking?,” he asks himself (Green 1988, 51). Starks’s high school experience, the despairing futility of the struggle, manifests also in the debates around Copeland’s Western Civilization curriculum. Hearing the platforms of the Copeland Students for Western Civilization, Jason is wearied: “he’s heard these opinions before. They are old and tired opinions” (Green 1988, 97). Likewise, Starks summarizes the four-hour faculty senate meeting simply as a rehearsal of “the same old arguments” (Green 1988, 175). Pseudo Cool ’s characters are not so much troubled by authenticity and feelings of belongingness to Black identity, but overworn by the burdens of representing Black identity to a white audience that seems in perpetual need of edification. This is perhaps a charitable assumption that the fundamental need is the perpetual maintenance of multiculturalist dialog and exchange, rather than a confrontation with an uncompromising white supremacy. The burnout felt by Starks and others is not an exact fit for Porter’s blackademic tropes, nor is it exclusive to other sites of activism, but this experience is perhaps uniquely suited to the experience of racial and ethnic minorities in higher learning—whether at predominantly white

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institutions or Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and especially in the contexts of the wearying, endless culture wars. Pseudo Cool poses, on the one hand, a reactionary bildungsroman rejecting the movement that made Black student life viable in American higher learning, and on the other a gesture of existential drain—perhaps even the very impossibility—of Black student life on campus. Perhaps most telling about the B.S.U.’s curricular politics is that, apart from laying the groundwork to demand an ethnic studies program, the B.S.U.’s campaign to reform the Western Civilization curriculum captures a tendency toward negation. Recall Starks’s first reaction to the news that Copeland would discontinue the Euro- and phallocentric Western Civilization curriculum: “He’s glad he’s not the one who has to decide on next year’s reading list.” It’s a widely shared sentiment among his peers. Perhaps one reason the faculty senate takes four hours to debate the Western Civilization curriculum is because they also considered what would take its place, but the narration allows no purview to that discussion—and anyway, the novel seems uninterested in positing what kind of curriculum would be more just. This negative critique has an unfortunate consequence in light of the culture war contexts of Pseudo Cool: it renders the B.S.U.’s criticisms of the Western Civilization curriculum— which are themselves just and, in my view, uncontroversial—as little more than resentment and grievance, the generally empty politics of negation that typify culture war discourses. Perhaps it is asking too much of these students, who are already overburdened with their peers’ education, overburdened with history itself, but what would a more just core curriculum look like? If the genre were to begin to answer that question, it would develop a positive critique, moving its exploration of the canon wars question from the terrain of mere resentment, showing the stakes of knowledge production, and inviting greater care for the outcomes of the culture wars.

“The Raw I”: Identity and Resentment in The Human Stain “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist, or are they spooks?,” Coleman Silk, an esteemed professor of classics at Athena College, a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts, asks aloud as he takes attendance at the beginning of class (Roth 2000, 6). It is the sixth week of class, and the two students in question have not yet appeared for a lecture.

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This innocent moment is the crisis—the point of no return, the dividing line that marks a clear before and after for Silk. Before this moment, Silk is headed to a fêted retirement, anticipating festschrift, the establishment of a Coleman Silk Lecture Series, perhaps even a building named in his honor (Roth 2000, 6). The after sets in quite quickly: later in the same day, he is brought before the dean of the faculty to answer a charge of racism. The two missing students, he learns, are Black—and they object to the use of the word “spook,” in the O.E.D.’s sense of “a derogatory term for a Black person,” to describe them. The charges of racism set in motion Silk’s severance from Athena, disgraced, as well as in his view the death of his wife. And in the logic of The Human Stain, the complex novel by Philip Roth, who with four titles in the Directory is among the genre’s most prolific contributors, it’s a travesty that could only take place in the perverse halls of higher learning. Roth’s conceit for the novel evokes “the water buffalo incident” that rocked the University of Pennsylvania in 1993 and reverberated throughout the culture wars as a sign of the academy’s disgrace. An Israeli student admitted to shouting at a group of Black female students late at night on the campus quad, calling them “water buffalo” and pointing in the direction of the Philadelphia Zoo; the student defended himself against charges of racism by explaining that in Hebrew the term signifies “a loud or rowdy person” (Hartman 2015, 246). As with Stanford’s curricular reform, the incident reverberated through pieces in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others, where with near uniformity the incident was diagnosed as political correctness run amok, as a sign of the academy’s departure from conventions of free speech and open inquiry. Penn’s president, Sheldon Hackney, became embroiled in the national outrage. The lead paragraph of a Wall Street Journal editorial remarks, “It’s not irrelevant to note that the head of this institution, Sheldon Hackney, is President Clinton’s nominee to head the National Endowment for the Humanities—and a man, university spokesmen insist, committed to free speech.” The piece continues, lamenting the “speech police” on American campuses (“Buffaloed at Penn” 1993). The tidy narrative crisis in The Human Stain, then, is fraught with combustible discourses—race, ethnicity, speech, political correctness, the ideals of the university—all set across the backdrop of the Clinton-Lewinski scandal in order to develop themes of purity and exile.

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Roth’s first move, before developing the rich complexity of the text, is to discard the charges of racism as bad-faith character assassination. “Consider the context: Do they exist or are they spooks?,” Silk explains to the dean. “The charge of racism is preposterous and my students know it is preposterous. The issue, the only issue, is the nonattendance of these two students and their flagrant and inexcusable neglect of work. What’s galling is that the charge is not just false—it is spectacularly false” (Roth 2000, 7). Present here are the twin engines of the text, which also happen to be prime movers of the culture wars. First, there is the instinctive dismissal of identity politics as ungrounded at best and destructive at worst. Roth crafts the roll-call episode in such a way that Silk’s either-or explanation—either they’re present or they’re apparitions—is unassailable, rendering moot the students’ charges of racism. Contrast this with “the water buffalo incident” at Penn, where it is indeed possible to imagine mistranslation: the Israeli man transliterating a Hebrew idiom, the Black woman hearing an unusual twist on the stock conventions of racial slurs, bestial and dehumanizing. No such empathy is possible in Roth’s roll-call episode. Second, observe the personal grievance latent in the tone of Silk’s explanation to the dean: a touch of self-righteous indignation in denoting the students’ “inexcusable neglect of work.” This matter of tone will escalate to an explicit statement of grievance when Silk reflects on the episode that he was “thrown out of Athena College for being white” (Roth 2000, 16). Identity politics, it appears, is for me, not for thee. Purity and exile—The Human Stain’s primary stakes manifest in the esteemed professor’s disgraced banishment at the hands of the socalled speech police, whose power to judge orthodoxy and apostasy runs unchecked on campus. This theme is announced even before the roll-call episode, in the novel’s epigraph from Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex: Oedipus asks Creon, “What is the rite of purification? How shall it be done?” and Creon responds, “By banishing a man, or expiation of blood by blood.” Consider the false equivalence: Oedipus is punished for incest, Clinton for an extramarital affair, which today in the post-Recession, #metoo era we better recognize as a severe abuse of power, and Silk for no transgression at all. The culprit in the latter two cases is pluralism itself, a pluralism that is institutionalized in the academy especially as an orthodoxy of purity.7 7 Purification also drives the first frames of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), which is also sometimes referred to as an academic novel. Coetzee’s protagonist, the communications professor David Lurie, coerces one of his students into sex, and he balks at the

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In Silk’s case, this plays out against his perceived ideological impurity and against the backdrop of his fluid racial identity, which is revealed after the roll-call episode to further ironize the Kafkaesque nature of political correctness. The Human Stain stakes out a reactionary position from this conceit, as I will discuss below, but I also want to concede that the novel’s premise—ideological purity—is not baseless. See, for instance, the case of Bret Weinstein. In 2017, the Evergreen State College biologist came afoul of the campus’s “Day of Absence” tradition. For some years prior, students of color had held a walkout to demonstrate their importance to campus life, but in 2017, as a response to the presidential election, the students reversed the formula and “invited” white faculty, staff, and students to leave campus for the day. Weinstein objected. As he tells it in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal, he wrote an email to all of the campus’s faculty and staff: “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles […] and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away [….] On a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color” (Weinstein 2017). In the weeks that followed, a group of demonstrators disrupted one of Weinstein’s class meetings at which he was denounced as a racist, and a petition circulated calling for his ouster. The campus police department was briefly involved after he was threatened. He eventually resigned. A New York Times opinion piece on the debacle opens with a description of Weinstein as a Bernie Sanders voter and vocal supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and after he resigned from Evergreen State, he consorted with the so-called intellectual dark web, also appearing on the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience multiple times and twice moderating debates between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. Setting aside that readiness to translate the experience into a national cause, Weinstein’s public critique of the Day of Absence investigation committee that ultimately follows: even though he concedes the affair, the committee wants more and more from him, he feels. He tells his daughter that the episode reminded him “too much of Mao’s China” and he laments, “These are puritanical times. Private life is public business” (Coetzee 1999, 66). Later, he frames his experience in terms of purges, framed in the long histories of ritual scapegoating and censorship (Coetzee 1999, 91). That he may have coerced his student is beyond Lurie’s imagination, and the novel’s subsequent rape, a violent and predatory act against Lurie’s daughter, seems to stifle even the possibility of interrogating Lurie’s conduct.

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was imminently reasonable. Weinstein charted the origins of this debacle to local policies recently implemented at the college, but by the time the story reached the New York Times it was a token of the speech police again terrorizing American universities—a troubling story, to be sure, and one that may prove stifling for others facing a situation similar to Weinstein’s. And while Weinstein’s case is an extraordinary tragedy, I still find inadequate the genre’s representation of the politics of cultural pluralism. Where Weinstein seems eager to think through the complexities of the issues, the genre does not. Indeed, as we see in Roth’s novel, the genre is far more interested in easy strawmen. How does The Human Stain frame the tyranny of political correctness in the academy? In his touchstone work Cosmopolitanism (2006), Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that pluralism is a cornerstone to cosmopolitanism, and states the phenomenon succinctly: “that there are many values worth living by and that you cannot live by all of them. So we hope and expect that different people and different societies will embody different values. (But they have to be values worth living by)” (144). Appiah carefully distances cultural pluralism from cultural relativism. Unobjectionable in the abstract, cultural pluralism becomes contentious when put into visible practice. Consider, for instance, the backlash against the formation of Black or Latinx or Asian-American student unions as either an affront to an assimilationist ideal or as siphoning resources away from white students, or for that matter the campus diversity initiatives that become mired in controversy before they even produce policy. It’s in this transformation, from abstract principle to institutional policy or, worse, ideological orthodoxy, that the trouble seems to lie, especially for The Human Stain. The two students from the roll-call episode are quickly shunted aside by the novel and replaced by the odious Delphine Roux as Silk’s chief persecutor. As the students disappear from the plot, the novel turns its focus from explicitly raced antagonism to a tangle of petty academic resentments and the genre’s stock-in-trade, antiintellectualism—in all of which the original charges of racism appear to be little more than a figleaf for retaliatory powerplays. Delphine Roux, an upstart professor of French, serves as dean during the roll-call episode. She is 29 years old at the time and was 24 when she was hired fresh out of graduate study at Yale University. Her Frenchness and her Yale education, both signaling theory and especially deconstruction, are the beginnings of a suspect character portrait, her 15-page curriculum vitae a vicious satire of academic bluster. Silk and Roux have skirmished before with theory,

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as so often is the case in the genre, in the backdrop. For instance, a student named Elena Mitnick had complained to Roux about assigned readings from Hippolytus and Alcestis in one of Silk’s courses, having “found them ‘degrading to women’” (Roth 2000, 184)—the quotation marks indicating disbelief at the premise. Later, after Silk has simply refused to give support to Mitnick’s classwork because it is “so grounded in narrow, parochial ideological concerns that it does not lend itself to correction,” he launches into a diatribe against the premises of feminism and other “Yale” preoccupations: “I can tell you,” Silk intones, “that a feminist perspective on Euripides is what they least need. Providing the most naïve of readers with a feminist perspective on Euripides is one of the best ways you could devise to close down their thinking before it’s even had a chance to begin to demolish a single one of their brainless ‘likes’” (Roth 2000, 190, 192). Most of this is relayed through Silk’s skeptical, resentful perspective, but Roux appears ignoble even from her own perspective, at one point thinking to herself, “She didn’t have to defer to him, she didn’t have to defer to anyone. He was no longer the dean who had hired her. Nor was he the department chair. She was. Dean Silk was now nothing” (Roth 2000, 197–98). In sum, readers confront a conniving, uppity French woman, with theory acting as a menacing force of pluralist orthodoxy—the anti-theory tropes a typical genre conceit. But the race politics are not so black and white as this, the roll-call episode and the presumed link between theory and the tyranny of political correctness. The Human Stain’s complexities hinge on race as they are transmitted by two devices. First is narration: the novel is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a recurring figure in several of Roth’s works in which he functions as metanarration device and as alter ego for the author; much of Zuckerman’s knowledge of Silk comes from his estranged sister, Ernestine, and a good deal of his insight is total speculation. Much of the narrative, then, stands on shaky epistemological ground. Second are character and theme: it turns out that Coleman Silk is Black. No one at Athena College knows this, nor does Zuckerman for most of the time he studies Silk. Indeed, Silk began passing as Jewish during high school, letting people make assumptions about his ethnicity according to his boxing instructor’s Jewish identity. After enlisting in the Navy, he enrolls at New York University, his Blackness behind him. In Greenwich Village in the 1950s, nobody seems too keen to interrogate racial identity, and opportunities for casual sex—Roth’s great passion across his career—are myriad.

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The fact of Silk’s passing is announced to readers in the second chapter to heighten the dramatic irony of the text and to flay the supposed ignorance of “speech police” and theory disciples such as Delphine Roux. The chapter is more-or-less bookended with accusations of whiteness—first by and then against Silk. After he can’t get his lawyer to press charges against Delphine Roux, Silk says “I never again want to hear that self-admiring voice of yours or see your smug fucking lily-white face” (Roth 2000, 81). The chapter closes with the phrase’s repetition, or given the narrative chronology, its first statement. Silk recalls a time when his brother Walt calls to harangue him for passing, an outrageous transgression against his family, earlier described as “a model Negro family” invested in the language and philosophy of uplift, and to cut off further contact with their mother to protect her from this hurtful behavior. “Don’t you even try to see her. No contact. No calls. Nothing. Never. Hear me?” Walt says. “Never. Don’t you dare ever show your lily-white face around that house again” (Roth 2000, 145). Consider the revolution: in the first term, Silk is a Black man indignant with the smug lawyer, and in the second, Silk is the son flouting his Black family with whiteness. The bookends indicate a paradox of racial and ethnic identity. On the one hand, race is a matter of fluidity and self-fashioning, as we see in Silk’s manipulation of the color line, his capacity to don the “lily-white face.” But on the other hand, identity can be a hard and fast category, as we see in Walt’s suggestion that his brother is forever across the color line from his family. These nuances of identity are not afforded to Delphine Roux. Roth’s novel has her too entangled in political correctness and personal vendettas to theorize identity fluidity as it may pertain to Silk and the roll-call episode. Worse, Roux is the one who exhibits explicit racism. Late in the novel, Roth has Roux drafting a personal ad to place in, naturally, the New York Review of Books. Betraying her motives in the roll-call episode, Roux considers the propriety of the form: “the problem was how to include in her ad, no matter how subtly coded, something that essentially said, ‘Whites only need apply’” without giving people around Athena the wrong idea about her pieties (Roth 2000, 262). Or at least this is how Zuckerman imagines Silk imagining Roux. At any rate, through it all, the novel asks: in a post-race world, how can anyone—let alone a Black man—be persecuted for using the word “spooks” in its spectral sense? Why is it that only the white theory types seem hung up on matters of race and ethnicity? Who is entitled to the mantle of victimhood in these persecutions?

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Robert Benton’s film adaptation of the novel—released in 2003 and another indicator of a wide gap between campus fictions and campus films—departs from Roth’s campus focus. In Benton’s narrative, Silk’s identity isn’t disclosed to the viewer until nearly the midpoint of the film, in effect muting the novel’s overdrawn dramatic irony because it is so far removed from the roll-call incident, which is so central in the novel. The film adds a few good lines on the academy, for instance having Silk describe his single-handed revitalization of Athena College and the enemies made as a result: “You can’t make a college without breaking a few eggheads.” But the film mostly foregoes academic politics and diagnoses of political correctness to focus on the love affair between Silk, played by Anthony Hopkins, and the Athena custodian Faunia Farley, played by Nicole Kidman. Delphine Roux, in Roth’s novel the avatar of soulless theory and the speech police, is relegated to near silence in the film. Silk becomes a character with secrets, not a fulcrum for the campus and its crises of political correctness. And to the extent that the film does return to the roll-call episode and the meanings of political correctness, it generalizes about society at the expense of the novel’s focus on the peculiar experiences of the academy in the theory-driven 1990s. The contrast between the novel and film then is striking: the film stating, but then obscuring a relationship between campus and racial discourses. The novel’s complex race themes are further muddied by the peculiar origins of the culture wars. The culture wars closely attend issues of race and identity—tidy Othering devices to sustain and widen the divisive tribalisms of the discourses. As Hartman explains, the first salvos of the culture wars were organized around racial-ethnic blocs: the New Left emerging with a focus on Black and Chicano bases, and neoconservatism emerging as a kind of Jewish identity politics. Indeed, many of the first neoconservatives were New York intellectuals such as Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb: educated, cosmopolitan, and Jewish, making for strange bedfellows with the Christian Right that became the bedrock of the conservative culture wars and who now are its primary drivers. This segment of the conservative bloc understood quota policies, for instance, as anti-Semitic in effect, if not in design.8 And Hartman finds 8 Hartman writes that “since the end of the older quota system that protected W.A.S.P. privilege, Jews had made remarkable advances, especially in higher education and in the professions that required advanced degrees—advances disproportionate to their overall numbers. As a result, [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan and other neoconservatives reasoned

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an uncharitable streak among the neoconservative elites: they “frowned upon provincial bigotry” and generally performed a cosmopolitan colorblindness, but the belief that Black Americans “could overcome racism if only they would work hard—if only, in other words, they would heed the example of Jewish Americans—belied their cosmopolitan pretensions” (2015, 65). In Hartman’s view, this belief stemmed not from racial hatred, but from a misreading of their own representativeness: the neoconservatives simply “understood their own peculiar circumstances to be more universal than they in fact were” (2015, 65). Perhaps such privilege is what Silk was angling for when he began passing as Jewish. At any rate, this backdrop further muddies the politics of race-based culture war, Silk straddling not only ethnic identities but the foundational blocs of the culture war itself. In this muddying, serious inquiries about race and ethnicity appear not as complex and nuanced but as at best feckless and at worst tarnished, corrupt. The Human Stain, of course, is not outside the culture wars. To the contrary, its apoliticism is an active engagement with those discourses because it tries to silence them and delegitimate them. How does the novel find itself in this reactionary alignment? The M.F.A. identity appears here not as some parochial detail pertaining to rarefied literary fiction, but as a force driving the genre’s general conservatism. Roth’s protagonist is not a writer, but that is beside the point. Roth is a writer’s writer, of course, and has nontrivial experience in the academic bureaucracy, having earned a master’s degree in writing, and having taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, retiring from Penn two years before the “water buffalo incident” took place there. The novel’s writerly politics appear in Silk’s insistence on the individual. Before joining the Navy, Silk follows his father’s wishes and enrolls at Howard University. He chafes at the school’s inculcation of racial solidarity, finding it anathema to “the raw I” and, referring to his boxing moniker, to “all the subtlety of being Silky Silk” (Roth 2000, 108). In his short stay at Howard, he finds himself becoming Black—and nothing else. He becomes more alarmed at this threat to his identity, not out of any overt disgust at Blackness but out of a simple refusal of identity politics. “You can’t let the big they impose its bigotry on you,” Silk recalls of his decision to leave Howard and begin passing, “any more than you that race—and ethnic-based policies, particularly proportional quotas, would only hurt Jews” (2015, 58).

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can let the little they become a we and impose its ethics on you” (Roth 2000, 108). Why Jewish identity doesn’t answer to “the big they” politics is never addressed; it appears to be the only alternative for Silk. Silk’s refusal of identity politics dovetails perfectly with the conventions of institutionalized creative writing in the U.S. As Mark McGurl demonstrates in The Program Era (2009), writing from this period places a high premium on personal experience, which McGurl argues is best understood as the byproduct of this productive triangle: the authentic experience (manifesting in the writerly axiom “write what you know”), creative freedom (“find your voice”), and craft (“show don’t tell”) (23). The result is not only a premium on the author’s personal experience and the reader’s experience of a refined subjectivity in the text, but also a systematic insistence on autonomy—autonomy from the conventions of genre fiction, for instance, and dogged autonomy from the academics who share English departments with the creative writing faculty, in other words the autonomy of “the raw I.” Not all M.F.A. writers demonstrate hostility to race consciousness, however. In fact, McGurl situates Roth’s oeuvre as one of the Program Era’s exemplars of “high cultural pluralism,” one of the three strains of M.F.A. fiction that alongside “technomodernism” and “lower-middle-class modernism” move the American literary voice after the world wars and after modernism and all of its avantgarde experiments.9 McGurl describes high cultural pluralism as joining “the high literary values of modernism with a fascination with the experience of cultural difference and the authenticity of the ethnic voice” (2009, 32). And he reads many of Roth’s other Zuckerman novels convincingly as meditations on group membership in this model. Perhaps it is an outlier from Roth’s oeuvre, but The Human Stain as I read it repudiates cultural pluralism: a reactionary culture war document, framing the academy and especially humanities theorists as unthinking identity warriors.10 This is not to deny the problematic existence of 9 See for instance McGurl’s intricate diagramming of this triangle on page 409 of The Program Era. 10 McGurl reads The Human Stain differently—as a study of “various forms of illiteracy.” Highlighting Silk’s scandalous affair with Faunia Farley, the woman half his age working on the grounds crew at Athena and widely assumed to be illiterate, McGurl argues that the novel’s plot is “founded on the irony that even elite liberal arts colleges now endorse poor reading skills, as the scholar-protagonist (a Newark-raised African American passing as a Jew) is held responsible for his students misunderstanding of the word ‘spook’” (2009, 56).

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careless identitarianism. As we see in a group of Leftist students pillorying Bert Weinstein for daring to dissent from the new Day of Absence protocols, the culture wars invite a kind of loss of proportionality, and, without lapsing into false equivalence, we can say that they are in actual fact a bipartisan phenomenon. But consider Roth’s plot twist, taking the complex premise of the roll-call episode and upping the ante by making his protagonist a Black man passing in the academy. Likewise, consider that the pluralist ethic of the university channels solely through Roux, the villainous caricature who is unbalanced by anyone who might stand in for levelheaded, humanist pluralism at Athena College. Might one reasonably conclude that the balkanized landscape of the academy is as unsafe for this Black man as the Jim Crow south would have been? In the end, despite its highly charged conceit and plot twist, the novel ultimately subordinates racial identity to that of the artist. Indeed, The Human Stain chafes at identity politics as an intrusion against the artist’s autonomy— and it lambasts the university along the way, identifying it as the source or defender of political correctness. The Human Stain, then, stakes out a reactionary position in the culture war debates of identity politics and political correctness, not so much addressing those issues for their own sake, but as proxies for obscure M.F.A. pathologies—the artist as identity politics.

Whose Affirmation? In the negative spaces of these culture war documents, we see another shibboleth for American higher learning: a presumptive whiteness—the tiresome whiteness of the curriculum at Copeland University and the implicit whiteness of a reactionary refusal of pluralism. In this way, Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) may well exemplify the genre’s tendencies. Not only can the novel’s title be read as a reference to mass media’s production of “static” that smooths over the differences of American experiences, nor only as the “technomodernist” strain of program-era fiction, as McGurl argues (2009, 63). Rather, the title also frames the entire premise of the academy as an exercise of whiteness, not only in the deep history of the academy’s founding that Wilder studies, but even, especially, through turn-of-the-century culture war. Read this way, the genre and the academy alike are always demonstrating, or at least contending with, pathologies of whiteness. In these pathologies and the assumptions of Exemptions that orbit them, the culture war narratives

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of the genre trace again the basic antinomy of the campus novel, a fulcrum holding in tension the genre’s utopian and regressive politics and suggesting the university’s countervailing values of private and public goods. It’s unsurprising, then, the struggles faced by students such as those in Pseudo Cool, the resentments such as those in The Human Stain, and the selection of a public university to host the failed Free Speech Week of 2017. Given the power and prevalence of this shibboleth, I note a conspicuous absence in the genre of the great culture war front, affirmative action. We might detect a trace of it, for instance, in the repetition of the word “merit” in Susan Choi’s My Education (2013), though this would mean reading against the grain of a novel that is mostly unconcerned with matters of scholarship and college policy, and not at all interested in the narrator’s Filipino and German ancestries. The term appears only once in the annotations of John Kramer’s The American College Novel (2004): a reference to Ishmael Reed’s Japanese By Spring (1993). The protagonist of Reed’s scathing satire of political correctness, theory, and the Western Civilization curriculum, Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt is applying for tenure largely on the strength of his public scholarship, having become “a black pathology merchant.” “He had had written a dozen or so articles about affirmative action,” we learn early in Reed’s novel. “About how your white colleagues don’t respect you. About how you feel stigmatized. About how you feel inferior. [….] Hadn’t his come up to him after every printed interview he’d given to congratulate him? To tell him he said what many of them could only whisper? To congratulate him for broaching a subject that was painful to discuss?” (1993, 10). This passage issues from a Black scholar working on a Bay area campus as it is being roiled by mob attacks on Black students that seem to be organized by either the Amerikaner Student Society or the American Student Chapter of the Order of the Boer Nation. The politics of this singular reference to affirmative action are unclear. Puttbutt is doing his best to survive and thrive in a racist institution, and Ishmael Reed enters the plot as a fictive character at one point to upbraid Puttbutt for associating with media that have been “telling lies about diversity” (Reed 1993,130). The satire is further complicated by a vicious Nipponophobia throughout the novel. Puttbutt shows an instinctual hatred for the feminist April Jokujoku, who, vaguely Japanese, may take his job. The college’s new president, Dr. Yamato, merges all identity studies programs into a new “European Studies” unit, requires all

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faculty to learn Japanese, and ultimately renames the college “Hideki Tojo No Daigaku” in honor of the prime minister of Japan during World War II and renames the student union “Isoroku Yamamoto Hall” after the mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor.11 Ultimately, we find that Puttbutt is taking Japanese lessons on the assumption that colonization by the Japanese is imminent, wanting to secure his place in society in the aftermath. Affirmative action policies are designed foremost to create diversity and facilitate integration. Japanese by Spring, it appears, shows little interest in extending such opportunities too widely. At any rate, Reed’s novel is most noteworthy here for having invoked affirmative action at all—the lone work in the genre, so far as I know, to do so explicitly. The omission is conspicuous, given the centrality of affirmative action to public culture war debates and highly publicized court cases, given affirmative action’s proximity to the “blackademic” genre trope that Porter identifies as the politics of authenticity, and given affirmative action’s explicit threats against the presumptive whiteness of the academy. We might locate an implied note of affirmative action in the genre’s many works that deal with cultural pluralism. An uncharitable way of framing the culture wars is that they always hinge on a maneuver to claim the role of victim. In The Human Stain, for example, or perhaps in Bert Weinstein’s case, it’s the putatively white and privileged liberal arts professor who is the victim of unchecked race politics. Conservatism sometimes translates this grievance by a claim to “reverse discrimination.” And here lies the implied link between the two: in the sense of a zerosum game, in which any recognition of another is magically translated into the loss of opportunity for oneself, we see that cultural pluralism is the abstract idea that accompanies the formal policies of affirmative

11 Further confounding are the loose parallels between Dr. Yamato and S.I. Hayawaka, who was president of San Francisco State University when students went on strike from 1968 to 1969 to force the creation of an ethnic studies program. Hayakawa is a fixture of studies of the Black campus movement: Kendi describes him as positively thrilled to create forceful contact with student protestors (2012, 136), Biondi discusses his enthusiastic deployment of tactical police on campus and underlines one student’s description of Hayakawa as “plantation oriented” (2012, 62–65), and Rooks tracks the wave of firings and resignations of Black faculty under his tenure (2006, 54–56). In Yamato, then, there is a suggestion of direct antagonism between ethnic minorities on campus, and further evidence of the politics of personal grievance in the genre.

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action. Each dialectically implies the other. What’s at stake in that relationship is not only the campus policies that might govern admissions or hiring, or the academic analyses of race and ethnicity, or the racial grievances that motivate the culture wars generally. What’s at stake also is the nature of the establishment itself, and how best to orient one’s position as wronged. This is the basic premise of cultural pluralism—that in the negative space of a hegemonic culture, marginal cultures must be honored and preserved. It is the basic premise of the foundation of Black studies, Hispanic and Latinx studies, gender studies, and similar academic programs.12 But The Human Stain simply identifies cultural pluralism itself as the forceful establishment that menaces “the raw I”. But this still does not resolve the question: why this glaring absence of affirmative action from the genre? Could the genre’s authors simply shy away from a thorny subject? The mendacity that surrounds this issue is notorious: in affirmative action discussions, including those of the Supreme Court, strawmen abound and thrive like they do perhaps nowhere else. Likewise, the case law for affirmative action policies is confounding and muddled. In For Discrimination (2013), Randall Kennedy summarizes thirty years of Supreme Court rulings—especially the critical cases Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), a pair of suits against the University of Michigan, and Fisher v. Texas (2012)—as “marked by ambivalence and confusion, obfuscation and inconsistency. The Court has made a series of ambiguous, ad hoc rulings that reflect the country’s racial anxieties” (182). This characterization surely applies also to the Court’s rulings in the summer of 2023 on cases involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, effectively striking down the practices

12 Noliwe M. Rooks addresses this issue in White Money/Black Power (2006). Rooks tracks the Ford Foundation’s crucial role in facilitating Black studies programs across the country, among other things identifying its fateful strategy to orient the programs toward white audiences. In the late 1960s, George McBundy, head of the Ford Foundation, wanted to codify the emerging field of Black studies, believing “that Black Studies was a tool that could lead to heightened levels of racial understanding and acceptance on the part of whites” (Rooks 2006, 93). In a strange coincidence, Rooks also attributes to McBundy a role in the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision on affirmative action, arguing that a piece he wrote for The Atlantic appears to be paraphrased by Justice Harry Blackmun, who cast a swing vote to allow affirmative action policies to continue at the University of California (2006, 148).

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of affirmative action in university admissions decisions—though conspicuously leaving a carveout for military service academies, where diversity of the officer ranks is evidently an exceptional necessity. But the genre only rarely gets bogged down in technical quagmires such as these, and anyway narrative needs some kind of conflict in order to thrive. Is there an unwillingness in the genre to confront the troubling questions of race consciousness, which affirmative action made manifest in policy and law? This seems unlikely, given the genre’s readiness to represent matters of race and ethnicity directly, as we’ve seen above, and especially in the campus novels set at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. How else to make sense of the genre’s avoidance of affirmative action? I don’t mean to suggest that the genre is a unified, agential body in the way that a singular text would be, and frankly I struggle to raise an adequate response to the question. But I think it only reasonable to consider the genre’s relationship to affirmative action as a shirking dodge. The issue is simply too prominent during the culture wars not to appear directly outside of Japanese by Spring. At the very least, the genre’s evasion of affirmative action is another sign of its problematic role mediating the academy and the American public. Disinterest in this discussion might well indicate to some that it is a subject void of substance, a matter heated by political rhetoric and nothing more. Ambivalence about Black students’ agency, resentment for the project of pluralism, silence on affirmative action—perhaps worse than their reflection on the academy is that such representations might be able to stand unchallenged in the broader terrain of debates about policy, equality, and justice.

Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Biondi, Martha. 2012. The Black Revolution on Campus. Chicago: University of California Press. “Buffaloed at Penn.” 1993. The Wall Street Journal, 26 April 1993. Coetzee, J.M. 1999. Disgrace. New York: Penguin. Green, Joseph E. 1988. Pseudo Cool. USA: Holloway House. Hartman, Andrew. 2015. A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. Chicago: University of California Press. Kendi, Ibram X. 2012. The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Recognition of Higher Education, 1965–1972. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Kennedy, Randall. 2013. For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law. New York: Vintage. McGurl, Mark. 2009. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Porter, Lavelle. 2019. The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual. Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Reed, Ishmael. 1993. Japanese by Spring. New York: Penguin, 1996. Rooks, Noliwe M. 2006. White Money/Black Power: the Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education. New York: Beacon. Roth, Philip. 2000. The Human Stain. Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin. Rudolph, Frederick. 1977. Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study. USA: Jossey-Bass. Volk, Stephen. 2019. “Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College: Local Issues, National Angers.” After Class: Education & Democracy, 20 June 2019, https://steven-volk.blog/2019/06/20/oberlin-college-v-gibsons-bak ery-local-issues-national-angers. Weinstein, Bert. 2017. “The Campus Mob Came for Me—and You, Professor, Could Be Next.” The Wall Street Journal, 31 May 2017. Wilder, Craig Steven. 2013. Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. Bloomsbury: Bloomsbury Press, 2014.

CHAPTER 7

Hardly Workin; or, the Valences of Productivism in Campus Novels

Schola—the Latin noun indicating “a school” or “learned discussion”—is easily recognizable in the English cognates “school” and “scholar.” Skholé, however, the Greek term from which the Latin is derived, refers simply to “leisure,” “ease.” In adopting the term, the Latin seems to have associated schooling with leisure under the assumption that a learned discussion is only available to you if you aren’t doing or aren’t needing to do or aren’t being forced to do work in the manual sense. The Latin term doesn’t necessarily imply that school is easy per se; it leaves open the possibility that school may in fact be intensive and stressful and exhausting. But in this genealogy we see that it carries a set of classed assumptions about who has leisure and what can be done with it. Put another way, slaves and day-laborers and the like have no skholé, and thereby have no access to schola. The Latin’s transformation of the Greek term is elided when periodically our term “scholar” is sloppily etymologized to the effect of “restful learning” or “one who is at leisure.” Not coincidentally, leisure pretty well sums up the vast bulk of campus novels. Whether their protagonists are faculty or students, the novels’ plots gravitate toward romances, affairs, midlife crises, protests, and all manner of dissipation. In other words, the genre scrupulously avoids and even suppresses the stuff of the stacks and laboratories, of lecture halls, of office hours, of flash cards, of grading, of meetings and meetings and meeting—anything but work! It is not only that the plots do not focus on work. After all, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 W. Beal, Campus Fictions, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1_7

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with the exception of police procedurals and a few other genres, it’s a rare thing to generate compelling fiction out of work. This is true also of the office comedy, which retains work almost exclusively in its setting. There are of course exceptions, John Williams’s Stoner (1965) being one of them.1 But the genre, as a general rule, obliterates any reference to academic work. As a result, it may be tempting to locate in the genre a sharp work/ leisure binary or, perhaps more broadly, a work/life binary. Insofar as it routinely displays characters’ refusal of work, the genre may well uphold that binary. Likewise, in other representations of the drudgery and desperation and sterility of academic work, one might be tempted to read an implicit affirmation of life beyond work. However, the work/life binary is muddied by the nature of the work itself, which is often considered a labor of love. The politics of work in campus novels, then, appears as a muddled ambivalence. John Lyons’s early study, The Campus Novel in America (1962), has scarcely little to say about the prevalence of scholarly work or the lack thereof across the genre. Himself a professor with a firsthand view to the undergraduate experience, Lyons occasionally observes a student’s laggardly behavior as an aside. But for all its other contributions, his book lacks focused analysis of the genre’s rendering of schoolwork and scholarship. I take that silence not as a failure of Lyons’s critical perception, but as a signal of the milieu in which we read the genre today: increased pressures for degrees to yield gainful employment coming from inside and outside higher education, massive perceptions of stress among faculty and students alike, intensifying adjunctification and job market disasters no longer even registering shock—in sum a tangle of crises pertaining to the stakes of work, how we work, and the nature of work in the academy. This knot of discourses corresponds to the genre itself, which represents work in four tendencies that are the focus of this chapter: 1 Celia Aijmer Rydsjö studies the relationships between work and dignity in Stoner. Rydsjö notes that unlike the average campus novel’s professor, Stoner is described from the outset of the novel as a hard worker (2021, 78). And this is no small detail, but a part of Williams’s project of representing the tie between one’s work and one’s identity, regardless of the content or structure of the work itself (Rydsjö 2021, 72). Rydsjö finds that where other campus novels refuse academic work or resolve around a student or professor’s liberation from the academic workplace, Williams’s protagonist quits an affair with the love of his life, a graduate student, not to keep his job on the faculty but in order to preserve the sense of self that he has invested into his work (Rydsjö 2021, 77).

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most routinely asserting a kind of work refusal, in rarer cases alternating between extolling or disclaiming work as a pathway to personal fulfillment, as well as suggesting the gendered boundaries to academic work. In addition to the outside pressures of changing economies and antagonistic public policy, then, here again the crises of the academy—as well of those of our broader neoliberal situations—are also seeded within the genre that represents it.

Paradise as Work Refusal During an idling afternoon discussion about class aspirations, Amory Blaine tells a Princeton classmate that he will sooner or later arrive at the top of “the glittering caste system.” “But I hate to get anywhere by working for it. I’ll show the marks, don’t you know?,” he says (Fitzgerald 1920a, 50). Ironic, blithely patrician, resolutely committed to leisureliness—there may be no better slogan for the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel This Side of Paradise (1920). Indeed, Amory’s rigorous avoidance of schoolwork typifies the genre’s students and its professors. If Richard Fariña’s “Exemption” is a keyword for the genre’s protagonists, there is perhaps nothing from which they are more uniformly exempt than work. Paradise, then, is representative of the genre’s treatment of work, at least in this subjective assessment. The novel was so wildly popular that at the age of 24 Fitzgerald became rich and famous, which helped convince a skeptical Zelda Sayre to accept his marriage proposal. Published with the prestige of Scribner’s imprimatur, the novel sold out its first run of 3,000 copies in a mere three days and was closing in on 50,000 copies by the end of 1921 (Bryer 2004, 29). Its role in this chapter is to demonstrate the genre’s work themes, its interwar publication date demonstrating the durability of this theme across time and therefore demonstrating an essential synchronic feature of the genre—one that evolves according to historical circumstances but that persists as one of the campus novel’s constant and perhaps most appealing tropes. The novel, like so much of Fitzgerald’s oeuvre, is widely recognized as a roman à clef . Amory’s Princeton education is interrupted by the Great War; Fitzgerald matriculated at Princeton in 1913, quitting to join the war effort in 1917. Like Amory’s, Fitzgerald’s dreams of a football career were cut short in the first year. Like Amory, he found his niche writing for campus publications and for the Triangle Club comedy troupe. Also

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like Amory, Fitzgerald found campus social life more stimulating than its academic life. In a brief autobiographical essay published in The Saturday Evening Post, Fitzgerald assessed his time at Princeton this way: “I spent my entire Freshman year writing an operetta for the Triangle Club. To do this I failed in algebra, trigonometry, coordinate geometry and hygiene. But the Triangle Club accepted my show, and by tutoring all through a stuffy August I managed to come back a Sophomore and act in it as a chorus girl” (Fitzgerald 1920b, 3). After his sophomore year, Princeton put him on probation from extra-curricular activities on account of poor grades, and after the fall semester of his junior year, he was suspended for “scholastic deficiencies” (Cross 1964, 9; Bruccoli 2002, 60). More than the lost access to halls of learning, Fitzgerald lamented his dismissal because it meant the end of his “big man” career (Cross 1964, 9). He prevailed upon a dean to write a letter for him stating that he had withdrawn due to illness. Dean Howard McClennan’s description of the voluntary withdrawal came with a note to Fitzgerald which read, “This is for your sensitive feelings. I hope you will find it soothing” (Bruccoli 2002, 60). Fitzgerald remained sensitive ever after to accusations that he had flunked out (Bruccoli 2002, 62). At any rate, Fitzgerald’s pursuit of leisure at Princeton corresponds to his sustained and public disdain for work. See, for instance, his famous boast that the summer of 1925, which he spent extravagantly on the French Riviera right after having published The Great Gatsby, was “the summer of 1,000 parties and no work” (Bell 2015, 312) and his seething resentment for his Hollywood writing in the 1930s. How, then, to move from the circumstantial evidence of biographical criticism to prove, textually, a negative? To demonstrate positively that Amory does no work, at least not while he’s at Princeton? To put it bluntly, Paradise offers only one passage in which its protagonist does classwork. At the outset of his sophomore year, Amory suffers through a math lesson on conic sections. The narration describes the instructor, Mr. Rooney, as a “pander to the dull,” and briskly hectors him through a session with recalcitrant athletes (Fitzgerald 1920a, 93). Even within the classroom, the passage demonstrates work avoidance. As Mr. Rooney questions his students over the application of different formulae, footballer “Slim” Langueduc can only manage evasions: “Why sure…of course,” he mumbles; “You bet—I suppose so,” he offers; and finally, he concedes, “Well, Mr. Rooney, if you don’t mind, I wish you’d go over that again” (Fitzgerald 1920a, 93). At most, the class session is a

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performance of work without its actual substance. After the meeting, the narrator describes the scholars thus: “most of them were so stupid or careless that they wouldn’t admit when they didn’t understand, and Amory was of the latter” (Fitzgerald 1920a, 94). And that they don’t understand may be a charitable evaluation. Readers can’t know about Slim, but there is every reason to expect that Amory’s struggles stem from simply not having prepared. In sum, the passage offers a textbook case of antiacademicism, with the instructor, the students, even mathematics itself set up for ridicule. Paradise’s few other references to classwork are indirect: Amory once mentions having to go to class soon, he calculates how many classes he can cut, and he reckons with the consequences of failing Mr. Rooney’s exam. The text itself squares up to this absence of work. “Amory neglected his work not deliberately but lazily and through a multitude of other interests,” the narration says of Amory’s sophomore year, detailing the dullness of his classroom studies and lamenting a poorly scheduled noon class. “Mostly there were parties,” it continues, changing the subject (Fitzgerald 1920a, 80). Reflecting on the failed math exam, Amory concludes, “My own idleness was quite in accord with my system, but the luck broke” (Fitzgerald 1920a, 96). He pens a satirical poem, “In a Lecture Room,” that skewers a class session as a great opportunity for most students to nap while a dusty professor and his cloying acolyte— the “Eager Ass”—create a pleasant backdrop of white noise (Fitzgerald 1920a, 104–05). Amory’s work avoidance stems from his perception that academic work is a grinding drudgery. His sophomore math courses hold only “small allurements,” and he is disappointed that his psychology courses, “which he had eagerly awaited, proved to be a dull subject full of muscular reactions and biological phrases rather than the study of personality and influence” (Fitzgerald 1920a, 80). In place of those curricular pursuits, he conducts his own informal studies. He writes articles for the Daily Princetonian and sketches for the Triangle Club. He matadors his way through a series of bull sessions, which typify his understanding of the undergraduate experience. He composes profiles of social types: the Slicker and the Big Man, the Popular Daughter, a Speed, the Suddenly Prominent, the Eager Ass, so forth. In other words, conventional school work—assigned reading, exam preparation, attentive class participation—may not be the best measurement of Amory’s productivity. Active in student organizations and reading

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widely, Amory is not the picture of the “idleness” that he blames for the failure of Mr. Rooney’s exam. Narrow, curmudgeonly, perhaps even regressive, the unexamined working definition of “work” I have been using thus far clouds more than it reveals about the genre and the institutions it represents. In her seminal manifesto The Problem with Work (2011), Kathi Weeks identifies one of the defining pathologies of our society—one that I have been leveling at Amory Blaine and the genre writ large, and one that provides the framework for understanding the genre’s variable representations of work: productivism. Productivism is the value of work as an absolute good unto itself. Productivism occupies an unlikely space shared by the Protestant work ethic and Marx’s theories of alienation and the species-being, but it also goes beyond the boundaries circumscribed by one’s shift or salary. Paid work, yard work, housework, schoolwork— productivism registers work as all activity that is considered gainful, and that is done for improvement of one kind or another. This broadly construed work, Weeks explains, “is not just defended on grounds of economic necessity and social duty; it is widely understood as an individual moral practice and collective ethical obligation” (2011, 11). While allowing that work does offer value and fulfillment, Weeks insists that “there are other ways to organize and distribute that activity and to remind us that it is also possible to be creative outside the boundaries of work” (2011, 12). Weeks’s repudiation of productivism does not equate quite tidily to the Great Resignation that unfolded in the American workforce in the wake of the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus, though the pandemic seems to mark an overdue reckoning regarding Americans’ dependence on paid work as a source of personal identity. I acknowledge that the preceding discussion of Amory’s refusals of schoolwork hews to a degree of productivist shaming, and that it carries a moralizing tone and perhaps an uncharitable framing of Paradise. Weeks invites us to reflect on such moralizing and its consequences, and her project prompts a more complex investigation of the nature of work in the genre and more broadly in the academy itself. What exactly is more clouded than revealed in a productivist reading of Amory’s refusals of work? If a primary feature of the genre is its refusal of work, then what is being affirmed while work is being denied? Lyons’s study of the genre, limited though it is in purview, offers one reading of the politics of work as we see it in Paradise. Lyons’s rough chronology of the genre holds that through the nineteenth century it was typified

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by pranks and by an anti-intellectualism that operates under the guise of romanticism, and by midcentury the Erziehungsroman, the novel of education, prevails. Fitzgerald’s Paradise plays a pivotal role in this narrative. “This is the first attempt in American novels of college life to describe an intellectual awakening,” Lyons writes, “and for this reason it might be said that This Side of Paradise is the first American novel of education. Before Amory Blaine the college novels describe undergraduate disillusionment or simple maturation, but never awakening” (1920a, 28). In this way, Paradise establishes one of the contemporary genre’s enduring preoccupations. Amory’s awakening is largely ushered in by his schoolmate Thomas Parke D’Invilliers whom he first regards as “that awful highbrow” and whose bookishness indicates a shameful lack of “much conception of social competition and such phenomena of absorbing interest” (Fitzgerald 1920a, 54). This development is a token of the U.S.’s distinctive residential, co-curricular model of higher education. Tom introduces Amory to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray at a lunch table, and after Amory calculates whether the in-crowd will “mistake him for a bird, too,” his world widens precipitously (Fitzgerald 1920a, 54). He motors through Wilde, Swinburne, Keats. The paragraph concludes, “He read enormously every night: Shaw, Chesterton, Barrie, Pinero, Yeats, Synge, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Keats, Sudermann, Robert Hugh Benson, the Savoy Operas—just a heterogeneous mixture, for he suddenly discovered that he had read nothing for years” (Fitzgerald 1920a, 55). If this reading list is not as heterogeneous as we might hope for in the twenty-first century, theory and restoration of marginalized voices and world literature separating our milieu from Fitzgerald’s, the significance of this awakening lies less in its content than in its form. For in this paragraph Amory sketches the outlines of a syllabus. The focused reading list provides us a kind of activity, though not the formally, perhaps morally, sanctioned schoolwork with which Amory seems unconcerned. Amory doesn’t totally abandon his interest in social advancement in this awakening; he tries to “awaken a sense of the social system in D’Invilliers” and the other first-year students take to calling them “Dr. Johnson and Boswell” (Fitzgerald 1920a, 56). But the awakening to an intense curiosity and its packaging akin to proper schoolwork provides an index of life that can’t be captured on Amory’s transcripts. In the refusal of work, a kind of politics of work emerges across the genre. It emerges variably, perhaps, given the kind of periodizing one

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can devise around the genre’s tendencies toward romanticism, theory, and such in different historical conditions. And it poses something more sophisticated than the romantic cliché that the most important learning takes place outside the classroom—though Paradise affirms that sentiment, too, for example when a friend of Monsignor Darcy warns that Amory’s “education ought not to be entrusted to a school or college” (Fitzgerald 1920a, 32). Rather, the genre offers a utopian politics of work. Utopias come in different shapes and sizes, and register in rich traditions of political theory, literary theory, and literature. In a vulgar form, the popular imagination construes utopia as bounty, as bodily gratification, as ease, usually as a fully alternative society.2 Certainly, the genre offers some of that: a milieu prone to hedonistic dissipation and a space bounded by its own rules, physical borders, and time. But a more sophisticated frame for the utopian literary tradition is that it acts as a kind of wish fulfillment for human agency, for collective activity, and for life itself. We can read such wish fulfillment in several of the genre’s qualities, chief among them its characters’ refusal of work—their “Exemption” from productivism. Wish fulfillment is a tricky business. As Frederic Jameson notes of a different genre—science fiction, typified by patently utopian discourses— wish fulfillment operates in a paradoxical zone of deferrals and incompletion.3 A wish that revolves around a refusal of work is no different. The genre’s refusal of work is not a wish not to work and a wish for pure leisure. Or at least it’s not only that. Instead, it manifests a wish for a capacity beyond mere productivism. In its negation of work, the genre points toward what Weeks calls “the social productivity of nonwork,” or, escaping the bounds of productivism’s logic, “nonproductive time” 2 The literary tradition can offer variations on that theme, but more recently has drifted toward a “critical utopia.” Kathi Weeks explains that the former tends toward a diegesis that is closed off from judgment and change, while the latter is more apt to reflect on its society’s failures, conflicts, and limitations (2011, 208 & ff.). 3 In Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Fredric Jameson writes: “Wish-fulfillments are after all by definition never real fulfillments of desire; and must presumably always be marked by the hollowness of absence or failure at the heart of their most dearly fantasized visions (a point Ernst Bloch never tired of making)” (83). He continues, “the desire called Utopia must be concrete and ongoing, without being defeatist or incapacitating; it might therefore be better to follow an aesthetic paradigm and to assert that not only the production of the unresolvable contradiction is the fundamental process, but that we must imagine some form of gratification inherent in this very confrontation with pessimism and the impossible” (Jameson 2005, 84).

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(2011, 169, 170). Especially true of Amory’s refusal of work, the genre’s politics of work amounts to an affordance of time—time to write for a traveling comedy troupe, for instance, or time to create a syllabus of one’s own. The freedom that motivates this wish for time is not without its own ideological complications, however. Namely, it shares a lot of territory with the service economy, with affective labor. And in that territory the genre’s utopian dimensions open up to some of the most pressing crises of the academy, as I will explore later in this chapter.

Work as Play in Dear Committee Members Addressed to a Ms. Ingersol, manager of Wexler Foods, Inc., the third entry of Julie Schumacher’s epistolary novel Dear Committee Members (2014) surveys a young writer’s promise. The narrator Jay Fitger, professor of creative writing at Payne University, summarizes the student’s fantasy/horror short story about a man-eating octopus and praises the student’s attendance and relative success at keeping his cell phone out of sight during class sessions. “Whether punctuality and an enthusiasm for flesh-eating cephalopods are the main attributes of the ideal Wexler employee I have no idea, but Mr. Leszczynski is an affable young man, reliable in his habits, and reasonably bright,” Fitger concludes, adding, “You might start him off in produce, rather than seafood or meats” (Schumacher 2014, 7). The letter on behalf of Leszczynski establishes a motif of unskilled labor. Subsequent letters recommend students to a position at a “paintball emporium,” to an entry-level job at Catfish Catering, and to a summer job at Flanders Nut House. Incongruously, each letter leverages the student’s creative writing experience for the positions. One-offs, these letters contribute little to the novel’s through-lines that develop Fitger’s personal and professional life, his bureaucratic squabbling on behalf of his department and colleagues, or the ordeals of his protégé student Darren Browles. But they do support the novel’s heavy thematic focus on work, and in the unskilled labor sought by these students, the letters provide counterpoint to ruminations on Fitger’s professional work that more broadly occupy Schumacher’s attention. The letters such as Leszczynski’s assume a specialized readership, to be sure. The joke lies in the incongruities between these jobs and Fitger’s teaching, and perhaps also in the idea that such work is beneath the

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dignity of the artist. This is one way that Schumacher is unique among the genre: her audience is narrowed by the shibboleths of the academic profession, taking for granted, for instance, familiarity with just how much time professors spend on letter writing such as Fitger’s. With a professor as protagonist, a campus as its setting, and a plot focused on the inner workings of a university, Dear Committee Members satisfies the genre’s criteria. But in its thorough confrontation with work—and more specifically in its esoteric treatment of the profession itself—it is something of an outlier from its peers. For it is not only students such as Amory Blaine who spurn schoolwork. Faculty protagonists tend to be thoroughly workaverse, too. Their distractions may differ from those of students, with a greater likelihood of focusing on midlife crises, for instance. Or perhaps, given a shared preoccupation with sex in the genre’s later works, maybe faculty and student protagonists aren’t so different after all. But work refusal is essential for the genre, and Schumacher’s resistance to that principle illuminates the genre’s ideologies of work beyond what we can see from Fitzgerald’s example. Schumacher rejects the genre’s principle of work refusal in the very form of her novel. In an epistolary novel made up of recommendation letters, every word of Dear Committee Members records the work of its protagonist.4 Whether satirical recommendations for unskilled positions, letters endorsing writing students for residencies, or passive-aggressive letters that simultaneously recommend and undermine colleagues, the

4 This formal quality contrasts that of The Shakespeare Requirement (2018) and The

English Experience (2023), Schumacher’s sequels to Dear Committee Members. The Shakespeare Requirement represents work, too—some scant teaching and a heaping dose of administrative politics for Fitger to learn to navigate. But because it uses thirdperson limited narration, it doesn’t signal work in its very form as Dear Committee Members does. This may come as some relief for readers, given the absolutely dreadful bureaucratic mélange that Fitger must navigate in his new administrative role. “Every transaction at Payne required an abundance of supporting documents,” Fitger learns, “the simplest procedures requiring truckloads of paperwork accompanied by blood samples, D.N.A. test results, fingerprints, and F.B.I. files” (Schumacher 2018, 100). The English Experience likewise eschews the epistolary form to develop Fitger’s interiority, though it also provides a range of student writing assignments to develop those characters. If not in form, however, it does mimic the way that Dear Committee Members is saturated with work: in the third installation of the Fitger saga, he accompanies a group of students who are studying abroad in England. “There was no hour of the day,” the narration states baldly, “during which he was free of his students” (Schumacher 2023, 71).

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distinguishing feature of this work is Fitger’s wit, everywhere an indication of his sense of play. And in Fitger’s spirit of play, Schumacher begins to unwind the work/life binary. Fitger’s work ceases to be work—a privilege, we assume, not extended to his students pursuing unskilled work or to adjuncts whose conditions of work are not guaranteed. The playful verve with which Schumacher approaches Fitger’s work often ironizes the numbing qualities of the work being performed. He recalls, for instance, a heated departmental meeting in which one colleague, “out of his mind over the issue of punctuation in the department’s mission statement, threatened to ‘take a dump’ (there was a pun on the word ‘colon’ which I won’t belabor here) at a junior faculty member’s door” (Schumacher 2014, 133). Three entries play with form, capturing Fitger’s failed attempts to file recommendations via electronic platforms. Prompted to explain how long he has known one candidate, he writes “I have known Ms. Natal for approximately eight weeks. She is a senior due to graduate in” (Schumacher 2014, 26). The next prompt comes from the platform’s information technologies desk, asking him to explain the problem he has registered. “The problem I am experiencing is that every time I hit the fucking return key or try to indent a,” he begins, before being cut off again (Schumacher 2014, 26). If the content is dispiriting stuff, Schumacher’s tone revises the tedious and the mundane into an expression of brio—work transformed into jest. This is nowhere more true than in the case of Fitger’s star pupil, Darren Browles. Browles is the subject of several letters, as Fitger recommends him to a writer’s residency and to his own literary agent; then, in desperation, calling in a connection to a friend who directs a P.T.S.D. treatment facility imploring her to manipulate a sort of writing retreat for Browles; and finally approaching rock bottom in recommending him for a job at an R.V. park. Browles’s chief distinction, according to Fitger’s letters, is his novel-in-progress that adapts Herman Melville’s classic story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) into a tale of a bookkeeper in a 1960s Las Vegas brothel. Fitger describes the project, which unfolds under the working titles “Accountant in a Bordello” and then “For the Sake of the Scrivener,” as “witty, incisive, original, brutally sophisticated, erotic” (Schumacher 2014, 1). Fitger scribbling away day after day, Browles’s accountant with only ledgers to keep him company in a whorehouse, and Melville’s copyist retreating behind an echoing slogan “I would prefer not to”—Schumacher creates a mise en abyme of the degradations of paid work. Schumacher may be punning on that critical

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term when Fitger laments the burdensome work of the letter of recommendation: the conventional letter of recommendation “has become a rampant absurdity,” he writes to his department chair, “usurping the place of the quick consultation and the two-minute phone call—not to mention the teaching and research that faculty were supposedly hired to perform. I haven’t published a novel in six years; instead, I fill my departmental hours casting words of praise into the bureaucratic abyss” (Schumacher 2014, 8–9). If not a purposeful nod to the text’s mise en abyme, Fitger’s lament certainly confronts the absurdity of paid work. There is of course a note of defeat that rings through this nesting device, and especially through Browles’s suicide, which reproduces the tragic end to Melville’s character. But again in the Bartleby material, Schumacher’s sardonic inflections—not least the protégé’s “erotic” take on Melville’s dreary office drama—transform the monotony of work into play. “Words of praise,” however, doesn’t adequately capture the contents of Fitger’s letters. Instead, he often adopts a passive-aggressive and sometimes even a disparaging approach to letters that, at least in the U.S., are conventionally written in unqualified superlatives.5 Of a colleague’s nomination to an endowed chair, Fitger writes, “Professor Franklin Kentrell has a singular mind and a unique approach to the discipline. He is sui generis. The Davidson Chair has never seen his like before” (Schumacher 2014, 8). “She appears to be a pleasant human being,” he writes in support of a student’s application for a fellowship (Schumacher 2014, 52). And those candidates are relatively lucky. In support of a student’s law school application, Fitger seethes, “I’ve known Ms. deRueda for eleven minutes, ten of which were spent in a fruitless attempt to explain to her that I write letters of recommendation only for students who have signed up for and completed one of my classes” (Schumacher 2014, 12). His praise for a member of the English department’s “Tech Help team”

5 An illustrative joke as relayed by the satirical Twitter account Shit Academics Say: for a graduate student seeking faculty employment or a grant or some such, the American style of recommendation might begin, “I have never recommended anyone more highly than this. Jones is, without doubt, the most agile thinker of his generation, and perhaps of any generation in living memory. I would like to say he will revolutionize the field, but such an understatement would do no justice to his true abilities,” and continue in that vein. The British style of recommendation might read in its entirety, “Jones is one of my Ph.D. students. For a Ph.D. student his work is quite good. Indeed, I would even say it compares favorably with the work of some of my Ph.D. students” (@AcademicsSay 2016).

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is that “his approach to problem solving is characterized by sullenness punctuated by occasional brief bouts of good judgement” (Schumacher 2014, 47). Again writing for his colleague Franklin Kentrell, Fitger addresses his department chair, “You requested that I leave out ‘all extraneous information,’ limiting myself to statements associated with my endorsement of Kentrell’s (self-)nomination” for a service award (Schumacher 2014, 156). The endorsement that follows consists of an ellipsis framed widely by white space and below it Fitger’s signature. Refreshing candor in a sea of superlatives, perhaps one project of Fitger’s frankness is to rescue language itself by reaffixing signs to signifiers, as if entering a debate with the post-structuralists. Another effect of Fitger’s non-praise is that here again his work presents itself as play. He doesn’t refuse the work, but he certainly refuses the signal convention of the form—the mandate to say something nice or say nothing at all in letters such as these. These letters are defined less by a dereliction of duty than by an impish nature. Fitger has found the boundaries of sanctioned work and stands just on the other side of them. If these letters are the result of a dreary scrivening, Fitger negotiates them with gleeful invention and further muddies the work/life divide. Whereas Paradise offers a hard and fast binary typical of the genre’s antiwork utopias, Dear Committee Members registers work and nonwork as an antinomy—one that hinges on the affective dimensions that are typically required of professorial work. The peculiar kind of work Fitger performs throughout the novel is one expression of this. Fitger’s steady production of recommendation letters falls under the category of service work, the omnibus term for the kinds of work that come third, and in some cases a distant third, behind research and teaching in evaluations of a professor’s career. Committee functions, advising, office hours, mentoring, assessment reports—often service work is that which the faculty scorn the most, and not only because it offers fewer professional incentives than other forms that can lead to promotions or job offers. The particular form of work that we see Fitger perform throughout Dear Committee Members, to the detriment of his own writing and teaching, it appears, is the form of academic work that often takes on a confounding subjective dimension. This kind of work is critical to Kathi Weeks’s critique of productivism. Weeks discusses the post-Fordist economy as requiring a kind of affective labor. In service sector employment, she argues, the worker’s most crucial skills are not merely compliance to authority or other site-specific

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talents. Rather, the worker is valued according to her commitment to and “subjective investment” in the work, to her “attitude and emotional state”—especially her abilities to empathize and socialize (Weeks 2011, 70). And with an emphasis on such emotional work, a love of the job becomes a basic requirement for the job (Weeks 2011, 70). This is a gendered kind of work, too, whether in the economy’s broad service sector or in the service work of the academy. For instance, a 2011 report from the American Association of University Professors found that men hold three-quarters of full professorships in the U.S., and the gender gap seems to be fueled by affective labor: at the level of associate professor, men are likelier to organize their time around research, and women are likelier to take on major service roles in their institutions—the former far likelier to eventuate in promotion than the latter (Misra et al. 2011). The gendered boundaries that circumscribe academic work figure heavily in the subsequent discussion of casualized labor in Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind (2021). At any rate, when the mandate is to love your job, the productivist ethic becomes further entrenched. While Fitger’s academic service work may not fall neatly on Weeks’s Fordist/post-Fordist period scheme, its effects are largely the same. Fitger has no shortage of attitude, of course, as we see in continuous demonstrations of his snarling wit. But he also has that other attitude—the love of the job, scarcely concealed by a surly veneer. While not the saccharine or exuberant stuff of a sentimental plot, Fitger’s is a perverse love, a deep passion for service work that runs parallel to the novel’s satirical impulses. Elsewhere in the genre, if a passion for work is invoked at all, it would be in relation to research or teaching.6 And we do see glimpses of that in Dear Committee Members, such as in Fitger’s letter supporting an application for a residency: the aspiring writer “is stolid and serious and will not spend his free time scoping out opportunities for debauchery. He wants to write” (Schumacher 2014, 176). The sequence of the sentences implies that the young novelist will spend his work time writing and his free time 6 For instance, in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925), the historian Godfrey St. Peter has just moved to a beautiful new home, decadent and constructed to his and his wife’s fancies, but he cannot part from the study in his old house. Indeed, the old study where he produced his multivolume history of Spain serves as a metonymy for St. Peter’s working, researching life. Late in the novel he tells his wife, “It’s the feeling that I’ve put a great deal behind me, where I can’t go back to it again” (Cather 1925, 142). It is that halcyon period of research that he’s thinking of—a lust for work itself—and the residues of which he chases after in his former home while the rest of his family has moved on.

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writing—a conventional trope of the writer’s pathology. It’s telling that Fitger’s outlet for passionate work is service, even if he acknowledges that it comes at a cost for his own writing productivity. We know that he has produced four novels, among them two works of campus fiction, Stain and Transfer of Affection. But that working life has largely taken a back seat to service, or so Fitger says in an aside during a letter for another residency application: “I fear I am already losing the never-ending battle to catch up with the recommendations requested of me. Suffice it to say that the L.O.R. has usurped the place of my own work, now adorned with cobwebs and dust in a remote corner of my office” (Schumacher 2014, 11). The final pages of the novel take Fitger still deeper into service work: he has accepted a three-year term as chair of the English department. Fitger relays a few excerpts of the outgoing chair’s recommendation of him as a suitable replacement. Ted Boti, the sociologist in erstwhile receivership of the dysfunctional English program, describes Fitger as “a champion for the department and particularly its students,” says his churlish character is “at least 50 percent façade,” and determines that he “behaves like more of an ass than he actually is” (Schumacher 2014, 178). Fitger protests humbly, calling Boti “a poor misguided soul” (Schumacher 2014, 178). But we know from Fitger’s other letters, acerbic as they can be, that their language is to be trusted. No meaningless superlatives, Boti’s recommendations strike true: Fitger’s love of the job, his “subjective investment” in the work, the undercurrent flowing through the novel’s mad torrent of letters, is his most distinguishing quality. Fitger’s love of work signals a stark contrast from the refusals of work that typify the milieus of This Side of Paradise and vast swaths of the genre. What we see in Dear Committee Members, instead, is a refusal of the work/life binary. There is plenty of life in the antecedent action of the novel: a divorce, an affair, and other concerns pass in and out of the letters’ detours. But Schumacher’s contribution to the genre is an idea of life embodied by a protagonist who fundamentally loves his work and has effectively conflated work and life. Or put another way, Fitger performs productivism so thoroughly that he derives a sense of pleasure and mission from it. As Weeks formulates it, productivism promotes work as “an essential source of individual growth, self-fulfillment, social recognition, and status,” and as a consequence, it encourages and rationalizes “the long hours U.S. workers are supposed to dedicate to waged work and the identities they are expected to invest there” (2011, 11). The post-Fordist economy relies on this conflation of work and identity—a common trope

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in discourses of social class, public policy, and management, and perhaps most stubborn as a feature of academics’ self-construction. The conflation of work and identity is further complicated in the genre’s thorny relationship to the Program Era, in which the status of the writer as a writer is an existential concern, as we have seen in works such as Schumacher’s and Francine Prose’s Blue Angel (2000). Where Amory Blaine is afforded time to revel in nonwork, Jay Fitger revels in work itself, and the pathology that emerges in that contrast has far-reaching implications for the work of scholarly inquiry that is supposed to take place at the university as well as the university’s troubled relationship to the broader neoliberal economy.

Ambivalence in a Long Day In the late evening of his long day of teaching, Cyrus “Duffy” Duffleman receives an unexpected email from one of his students at Ivy Green University. The adjunct protagonist of Alex Kudera’s Fight for Your Long Day (2010) had witnessed the assassination of the Under Secretary for Homeland Defense at midday, and he is surprised by the student’s proposition, stated flatly: “University Towers Hotel. 10 pm. Room 1007. Be there, or be square, Professor. In fact, try to come cylindrical ” (138). Either of these plotlines—politics, sex—would be typical of the genre’s work avoidance. But what Kudera delivers instead is a sustained rumination on work: a rare depth of consideration for the craft of teaching and, not surprisingly, reflections on the acute working conditions of adjunct instructors. Duffy’s oppressive work and the forlorn precarity that is its reward mark an obverse side of the productivism that mostly suits Jay Fitger. This segment and the following segment study the most recent development of the genre: the novel of the adjunct, which provides an important register of the ambivalent politics of work in the campus novel. In his short essay “Unlucky Jim” (2012), Jeffrey Williams identifies this as a subgenre that emerges around 2010, in which “the hero of the new academic novel is a professor manqué, and the academic world is no longer a path to middle-class security” (2012b). Indeed, in “The Rise of the Academic Novel” (2012), Williams suggests that the downward mobility captured in this subgenre may explain the appeal of the campus novel altogether, with its faculty protagonists “exemplifying,” he argues, “the shrinking horizons of the educated middle class” since the 1980s

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(2012a, 575). Kristina Quynn calls this subgenre the adjunctroman. In such novels, scholarly goals of tenure and publication and other markers of the academy’s economy of prestige remain desires for adjunct protagonists, Quynn argues, “and yet without modification such tropes abjectify contingent faculty and reveal the Professorroman to be largely incapable of telling a tale other than the very failure of the adjunct to come of age or, more aptly, come of tenure” (2019, 94). Like Schumacher’s protagonist, the protagonists of the adjunctroman have no Exemption from work. But characters like Cyrus Duffleman have an altogether different relation to work than Jay Fitger—and it is not a difference of degree, but a difference of kind. Duffy explains it succinctly to a student unfamiliar with the term: “No tenure. No permanent job. Low pay. No benefits. No status” (Kudera 2010, 190). That last item may strike some as incommensurate to the material problems of poverty-level wages, lack of health care, and short-term contracts that preclude the stability of middle-class social life, conditions that have become better documented as the ranks of adjuncts swelled precipitously over the last generation. But in institutions that largely operate on an economy of status, an abject lack of it—insult to penury—only exacerbates those material conditions. Kudera, himself a survivor of an adjunct career, at times shows the documentary impulses of literary realism, with several passages committed to proving these working conditions beyond a matter of mere verisimilitude. That tight correspondence between the literary and the real garners praise in the novel’s front matter: “Kudera takes you behind the stately ivy-covered walls of the typical college campus,” Linda B. Nilson blurbs, “and tells it like it unfortunately is for today’s faculty and students.” With teaching and tutoring responsibilities at four different institutions across Philadelphia, Duffy must be steadily mindful of the clock. Kudera’s paragraphs are punctuated by references to time as Duffy tries to keep up with his class meetings, appointments, and public transit between campuses. More than just the framing device of the single-day narrative and more than the novel’s ambivalent mix of optimism and defeatism, the excruciating sensitivity to time reads as an homage, as several early reviews noted, to Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), whose protagonist Shukhov seems to suffer worse from the slow movement of time than from ruthless Soviet power. The effect, even without any explicit reference to the Gulag, is a pervading sense of Duffy’s imprisonment as he shuffles, the picture of fatigue, from one worksite to the next. That unfreedom of time makes for a stark contrast with Amory

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Blaine’s experience, in which time itself is the basis of a utopian wish. For some readers, there may be a temptation here to a false equivalence between the overstretched workdays of both Duffy and Jay Fitger. Fitger, for instance, observes that he writes some of his letters over Thanksgiving and spring break, and laments that he is “laden like a burro with advises every semester” (Schumacher 2014, 64).7 Both complain that their teaching responsibilities have interfered with their writing lives. But Duffy does not enjoy even the most modest opportunity for wit, play, or reflection—to say nothing of the tenure that allows Fitger to speak freely. Duffy is a scholar, then, who lacks access to skholé. In spite of the grueling hours involved, Duffy exhibits an attention to the craft of teaching that is uncommon in the genre.8 Not only does Kudera set long sweeps within class sessions, a major site of academic work, but he also shows his protagonist poring over pedagogical strategies. “Not wanting to silence forever the motionless girl,” Kudera describes one fraught classroom moment at Urban State University, “he does what he tries to do with many student comments. He co-opts them, alters their ingredients, and rearranges the tone and meaning: he aims for something thoughtful, useful, perhaps even good, or at least not unabashedly malignant” (2010, 35). The makings of a glowing teaching evaluation, this passage aligns also with Duffy’s careful encouragement during a tutoring session later at the University of America. “To get rehired remains an adjunct’s end in itself,” Duffy cynically reflects at one point, but in these passages it appears that the least secure figure in the academy shows the most devout concern for the work (Kudera 2010, 49). This affective labor extends beyond the classroom to a range 7 Unsurprisingly, the great majority of this study emerges out of my own Thanksgiving, spring, winter, and summer breaks. It’s another familiar academic joke: looking forward to finally getting some work done over the break! And this joke echoes through the way we conceive of the sabbatical system in U.S. colleges and universities. The O.E.D. traces the term “sabbatical” back to the term “Sabbath,” meaning that “sabbatical” indicates a period of rest from work. For some institutions, that sense of the term may well obtain, with sabbaticals affording time with no strings attached, no expectations. For many other institutions, however, the sabbatical is far from nonwork, with faculty proposals awarded to those whose goals are to achieve the most work in their time away from usual duties. 8 Quynn points out also that Duffy dedicates a significant amount of attention to his own “digestive preoccupations”: “musings on and fantasies about bathrooms, bowel movements, and farts” (2019, 98). In this motif lies a brutal parallel: bodily excrement, professional expulsion.

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of student services. Duffy tries to usher a troubled Urban State student from the classroom to a counselor’s office, and later visits her in the hospital. In the novel’s climax, Duffy finds that one of his Liberty Tech University students was the accidental assassin of the Under Secretary and tries to counsel the man against confronting soldiers outside the campus’s new Graduate School of Defense Technology. Duffy balances all of this labor with his worries about making the rent with cutbacks in his next semester’s assignments, all while the tenure-line faculty at these schools enjoy the privileges expropriated from his labor “to pad their own superlative pay and benefits—German-sedan health coverage and expense accounts for books,” to say nothing of liberties taken with their students’ bodies (Kudera 2010, 60). In this understanding of labor exploitation, Kudera’s novel demonstrates again the centrality of resentment to the genre.9 Nevertheless, Duffy manages to avoid a purely dystopian view of his work and finds a complex relation to the productivist ethic. The problem is introduced in the content of his first class session of the day. At Urban State, he leads discussion of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs— its relationship to the Business Writing course’s learning objectives not clearly demonstrated, but the lesson circumscribes the adjunct’s position between the struggle to achieve Maslow’s first stages of bare survival and then to reach the professional accomplishments and life fulfillment of the final tier, “Self-Actualization.” The latter he indeed reaches during a session of Critical Reading and Research at Liberty Tech. “For a moment, Cyrus Duffleman experiences genuine pleasure,” the narration reflects. “He has reached that certain level, that dignified position, of actually feeling like something he has said has gotten through to the students. A message delivered” (Kudera 2010, 97). But the counterpoint to this fulfillment of creative potential at Maslow’s apex is not only the

9 The book’s racial politics are ambivalent at best, resentments seeping forth in multiple directions. Of students’ perceived xenophobia, the narration reflects, “It occurs to Duffy that he can’t compete either. The brilliant, exotic post-colonials having seized half the tenured posts in the humanities, and the Duffler is three-stepping the adjunct shuffle” (Kudera 2010, 97). Elsewhere, Duffy seems to blame “political correctness” for some scholars having climbed the ladder past him. He nicknames one outspoken Black student at Urban State “the Afrocentrist,” though she never exhibits discourses of Pan-Africanism or Negritude. Toward the end of his day, however, he shows some guilt over his own racism—he “wants desperately to quash the brazen stereotyping that stabs him in the brain” (Kudera 2010, 107)—as if providing the novel a note of the Bildungsroman.

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bare conditions of his adjunct position—the perils of catastrophic health coverage and the threadbare clothing. Rather, the work itself fails to fulfill consistently. At the end of the day, looking back at his course on the Eastern European and Russian shorty story at Ivy Green, a gig that all-but-dissertation Duffy secured with a forged Ph.D. diploma from a backalley fake I.D. dealer, he confesses to himself that “reading Kafka and Schulz has become a chore” and laments “the dullness of the sweet part of his day” (Kudera 2010, 236). Would the security of a tenure-line post resolve Duffy’s work ambivalence? Or another line of work altogether? Or do adjunct conditions muddy up Maslow’s project, reorganizing its pyramid form into something like a dialectical tangle, bare survival, and self-actualization on the same receding horizon? Fight for Your Long Day illuminates an enduring dilemma of work in America and especially in the academy. The productivist commandment— love thy job—leads not only to greater labor output, but also to greater labor exploitation. In opening up broad questions of productivism, this basic condition of labor manipulation, hardly news to those who have studied rising adjunctification in the U.S., poses questions for all strata of faculty, staff, and student life in the genre: whether and to what degree is our work working for us?

Gendering Work and The Life of the Mind “You know how we used to joke about how we wanted to be the first to die in the apocalypse,” Dorothy asks her partner Rog. “Because our glasses would break?” (Smallwood 2022, 30). Dorothy later peppers Rog with morose questions: “Do you ever think about being dragged for miles in a mudslide?” When Rog counters that people in those situations ignored evacuation demands, she reposts: “What about the people who get burned alive in their cars driving from the fires?” (Smallwood 2022, 32). This passage reads as playful repartee between domestic partners, but the subject is in fact quite dear to Dorothy, the protagonist of Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind. An adjunct instructor of English, Dorothy teaches a course called “Writing Apocalypse” at a private university, the narration is quick to note, whose “list-price tuition was twice her annual earnings” (Smallwood 12). This pairing—a wary sense of looming climate disaster, as well as Dorothy’s overt confrontation with apocalypticism—situates The Life of the Mind in or alongside “millennial fiction,” whose protagonists tend to be “fatalistic and without political

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recourse,” as Jeffrey Williams describes them in “Millennial Academe” (2022), and therefore differ slightly from the adjunct protagonists of a prior generation who held out some measure of hope for less precarious working conditions (2022). Dorothy’s situation, then, refutes the utopian antiwork projects such as we see in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. I close this chapter with the Life of the Mind because of the way that Smallwood pairs fatalistic apocalypticism with careful attention to the body. It’s six days after her miscarriage when readers are introduced to Dorothy. She considers the event “less than a trauma and more than an inconvenience”—and yet the bodily effects of the miscarriage linger throughout the novel, a steady source of fatigue and disquiet (Smallwood 2022, 4). Later on she will refer to this time as “the blight.” Dorothy’s adjunct position puts this novel squarely in the subgenre that Kristina Quynn calls the adjunctroman, which tends to be told in “crises of professional acumen, reputation and career building, and professorial identity”—progress that is inherently denied to adjunct instructors, the overall plot arc contradicting presumptions about professorial career stages (2019, 86). But Dorothy’s disposition toward her work, as well as the novel’s emphasis on the body and its adjacency to apocalyptic themes, leads The Life of the Mind to a unique affordance: gendering adjunct work at an intersection between the life of the mind and the life of the body. The novel ruminates on Dorothy’s working conditions and on the state of higher learning, demonstrating not only Smallwood’s concern for academic labor and status, but also her skill at dissecting manners. For instance, she suffers the tedium of public printers and gets in a minor squabble with a university librarian who doesn’t accept her proclamation of institutional authority—“I’m a professor”—a claim that Dorothy doesn’t believe, either (Smallwood 2022, 211). More than demeaning working conditions, Dorothy experiences work as an identity crisis. She notes for instance that open positions in her field have fallen from six positions in the prior hiring season to none in the current one, and she confides in a friend, “It’s like every time I don’t get a job, my own sense of fraudulence gets closer to being accepted as the truth I always knew it was” (Smallwood 2022, 13, 42). The novel also provides images evocative of the academic labor market, for instance during an academic conference in Las Vegas where Dorothy plays slot machines and later ponders a lobster tank in a casino restaurant. Passages such as these are staple features of the adjunctroman, conventional tropes that align with the material found in Fight for Your Long Day.

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But readers should take note of the tone in which Smallwood delivers this material: Dorothy remains dispassionate about and resigned to the casualization of the academic labor force. Fresh off of a traumatizing reunion with her dissertation advisor, Judith Robinson—a caricature simultaneously of academic celebrity as well as of the emotionally manipulative professional mentor who blithely refuses to acknowledge disparities in privilege and power in the academic workforce—the narration captures Dorothy’s sense of removal from the situation: Judith was a teacher and a foster mother and an employer, and more than that, she was a node in a large and impersonal system that had anointed her a winner and Dorothy a loser, and due to institutional and systemic factors that were bigger than either of them—not more complicated, no, because no system is more complicated than a human being—no one of Dorothy’s generation would ever accrue the kind of power Judith had, and this was a good thing even as it was an unjust and shitty thing. (Smallwood 2022, 142)

Perhaps that sentence indicates an undercurrent of outrage, its wide sweep trying to contain a welling-up of resentment for Judith personally and for the academy generally. But if so the following resolution forecloses Dorothy’s affective response to the situation: “The problem wasn’t the fall of the old system, it was that the new system had not arisen” (Smallwood 2022, 143). The tone, cool and measured, may be read as the triumph of Dorothy’s powers of analysis over personal reactions to her working situation, but situated in the muted voice of The Life of the Mind it reads as resignation. Why so, this acquiescence? In part, this disposition is the result of Dorothy’s exceptional circumstances. Noting her partner’s privileged income, she describes her situation as “comfortable precarity” (Smallwood 2022, 66): where Kudera poses a dire relationship to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Dorothy’s material needs are well-met. Dorothy is often sensitized to inequality as manifesting in the wealth of others, for instance wryly noting the fact of a university press editor’s second home on the Cape, but she is not herself subject to material privation in the way that Kudera’s narrator is. In part, perhaps it is a manifestation of “cruel optimism,” Lauren Berlant’s tool that was the subject of a presentation Dorothy attends at the conference in Las Vegas and which Smallwood’s narration describes as “why and how people remain attached to fantasies

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and aspirations of ‘the good life,’ how those aspirations injured them, and the resulting affect—something [Berlant] called ‘stuckness’” (2022, 119). “Cruel optimism” also captures Dorothy’s hope for “the new system that had not arisen,” framing her understanding of casualized academic work as an unfortunate interregnum of exploitation and precarity before some better future to come. In other words, “cruel optimism” signals a hope that the current system of exploitation is not in fact itself the “new system” to replace that one that favored Judith’s generation of academics. Alongside this resignation to adjunctification of the professoriate, Smallwood genders the life of the mind itself. Put bluntly, Dorothy must wade through a sea of blood before even beginning to undertake a life of the mind. Her miscarriage and her subsequent days of bleeding are announced in the novel’s first paragraphs. A twelfth day of bleeding raises concerns about her recovery. She fixates on the sensory details of her discharge—its taste, its texture, and its smell. She searches for the perfect verb to describe her changing flow. She welcomes the return of her regular period with relief: “the time of the blight was no more” (Smallwood 2022, 191). Reflecting on this tide of blood, Dorothy considers the burdens of embodiment: “She wished there was someplace she could put her body down for a while, just a little while, before getting back into it” (Smallwood 2022, 110). Dorothy’s blood occupies her attention steadily throughout the novel, and when it finally tapers off her attention shifts to her friend Gabby’s as she navigates a medically-induced abortion. A miscarriage, a long-awaited period, an abortion—read one way, all of this blood complements the novel’s apocalypticism motif, suggesting the barren prospects of academic work in the U.S. But of course the novel’s blood is also inherently gendered. And in foregrounding the woman’s body, Smallwood’s novel suggests a tie between adjunctification and the labor of women academics. Indeed, if the American university is founded on explicitly raced conceptions of personhood and knowledges, as Craig Steven Wilder demonstrates in Ebony & Ivory (2013), it also continues to display a systematic misogyny toward women in the instructional ranks—this, despite advances in student admissions and the rise of women’s studies, centers in the postwar era. Women among the faculty, for instance, achieve tenure and promotion more slowly than men and are underrepresented at top ranks and

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among administration (Winslow 2010, 770).10 Sarah Winslow attributes this set of facts to systematic misogyny in academic administrative culture: “women are more likely than men to be teaching more than they prefer and researching less, gaps that cannot be fully explained by educational, institutional, and family status attributes. This result offers support for the contention that higher-status groups, in this case, men, are seen by administrators as more deserving of rewards” (2010, 788). Many studies have shown that such disparities disproportionately impact women working in the natural sciences—one recently showing that women are systematically uncredited for their work on highly cited papers and on patents.11 Further, and unsurprisingly, a report from the American Federation of Teachers found women make up 63.8% of the ranks of adjunct instructors (2020, 2). The blood that marks The Life of the Mind, in this reading, suggests also the wide history of misogyny in the working conditions of American universities. This is not to create a facile causality indicating that Dorothy cannot gain a tenure-track job because she is a woman. The novel resists that assumption: Dorothy has women friends and acquaintances who have found their way onto the tenure track, such as the woman working on Berlant’s theory of “cruel optimism,” though the novel has little to say about gendered conditions at their workplaces. Instead, the steady flow of blood in The Life of the Mind indicates a gendered nexus of the body, casualized work, and perhaps also institutional catastrophe. Read this way, Smallwood’s novel not only refutes the idea that the university may offer Exemption from waged work. Having extricated herself from the squabble with the librarian over printing privileges, Dorothy reflects, “how naïve she had once been to believe there was anything glamorous about the life of the mind” (Smallwood 2022, 212). That sentiment is

10 And this is far from a recent discovery. See for instance Linda A. Krefting’s “Intertwined Discourses of Merit and Gender: Evidence from Academic Employment in the U.S.A.,” published in Gender, Work, and Organization in 2003 for an earlier statement of this ongoing shortfall in gender parity in the academic workforce. 11 The study found, for instance, that even controlling for factors such as title and rank, women are 13.24% less likely to be named on articles and 58.4% less likely to be named on patents (Ross et al 2022, 6).

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consistent generally with the conventions of the adjunctroman. But a reading of the blood of The Life of the Mind goes further—to the still more pessimistic suggestion that Exemption from work is a gendered privilege.

Closure or Horizon? Utopian refusal, total productivism, a flattening of Maslow’s pyramid, gendered barriers to work—these permutations demonstrate again the fundamental antinomy of the campus novel: the utopian and regressive polarities held in tension by the politics of Exemption. Who is Exempt from work, even from productivism, and who’s not? And what does that mean for the genre’s representation of an institution that is caught between the polarities of its own public and private goods? If the framework of this chapter doesn’t offer a chronology, as Lyons does in his narrative movement from romanticism to the Erziehungsroman or much in the way of historicist criticism, it demonstrates a synchronic tension for the genre: a cluster of possibilities, which in turn signal the possibilities and crises of the academy. The genre’s rendering of work returns us to the important question on which Stefan Collini insists: what is the university for? This question plays out on two interrelated fronts, the first regarding how the academy prepares students to enter the marketplace, and the second evaluating the nature of academic work itself. As a token of the student protagonist’s general work refusal, Amory Blaine may be read also as neglecting his obligations to prepare for gainful employment. After all, why is he at Princeton if not to prepare himself for the world of work via rigorous studies and, perhaps more vulgarly, the formation of remunerative connections? My phrasing of that question, of course, aims to capture a particularly reductive rendering of the purpose of higher learning, as it if were merely a job training facility. Collini rightly points out that while higher education accommodates a great deal of practical application it is the lone institution in which free inquiry “is in principle not subordinate to any other purpose” and has operated that way since the late eighteenth century (2017, 25, 78). It is all too easy to conflate Amory’s refusal of academic work with a refusal of preparation for paid work—and in both cases, the virtue of his open-ended inquiry, the construction of a syllabus of his own, gets lost in the shuffle.

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Amory and other student protagonists in the genre pursue open inquiry in ways that not only defy productivist expectations for their experiences during college, but also challenge the subordination of the academy to the economy that prevails in our contemporary policy discourses. Those external pressures on the academy are often driven by a fairly clear definition of work—the kind signaled by wages and benefits—and the expectations that one’s studies will lead seamlessly to it. To facilitate that relationship between academy and economy, the neoliberal state demands that the university must fund itself according to the laws of the free market; must transform its every feature into measurable data; and most importantly, must direct all learning, no matter how abstract, to the production of marketable goods, operations, or future employees. A clarifying example comes from former Florida Governor Rick Scott. In his sales pitch for the 2012 legislative agenda, Scott wondered, “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so” (Anderson 2011). That plan called for reallocating state funds away from social science and humanities degrees toward those deemed to have higher market relevance. Setting aside the undercurrent of family melodrama— Scott’s daughter had earned an anthropology degree before enrolling in a Master’s of Business Administration program—one important result of this plan would have been in effect to raise tuition rates on humanities and social science majors, reaching the state’s invisible hands into the so-called marketplace. A report from the National Conference on State Legislatures found that Florida was one of at least 15 states that mete out education dollars with metrics such as “bachelor’s degrees awarded in areas of strategic emphasis” (2015). Scott’s proposal overlaps with those percolating through many other states, as well as the Trump administration’s summer 2018 scheme to merge the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor into a new unit that would have been called “the U.S. Department of Education and the Workforce.” These recent public policy debates punctuate a long arc of work discourses in American higher education. For instance, in The Higher Learning in America (1918), Thorstein Veblen laments that practical knowledge is a farce and that business-styled management is inherently

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incompatible with “esoteric knowledge” and academic processes.12 Ultimately opting for the subtitle “A Memorandum of the Conduct of Universities by Business Men,” Veblen had originally crafted the subtitle as “A Study in Depravity,” so urgent were there pressures he felt on the university system (1918, 217n34). The meanings of work change in the post-Fordist, neoliberal regime, but Veblen’s interwar jeremiad charts an enduring tension between the academy and the workforce. The genre confounds that tension with its emphasis on work refusal. The second of the genre’s work themes, the rendering of academic work itself, is most often transmitted through faculty protagonists. Schumacher’s and Kudera’s protagonists demonstrate that what counts as work inside the academy is unsettled, its boundaries mysterious even to its own denizens, and Smallwood’s protagonist delineates the enduring nature of gendered boundaries around this work. This phenomenon puts me in mind of Studs Terkel’s classic study Working (1972). In the 133 profiles that make up Terkel’s book, only one is associated with universities—a symptom of the way that academic work is represented in fiction and in public discourse. A kind of oral sociology, Terkel’s book collects statements on work from Americans across several sectors of the workforce: farmers, a sex worker, welders, cabbies, housewives, and executives of all sorts. Terkel sees the manufacturing economy giving way to the postFordist service economy and calls for a work ethic that doesn’t revolve solely around making things. He quotes from a labor organizer on the problems that follow from a society of abundance: “There’s no question about our ability to feed and clothe and house everybody. The problem is going to come in finding enough ways for man to keep occupied, so he’s in touch with reality,” the former president of the United Packinghouse Workers of America told him (Terkel 1972, xxviii). In other words, Working searches for a productivist model that would cohere in the new economy. It’s telling that Terkel’s cast of characters has so little to say about academic work. A vignette in the introduction discusses John R. Coleman’s sabbatical from the presidency of Haverford College. He worked

12 Veblen’s argument has an uncanny familiarity for those entrenched today, 100 years on, in defying neoliberal redefinitions of the academy and thinking through the university’s tensions between public and private goods. “‘Practical’ in this connection,” Veblen writes, “means useful for private gain; it need imply nothing in the way of serviceability to the common good” (1918, 169).

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at menial jobs and at one point was fired from a gig as porter-washer. “I’d never been fired and I’d never been unemployed [….] Though I had a bank account, though my children’s tuition was paid, though I had a salary and a job waiting for me back at Haverford, I was demoralized,” Coleman reflects, pondering the conflation of identity and paid work (Terkel 1972, xxi). The profile of Jack Hunter, a communications professor whose entry is nestled in the “Communications” segment along with those of a receptionist and a switchboard operator, deals exclusively with the communications field and not at all with any of his responsibilities as a professor. He mentions an opportunity to become a bank’s director of information, but offers no insight as to why he didn’t take it. Neither Coleman nor Hunter discusses academic work as a phenomenon unto itself. Given the growing attention to adjunctification inside and outside the academy, a reprise of Terkel’s project in the twenty-first century would perhaps include a profile of an adjunct, as he seems keen to find fulfilling work in the unlikeliest contexts. That Working would demonstrate a blindspot for academic work corresponds to the work refusals that have typified the genre until the arrival of the adjunctroman.13 However, allowing as he does for a wide spectrum of manual and service work as well as a range of privileged salaryman and working-class stiffs, Terkel’s omission of professors’ and students’ working lives is informative of the way we talk about academic work in 13 Complicating the matter further is the intermediary of literary form. It’s not just the students’ and professors’ work that is suspect, mysterious, but that of the genre’s authors, too. Terkel surveys a writer/producer at an advertising agency and a copyeditor, but neither addresses the work of writing, the former instead contemplating the glass ceiling and the latter searching for fulfilling challenges in the workplace. Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009) deftly chronicles the rise of the creative writing degree, the mid-century event that he argues best defines postwar American literary history. That development certainly separates Fitzgerald from Schumacher and Kudera, both of whom hold an M.F.A. degree with Schumacher also teaching in an elite M.F.A. program. But despite the leaps forward initiated by the American creative writing degree—its systematization of voice and its development of personal experience—writing still retains a note of leisure and still maintains a murky relationship to work after its post-Fordist reconceptualizations. So while Schumacher shares a direct genealogical tie with Samuel Richardson, whose Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) are credited with establishing the epistolary form, in fact each of the genre’s writers could be said to share the same smears as Richardson’s protagonists, whose letter-writing signals a leisurely withdrawal from work: mere scribblers, idlers, all. In this way, and perhaps despite reductive readings of Fight for Your Long Day as a realist polemic, these novels’ form—rather than, say, that of documentary film or investigative journalism—muddies any discussion of work.

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the U.S. In other words, a widespread presumption of skholé—or more pejorative, idleness—frames the institution. Or to put it another way: it’s unclear to what degree academic work counts as work, even within the academic novel. A residue of the Fordist mandate to make, a trace of antiintellectual resentment of all things pointy-headed, perhaps even a specter of the genealogy of skholé—Terkel’s oversight of academic work is no relic of the 1970s. Indeed, in pairing productivism and the affective labor of the new economy, Terkel marks a point of origin for the neoliberal project that is so befuddled by academic work. Again, Collini’s question echoes: what are those people doing over there? What is higher education for? At any rate, these two work discourses—the academy’s preparation of students for the workplace, the vagaries of academic work—conspire to manufacture productivism. The first organizes life around successful entry to the workplace. The second demands a persuasive accounting of one’s working life, a request that the academic’s critical inquiry is not readymade to deliver. Likewise, the genre’s position amid these two tensions has the effect of sustaining a broad ideology of productivism. On the one hand, its widespread refusal of work posits a kind of leisure, but not one that facilitates the esoteric study that Veblen so highly valued—not so much skholé leading to schola, in other words, but skholé existing as an end unto itself. This is true of Amory Blaine and a wide range of the genre’s protagonists, whether faculty or student, whose passions and pursuits are facilitated by the freedoms of the campus setting but have little or nothing to do with the work that is native to the campus. While that work refusal may generate a utopian critique of the productivist ethos, it also has the effect of showing academic work to be no different than other forms of work to be avoided. And this is directly at odds with the genre’s other hand, in which academic work such as Jay Fitger’s is held out as exceptional, as an extraordinary love, as an extension of life itself and all of its passions and energies, as worthy of a “subjective investment” so complete as to make inseparable one’s personal identity and one’s work. The warbling dissonance between these two characterizations of work posits a reactionary closure, setting the academy not as a utopian alternative to work as we know it in the contexts of post-Fordism, neoliberalism, so forth, but merely as a variation on the old themes. This antinomy, then—here expressed in utopian work refusals and the productivist mandate to love the job—fundamentally resists disentanglement.

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Weeks, after all, doesn’t wholly disclaim the goods of fulfilling work, though she rightly illuminates how such labor is readily exploited in the affective sectors of neoliberal economies. Fulfilling work is clearly preferable to unfulfilling work. The thrust of her argument, however, is that these are not the only choices, and that the American economy could afford less work and therefore greater capacity for fulfilling nonwork. Could the university provide a blueprint for such nonwork? And would it be a dereliction of the critic’s roles to substitute prescription for criticism here? The genre’s work themes invite such imagination. More broadly speaking, the genre invites us to consider the dignity and meaning of nonwork. This is inherent in Collini’s question: what is the university for? To answer that question “the academy is for nonwork” is significantly different from answering “it is not for work.” The latter offers a simple negation. “Nonwork,” despite its appearances, is in fact a positive term that suggests we rethink the goals and outcomes of higher education. And while “rethinking” sits well inside the comfortable ken of humanities scholars, Collini prompts us to make ourselves comfortable in somewhat foreign territory: public policy. This would mean engaging not only in a slippage between the genre’s representations and the real situations of the university, but slipping further into thinking about how they both might be paired to reach new audiences within, alongside, outside the academy, to build alliances with those audiences, and to erect some defenses from the neoliberal assaults on the university by articulating what kind of work is done there, who does it, and under what conditions it may or may not relate to the rest of society. The genre’s invitation to advocate for nonwork, then, extends well beyond the boundaries of the campus. Nonwork is hard to conceive, perhaps, in a moment when our discourses across the political spectrum assert as a first premise the dignity of work—the right to it, its necessity for personal growth, the shameful lack of it. But such imagination and whatever organized movements may follow from it may be imperative to break from the crises of the academy and the neoliberal economy more broadly. Such an imagination might then be attended by an organized movement, a formalized interest group that builds alliances and issues demands—a demand, for instance, to legislate a shorter work week, a demand perhaps for a basic income (tenure for all!), and a demand for the affordances of the flourishing of nonwork. The genre’s invitation to imagine nonwork calls also for action to create sustainable, equitable life.

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The genre’s role in that imagination is crucial. For the genre offers a tantalizing potential—a “Real-Possible,” as Ernst Bloch might say. He distinguishes “abstract utopia” from “concrete utopia,” as the second chapter discusses in its study of campus character’s Exemptions. The former is mustered without due respect for material contexts and conditions, the latter seeded in lived, tangible history. The framework of concrete utopia allows us to think within and beyond the limitations of the present because it provides not only a distant horizon but also a familiar model as its vehicle. The genre, so often asserting the freedom of time in settings that have material corollaries, provides such an intermediary stage to prompt the imaginations not only of those working within campus boundaries, but also for workers across Terkel’s spectrum. But it will remain a corrupt design so long as the love-of-work ideology persists. Weeks considers that nonwork, the freedom of time, is scary “not only because of what we might do with more nonwork time, but of what me might become” (2011, 170). The genre assigns readers to think through this work, then, as a concrete problem.

Works Cited @AcademicsSay. 2016. “American vs. British Reference Letters and Peer Reviews.” Twitter Post, December 8, 2016, 3:40 a.m. twitter.com/Academ icsSay/status/806825718579601408. The American Federation of Teachers. 2020. “An Army of Temps: A.F.T. Adjunct Faculty Quality of Work/Life Report.” https://www.aft.org/sites/ default/files/qualitylifereport_feb2022.pdf. Anderson, Zac. 2011. “Rick Scott Wants to Shift University Funding Away from Some Degrees.” The Herald-Tribune, October 10. http://politics.heraldtri bune.com/2011/10/10/rick-scott-wants-to-shift-university-funding-awayfrom-some-majors/. Bell, Robert H. 2015. “F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Life.” Sewanee Review 123 (2): 312–24. Bruccoli, Matthew J. 2002. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. 2nd ed. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Bryer, Jackson R. 2004. “F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896–1940: A Brief Biography.” A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Edited by Kirk Curnutt, 21–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cather, Willa. 1925. The Professor’s House. New York: Vintage, 1990. Collini, Stefan. 2017. Speaking of Universities. London: Verso. Cross, K. G. W. 1964. F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Capricorn.

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Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 1920a. This Side of Paradise. New York: Scribner, 2003. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Who’s Who—and Why.” 1920b. My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920–1940. Edited by James L.W. West, 3–5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. Kudera, Alex. 2010. Fight for Your Long Day. Kensington: Atticus. Misra, Joyce, et al. 2011. “The Ivory Ceiling of Service Work.” Academe 97 (1): 22–26. National Conference of State Legislatures. 2015. “Performance-Based Funding for Higher Education.” July 31. http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/ performance-funding.aspx. Quynn, Kristina. 2019. “Drudgery Tales, Abjectified Protagonists, and Speculative Modes in the Adjunctroman of Contemporary Academic Fiction.” Genre 52 (2) (July): 85–108. Ross, Matthew B. et al. 2022 “Women Are Credited Less in Science than Are Men.” Nature 608: 135–45. Rydsjö, Celia Aijmer. 2021. “‘We Do No Harm, We Say What We Want, and We Get Paid for It’: Academic Work and Dignity in Stoner by John Williams.” In Engaging with Work in English Studies, Edited by Alastair Henry and Åke Persson, 69–95. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Schumacher, Julie. 2014. Dear Committee Members. New York: Doubleday. Schumacher, Julie. 2018. The Shakespeare Requirement. New York: Anchor. Schumacher, Julie. 2023. The English Experience. New York: Doubleday. Smallwood, Christine. 2022. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt. Terkel, Studs. 1972. Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do. New York: Avon, 1974. Veblen, Thorstein. 1918. The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. Edited by Richard R. Teichgraeber III. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Wilder, Craig Steven. 2013. Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014. Williams, Jeffrey. 2012a. “The Rise of the Academic Novel.” American Literary History 24 (3) (Fall): 561–89. Williams, Jeffrey. 2012b. “Unlucky Jim: the Rise of the Adjunct Novel.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 12. Winslow, Sarah. 2010. “Gender Inequality and Time Allocations Among Academic Faculty.” Gender and Society 24 (6): 769–93.

CHAPTER 8

On Teaching the University

I designed this book in part to answer Jeffrey Williams’s call to “teach the university.” The outline of the book spans a range of the genre’s foremost themes in order to track the campus novel’s fundamental antinomy between its utopian promises and its regressive tendencies—an antinomy whose tensions are held in place by the genre’s countervailing politics of Exemption, an antinomy that closely corresponds to and nevertheless distorts the university’s antinomies of public and private goods. This miscellany of this book’s chapters, I hope, will facilitate scholars’ interest in bringing the genre into their classrooms. Analysis of the campus novel doesn’t have to have classroom application as its singular or highest outcome, but bringing discussions such as these into the classroom is one efficient approach to bridging the gaps in understanding of higher learning that plague our discourses about the university. Readers will note, of course, that I have not outlined lesson plans or other application materials in these chapters. I would find that overly prescriptive, given the variability of students’ preparedness at different institutions and the variability of course listings—first-year or senior, general education or advanced seminar for the major—in which any of these materials may find a home. However, I will conclude here with a few brief and general remarks about how the material from the preceding chapters may translate into the classroom.

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In “Teach the University” (2008), Jeffrey Williams lays out a rationale for this pedagogy, as well as some frameworks for approaching it. Williams notes that since at least the 1990s humanities scholars have explored the ways in which discourses of gender, sex, race, ethnicity, and class have formed us and our society. “Rightly so,” he says of these inquiries, “but the university, as the primary liminal zone of our society between childhood and a full franchise in adult life, offers another crucial way to look at social formation” (Williams 2008, 26). Further, he argues, we should teach the university because to do so would be to participate in humanities traditions dating back to Immanuel Kant; because such teaching may broaden and strengthen understandings of civics and democracy; because teaching the university may help those of us working in universities to “counteract our resignation or abjectness or, on the other hand, overinflated claims of our political ‘interventions’” (Williams 2008, 27). Williams argues that such teaching must be interdisciplinary, encompassing the theory and history and sociology of the university, as well as its representation in fiction and in film (2008, 30). He proposes a course design comprised of four components: “the idea of the university” as discussed in philosophy and theory and as captured in policy statements from universities and their administrators; the history of the university, which depending on one’s approach may span as far back as Europe’s Middle Ages; university representations in fiction, film, and television; and sociological data about university life such as government policy documents and ethnographic surveys (Williams 2008, 31–37). Williams provides sample texts for each of these four components, and in the preceding body chapters, I have tried to demonstrate the conversations that might begin when they are synthesized. One of the challenges for such teaching is to provide students with a coherent digest of the conditions of higher learning. The sociological data that Williams calls for can bridge some of that gap. For instance, students might be surprised to see data from U.N.E.S.C.O.’s “Global Flow of Tertiary-Level Students” tool, which demonstrates that the American university, despite a deficit in institutional trust domestically, attracts international students in droves.1 They will be less surprised to see studies 1 U.N.E.S.C.O.’s “Global Flow of Tertiary-Level Students” tool visualizes the flows and exchanges of students through higher education worldwide. In 2016, the U.S. sent 68,580 of its students abroad and hosted 907,251 international students; the People’s Republic of China had the largest share of inbound students with 291,063, India trailing

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of higher education’s rising costs2 or students’ rising debt loads,3 though they may be surprised to learn about personal benefits of higher learning apart from income-to-debt calculations.4 But that data will likely benefit from robust contextualization that reaches beyond what Williams calls for when he proposes the history of the university in his four-part approach to teaching the university. To understand more fully the contexts pushing cost and debt trends, for instance, students will likely benefit from a classic study of neoliberalism, such as David Harvey’s Spaces of Global Capitalism (2006).5 A text such as Harvey’s may be a necessary prerequisite for students to begin to situate the financial stressors of American higher education—demonstrated, for instance in Christopher Newfield’s

with 112,714, South Korea with 63,952, Saudi Arabia with 53,637, Canada with 28,454, and so on (U.N.E.S.C.O. Institute for Statistics). In China’s case, this has to do in part with the oversupply of college-age students relative to the capacity of the country’s universities. 2 The Commonfund Institution finds that the average cost of tuition, room, and board increased as much as 50 percent from 2000 to 2016, while median household income has been flat or has even fallen during the same period (“Commonfund” 2016, Table A). Further, the Higher Education Price Index which tracks the primary cost drivers in higher education shows an increase in college and university operations from a 25.6 in 1961 to a 319.0 in 2016 (“Commonfund” 2016, Table A). The Consumer Price Index for the same period balloons from 30.3 to 242.8 (“Commonfund” 2016, Table A). 3 About half of 1994’s bachelor’s recipients graduated with debt, averaging just over $10,000; more than two-thirds of 2016’s graduates carried debt away from their commencement platforms, averaging about $35,000 (Kantrowitz 2016). 4 In Higher Learning, Greater Good (2009), Walter McMahon applied a modern human

capital approach to show that accounting for college graduates’ career earnings deeply undervalues the worth of higher learning for the individual. McMahon estimates that private “nonmarket benefits,” those that fall outside the boundaries of one’s workplace compensation including personal health and longevity, even when controlled for higher income, total some 122% of the average earnings increment gained from a bachelor’s degree (2009, 173). 5 Harvey provides a succinct outline of four organizing principles of neoliberalism: the privatization of public utilities, including social welfare provisions, public institutions, and even warfare; the financialization of everything via a deregulatory state; the management and manipulation of crises led jointly by state and corporate officials; and the state’s redistribution of wealth (2006, 44–50).

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seminal work The Great Mistake (2016)6 —in a comprehensive framework. In the zero-sum game of course design, covering material such as this, whether as assigned readings on a syllabus or as components of independent research assignments, takes time away from that which students might spend reading more campus novels. But that sacrifice yields a more generative understanding not only of the genre, but also of the university life that it represents. Drawing on philosophies of higher education, histories of the university, and sociological data, courses following Williams’s design are likely also to uncover the fundamental contradiction of the American university today. The friction derives from different perceptions of the mission of higher learning: those of us working in and adjacent to universities are likely to consider higher learning an inherent public utility or social good, while parents, students, commentators, and legislators long ago abandoned such thinking and now consider the university an individual’s pathway to credentialing, employment, and class status.7 As Kathleen Fitzpatrick suggests in Generous Thinking (2019), both of these 6 For some forty years, Newfield explains, the privatization of the university has enjoyed a bipartisan consensus in American politics, though perhaps this has begun to change in the 2020s. Newfield argues against the conventional wisdom that public universities are in crisis not because of the “waste, fraud, and abuse” alleged in the Reagan years, nor because of its refusal to submit to business practices. Rather, students now pay increasing tuition rates and receive decreasing educational outcomes because the university has adopted market practices too readily. “The fundamental driver of college costs is the market competition that typifies private industry,” Newfield argues. “Turning universities into private businesses is not the cure for the college cost problem, but rather its cause” (2016, 26). Newfield details how privatization has unfolded not only in removing state support for higher learning so as to make the individual student bear the burden of her education, resulting in vast inequality in access to the university. It also manifests in the widespread usage of vendors and consultants who drain away potential university revenues; in shifting governance away from the public and toward philanthropists; in downplaying the public value of knowledge produced in and distributed through universities; and in “redefining the educated person” not as a broadly developed human but as “an economic subject” (Newfield 2016, 28–30). The privatization of the university has been achieved through a perpetual feedback loop that Newfield calls “the devolutionary cycle” in which cuts to funding, tuition hikes, the entry of private vendors, and other factors reinforce each other, resulting in widening chasm between the university and its mission to serve the public good (Newfield 2016, 36–49). 7 Regarding service to “the public good,” Kathleen Fitzpatrick reminds readers that this term itself acts as a shibboleth because not all Americans agree what that “good” would entail and because a great measure of Americans seem to reject the idea of shared benefits and shared obligations altogether (2019, 189). Further, she delineates the nature

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paradigms are likely failing—the university no longer delivering social goods in proportion to its opinion of itself, and the private benefits of a degree meaning perhaps less than some may imagine (198–99). We find ourselves in a rather sticky situation—one that requires our students’ reflections as well as our own. In addition to contextualizing the philosophies and histories of the university, another challenge for teaching the university is gauging student trauma that might attend the campus novel. Several such risks are inherent to the genre. Put bluntly, the genre’s subject matter may register with students in the same tricky ways that discussions of sexual assault or race or gender identity can trouble students. Further, discussions of American higher learning orbit around the difficult economic, even moral, calculations made by many middle-class families that have eventuated in their students’ arrivals in our classrooms. In Indebted (2019), Caitlin Zaloom explores the stresses facing middle-class families as they pay for college. Zaloom argues that this stress is not a straightforward matter of budgeting and making ends meet, tense as that can be, but is also produced by a complex web of moral mandates. This strain is set across the backdrop of “the morality of fiscal restraint,” which informs middle-class ideals of saving and debt (Zaloom 2019, 27). And it deepens between the polarities of middle-class American morality: on the one hand, one must be autonomous, independent from institutional and family support, while on the other, a family is compelled to provide its children an unburdened, open future, part of a moral discourse that holds “children’s potential as sacred” (Zaloom 2019, 45). Further, the latter discourse is encoded in the language used by financial gateways such as the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form and 529 college savings instruments, and Zaloom argues that each of these gateways demonstrates an idealized and morally prescriptive discourse of the nuclear family that many students simply will not have experienced through their young adulthoods. Whether having passed through this vise of moral mandates or still finding themselves trapped in it—for too many students, the very identity of being a college student is fraught with guilt over sacrifices made on their behalf and worry over the uncertainty of what goods may follow after graduation. This situation is exacerbated if one considers that a great many works of the genre operate on classed exclusions that resonate with of “private goods,” “common resources,” and “club goods” and the relation of each to higher learning (Fitzpatrick 2019, 190–91).

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these same financial stresses. In “Injuries of Class” (2015), Christopher Findeisen8 argues that “one of the genre’s defining plot structures has been higher education’s reluctance to incorporate marginalized populations and the corresponding success or failure of outsider students in adapting to the white, upper-class world that academia has historically served” (288). Findeisen, drawing on enrollment data showing increased inequality across the student body of American universities, reads the lower-middle-class voice of the Program Era as demonstrating not the inclusion of poorer students in American higher learning but their replacement by ideological symbolism (2015, 291). In other words, anyone endeavoring to teach the university should recognize that a student’s identity as a college student may be a fraught one that requires care and attention in the classroom. More specifically, and more widely understood, there is good reason to be skeptical about deliberately introducing into the classroom discussions of potentially traumatizing subjects such as sexual assault, the lens through which chapter four discusses Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004). At over 700 pages long, Simmons would likely require excising in order to fit onto a course syllabus, and this could, perversely, distill the troublesome material and thereby elevate the risk of traumatization through its reading. What is to be done about such material? Readers may note that during the introduction chapter I have paraphrased the sexual assaults perpetrated by the narrator of Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966) in an effort to mitigate the possibilities of retraumatization for readers who have suffered sexual assault, but this seems an unsustainable tactic for coursework that will emphasize close reading of literary texts, much less for courses that may discuss sexual trauma squarely, as the fourth chapter does. Trigger warnings may offer some measure of care, but recent studies in clinical psychology have found that those policies do not effectively alleviate students’ trauma and

8 Findeisen goes further, arguing that the campus novel exists primarily to contain the university’s function in an unequal society. “The symbolic work of the campus novel has been to imagine a system that stages social conflicts between the deserving and the entitled when in fact the two categories have become functionally indistinguishable” due to enrollment practices that favor wealthy over poor students (2015, 294). This reading of the genre aligns with his understanding of the higher learning itself—that “mass education is an ideological fiction whose purpose is to preserve an ideal of equal opportunity during a period of increasingly unequal outcomes” (Findeisen 2015, 295).

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may in fact exacerbate it.9 I am not aware of similarly empirical studies of the extent to which teaching such material results in retraumatization of students, and that information would be helpful for those teachers who are weighing the risks posed to their students. Absent such empirical studies of probable outcomes, advocates of trauma-informed pedagogy provide useful guidelines on how thoughtful attention to students’ experiences can help manage or even mitigate the risks of classroom discussions of subjects such as sexual assault. For example, in “Trigger Warnings, Covenants of Presence, and More” (2017), the theologian Stephanie M. Crumpton offers a “trauma sensitive pedagogical strategy” that emphasizes connecting sensitive material to other ongoing thematic concerns of the course, monitoring students’ affective and body languages, and reserving the right to conclude discussion at the close of class time (144–46). With a trauma-informed pedagogy, then, one would undertake teaching the campus novel with utmost care, monitoring students’ responses closely, paying attention to discrete student cultures as well as the norms of the instructor’s department, and providing regular reminders about relevant campus resources—and I emphasize that a framework such as this is important not only for discussions of sexual assault, but for any discussion of university life, given its fraught nature for many of our students. For Williams, teaching the university would ideally eventuate in a robust course dedicated entirely to the university, but of course there are myriad other opportunities for teaching the campus novel. Williams discusses experience in teaching a historical survey of the genre, as well as themed courses that might focus on student life or academic labor (2008, 37). I have had productive experiences teaching a campus novel seminar, too, but I would also encourage readers to consider teaching the university as at least a unit embedded in other courses. Consider, for instance, Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring (1993). Chapter three discusses this novel alongside the genre’s anti-intellectual tendencies—a theme that would suitably organize a seminar course on the genre. Japanese by Spring, however, could profitably contribute to a range of course syllabi, bringing along with it unique discussions of higher learning. It would serve a standard survey of U.S. literature by prompting discussions of the 9 See for instance Payton J. Jones, Benjamin W. Bellet, and Richard J. McNally’s. 2020. “Helping or Harming?: The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals with Trauma Histories” in Clinical Psychological Science 8(5): 905–17.

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professionally trained creative writer and the Program Era. And such an opportunity is not restricted solely to Americanists: Japanese by Spring could also serve topics courses on Orientalism or feminisms: if contrarian and dissenting in its views, Reed’s novel also situates these discourses in the contexts of the university. Packaging Japanese by Spring for courses such as these would of course make for shallower inquiry than would be afforded by a seminar on anti-intellectualism in the campus novel. But it would still produce some measure of the results that Williams has in mind in calling for such teaching. In my experience, one cannot underestimate an undergraduate student’s understanding or knowledge of any of the contexts or conditions of American higher learning—and this is perhaps the best reason to undertake such teaching wherever one can manage it. Perhaps this argument relies too much on exhortation. In Permanent Crisis (2021), Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon lament that “those who claim to speak on behalf of the modern humanities often do so through exhortation and declaration” (6). Reitter and Wellmon decry that humanists’ writing about the state of the humanities, or about the state of higher learning generally, too often lacks historical perspective and can be “antithetical to the careful thinking and scholarly virtues” to which scholars aspire (2021, 3). These are just rejoinders to some of the material one may find under the heading of critical university studies—and surely to some material throughout the preceding chapters. I am skeptical, however, that an appeal to scholarly circumspection may too often run at cross purposes with public engagement and especially with the “generous thinking” that Kathleen Fitzpatrick advocates. With appropriate scholarly circumspection, we must be able to agree that higher learning in the U.S. faces a raft of transformations. These transformations, driven by global neoliberal reorganizations of bodies politic, are not exclusively American in their character. Nor are they the first deep transformations in the history of American higher learning, which is indeed, paradoxically, typified by crisis, as Reitter and Wellmon demonstrate. The lived-experience of American higher learning is fraught, to say the least. What is to be done? Or more specifically: how are we to participate in what can be done about this institution? The campus novel can serve as a useful, perhaps indispensable vehicle for such discussions of higher learning, and can widen those discussions beyond our trade journals and faculty meetings and into a broader stream. A strategy of teaching the university through campus novels comes with drawbacks, including the representational fallacies to which

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literary scholars will already be well-tuned. Another concern, however is the tendency toward the jeremiad that may attend the campus novel and discussions of it. In her study of English and American campus novels, Elaine Showalter finds that such works are “the author’s vehicle for an attack on a dying tradition and a suffocating institution” (2005, 33). This kind of jeremiad thinking is perhaps also an implicit bias in critical university studies and the kind of studies that Reitter and Wellmon critique as lacking sufficient perspective and scholarly care. If the jeremiad runs rampant in the campus novel and in critical university studies alike, then perhaps it should be foregrounded in any projects that teach the university. Such jeremiads also correspond to the fundamental frictions of the campus novel genre. The genre’s utopian promises of self-determination and freedom from work—if these are also jeremiads for imagined pasts, of which many undergraduate students may be unaware or which they may be unable to articulate fully, then they are also simultaneously signposts and obstacles to what the university may become, to what roles it may serve in American society. It is no small feat to imagine higher learning’s futures in such conditions. Perhaps by teaching the university, we—and our students—will be equal to the task.

Works Cited Commonfund Institute. 2016. “Commonfund Higher Education Price Index, 2016 Update.” Commonfund Institute. https://www.commonfund.org/wpcontent/uploads/2016/10/2016-HEPI-Report.pdf. Crumpton, Stephanie M. 2017. “Trigger Warnings, Covenants of Presence, and More: Cultivating Safe Space for Theological Discussions about Sexual Trauma.” Teaching Theology & Religion 20 (2): 137–47. Findeisen, Christopher. 2015. “Injuries of Class: Mass Education and the American Campus Novel.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 130 (2): 284–98. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2019. Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Harvey, David. 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. London and New York: Verso. Kantrowitz, Mark. 2016. “Why the Student Debt Crisis is Worse than People Think.” Time, January 11. http://time.com/money/4168510/why-studentloan-crisis-is-worse-than-people-think/.

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McMahon, Walter. 2009. Higher Learning, Greater Good: the Private and Social Benefits of Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Newfield, Christopher. 2016. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Reitter, Paul and Chad Wellmon. 2021. Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Showalter, Elaine. 2005. Faculty Towers: the Academic Novel and Its Discontents Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. U.N.E.S.C.O. Institute for Statistics. “Global Flow of Tertiary-Level Students.” http://uis.unesco.org/en/uis-student-flow. Accessed 1 August 2018. Williams, Jeffrey. 2008. “Teach the University.” Pedagogy 8 (1): 25–42. Zaloom, Caitlin. 2019. Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost. Princeton: Princeton University of Press.

Appendix I: Further Data

This appendix includes a run of data visualizations that may provide useful context or prompt further inquiry for those interested in teaching the university. The data visualizations here stem either directly from the Directory of the American Campus Novel, as Fig. 1.1 does in the introduction chapter, or they tease out the results of topic modeling derived by machine reading of those titles. All of the visualizations that follow involve the data from John E. Kramer’s The College Novel in America (2004). The introduction chapter briefly describes the limitations of Kramer’s dataset. These and my parameters for defining the genre are worth developing further, not to undermine any of the data analysis in this book but to emphasize that data are as rhetorical as any other object of inquiry. I have defined the campus novel as one that takes place primarily on the physical sites of and primarily in dialogue with institutionalized higher learning. If dry and uninspiring, this framework comprises texts where action spills off of campus, as well as those for whom the academic functions of the campus are subordinated to other pursuits—a rich body of texts through which we can unpack meanings of, as well as the pressures against, American higher learning. Positive definitions of the campus novel strain at the edges. Problematically, the campus novel doesn’t submit to a template plot. For instance, the school novel—set in boarding schools and featuring a young adult sensibility—tends to construct plot around curriculum, such as in the Harry Potter series in which the novels

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 W. Beal, Campus Fictions, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1

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are structured by year and by coursework.1 Many campus novels will follow a bildungsroman form, but this is by no means a universal feature of the genre. This problem of taxonomy might be more easily resolved if the campus novel had any substantive investment in scholarly life, but that is simply not the case. Unlike, say, detective fiction, where the bulk of a given plot is concerned with detective work of one sort or another, the campus novel genre generally eschews, even scorns scholarly work. Similarly, but rarely do these novels represent the administrative work of university life.2 Other critics have narrowed their focus to study the campus novel according to protagonist, whether faculty or student or administrator. While this approach yields depth of critical inquiry, I have opted to study themes that are mostly applicable to both faculty and student narratives, hoping to capture the full range of Exemption across such work. Further, I have focused on those academic novels that are set on American campuses. This parameter allows for authors of any national background—accommodating, for instance, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957) and Pale Fire (1962)—but hews to an American setting because of the distinctive qualities of the American system. Some of these qualities are historic, such as the idealization of the residential campus, which prevails in the U.S. despite the majority of American collegians living offcampus during their studies. Others are institutional, such as the tendency to emphasize a liberal arts core and to foster co-curricular engagement. Some are economic, such as U.S. universities’ compulsive dependency on athletics for recruitment and revenue. Still others are cultural, such as the unique mythology of the “big man on campus.” While not an

1 Elaine Showalter in Faculty Towers (2005) makes a related but not equivalent argument—that many academic novels are “set in academic time,” beholden to the rhythms of semesters, seasons, tenure clocks, the “Beckettish” cycles of days and careers (7, 9). This may be true. But Showalter acknowledges that this is truer of the novels that study professors than those that focus on students. And anyway, “academic time” still doesn’t result in a consistent plot pattern of crisis and climax and denouement by which one might identify the academic novel as a coherent genre. 2 Cow Country (2015) is a rare outlier in this regard. Published by the pseudonymous

Adrian Jones Pearson, the novel features a protagonist who must manage a community college’s high-stakes accreditation report and accordingly its assessment protocols. The novel makes great fun of diagramming mission statements and learning objectives. One chart notes the imperative to “assess the effectiveness of the assessment” (Pearson 2015, 294)—which, in mimetic brilliance, the novel’s characters never bother with.

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exhaustive list, each of these features contributes to a thicket of ideologies regarding the meaning of higher learning in the U.S. And they make for a different milieu—both within the boundaries of campus, and throughout the broader social understanding of the academy—than one might find in higher education across the globe.3 I risk endorsing some American exceptionalism here, as the global history of higher learning is typified by flux and exchange across a range of cultural, curricular, and economic traditions; as the origins of liberal education are a mix of ancient Greek, Chinese, Indian, and Egyptian traditions; and as other markers of American higher learning such as college completion rates, do not stand up to those of our global peers. In many ways, the university may be better understood today as a global system than as a set of highly distinct national traditions. But the campus novel lags behind in recognizing this kind of flux.4 Kramer takes a fairly purist approach to defining the campus novel. His annotated bibliography comprises 648 campus novels published between 1828 and 2002, starting with John Lyons’s The College Novel in America (1962) which he supplemented with “eyeball examinations” of a range of book reviews and digests (Kramer 2004, vii). Kramer excludes anthologies of short stories—except short-story cycles, the collections that are linked by common character and thus presumably provide deeper explorations of campus themes; this results, for instance, in the exclusion of Lionel Trilling’s “Of This Time, of That Place” (1943).5 Memoirs are excluded in Kramer’s focus on fiction, though there’s no shortage of 3 Of course many other traditions in higher learning show similar features. The house system at Oxford University comes to mind, for instance, but it hardly represents the organization of most British universities. 4 Corina Selejan, on the other hand, argues for a comparative framework for reading the campus novel. Despite being associated foremost with Anglo-American social history and literary traditions, she argues in her study of Romanian, German, English, and American campus novels, “comparative perspectives keep yielding the most insight by being the least reductive, provided there is always a resistance to homogenizing tendencies at work” (Selejan 2019, 178). Selejan offers a compelling case for those interested in comparative frameworks. 5 In “Morals, Manners, and the Middlebrow” (2017), Adam Kaiserman discusses this

story as Trilling’s critique of commercialized fiction. Kaiserman argues that Trilling was trying to demonstrate how high culture might “resist its own institutionalization” (Kaiserman 2017, 321)—another site of tension between the institutionalization of creative writing in the Program Era and its implications for autonomous art, which I discuss below, even though Trilling’s 1943 generally predates the apex of that tension.

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such work adjacent to the genre. Kramer excludes young adult works on the presumption that their engagement with campus life would be too shallow. He excludes mysteries, thrillers, suspense novels, science fiction, and horror novels—presumably the plots being too focused on noncurricular intrigue. He excludes novels dealing exclusively in the “win-loss aspects of intercollegiate sports” (Kramer 2004, vii). He excludes those novels set in medical schools or military academies. He excludes the novels featuring a student or professor protagonist who is absent from campus and seen in roles unrelated to academic functions. He excludes works whose sole purpose is “the commercial exploitation of sexual themes” (Kramer 2004, vii). Kramer’s purist definition of the genre departs notably from one of Jeffrey Williams’s key arguments about the campus novel in “The Rise of the Academic Novel” (2012)—that it succeeds, or at least survives, in the literary marketplace because it has grafted itself onto other generic forms. Similar to the way that student-driven campus novels merged with the mainstream bildungsroman form, Williams argues, the faculty-driven campus novel “has grafted with the mid-life crisis novel, the marriage novel, and the professional-work novel to become a prime theater of middle-class experience” (2012, 562). This genre-grafting is a critical function of Williams’s readership argument, discussed in the introduction, as the genre’s perambulations into mid-life experience and middle-class concerns help it capture the professional-managerial class readership. Where Elaine Showalter sees in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) a kind of subordination of the academic novel to other thematic concerns, Williams sees the genre’s ascension: “academe is no longer a marginal place and academic fiction is no longer strange or quirky but common, effortlessly merging with mainstream culture,” he argues of this genre-grafting (2012, 573). By contrast, Williams’s understanding of the genre illuminates the insular purity of Kramer’s genre standards. Despite the differences in approach, however, see how Kramer’s data in Figs. 1.1 and A.1 track closely with Williams’s findings for both the rise of the faculty protagonist and for the increasing publication rates of the campus novel. Further, Kramer’s dataset occasionally features an omission or inclusion that raise doubts about its precision. For instance, I’ve found a few titles that he overlooked, such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s Mansard Builds a School (1959), and added them to the Directory. Indeed, Kramer acknowledges having identified some fifty more titles that seemed promising, but they

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proved too obscure to obtain and therefore do not appear in his bibliography—and consequently are absent from the Directory, as well (2004, viii). I’ve eliminated a few others that appear in his bibliography when they violate his own standards of genre purity. For instance, Kramer includes Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), in which he judges the campus passages vital to the overall plot, even when they themselves do not preoccupy the novels’ attention. These small edits reduce Kramer’s run of 648 titles between 1828 and 2002 to 647 titles for that period. I’m drawing out the metadiscussion of data collection here to emphasize the rhetorical function of data—never absolute, and hardly so in this case, but offering an occasion to introduce the genre as a body. Such qualifications are not only imperative for those studying data, but also for those studying literature in any capacity.6 Though the metadiscussion is tedious, it enriches the following information that can be visualized using Kramer’s bibliography as a dataset. While I have followed Kramer’s parameters to bring his annotated bibliography up to the present, I suspect I’ve fallen short of his example. Accordingly, the data used for analysis in the introduction and in this appendix work with Kramer’s corpus, despite its limitations, in order to avoid confounding his results with uneven methods of data collection. How does the genre fare over time? Fig. A.1 tracks Kramer’s data for the genre’s publication across time, stretching from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s lonesome Fanshawe to a run of six novels in 2002. The chart shows some regular production beginning in the early 1920s, with peaks in 1963, 1979, and 1998 and a stark cliff at the year 2000. But because of the relatively small sample size, which never exceeds 17 novels in a year, the line graph doesn’t offer enough data to draw a meaningful correspondence between the small crests and troughs of the y axis’s publication numbers and whatever other historical conditions might be unfolding along the x axis. There is no definitive spike to historicize, then, despite a temptation, for instance, to coordinate the 10 titles of 1947 with the 1944 G.I. Bill. And while the crash at the turn of the millennium may

6 For instance, Adena Rosmarin exhorts literary scholars to “explicitly [choose] our premises and [deduce] our texts. The argumentative energy of these explanations goes not into concealment but into reasoning, not into denials of the premise and the critic’s act but into justifying his chosen premise by the consistency and richness of the reasoning that follows” (Rosmarin 1985, 49).

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Campus Fiction Production, 1828-2002

18 16 14 12 10

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8 6 4 2

1828 1852 1878 1888 1894 1900 1904 1909 1915 1919 1923 1927 1931 1935 1939 1943 1947 1951 1955 1959 1963 1967 1971 1975 1979 1983 1987 1991 1995 1999

0

Fig. A.1

Campus Fiction Production, 1828–2002

be provocative, it may also simply be anomalous—perhaps followed by a recovery of sorts through the 2000s. Instead of dramatic historical breaks and breakthroughs, Fig. A.1 shows a steady, modest climb—uneven and punctuated, but a general rise in volume from the 1920s to about 2000. We might situate the genre’s expansion alongside the growth of college graduates over the twentieth century or the growth of postwar readership markets. But it’s the durability of the genre that is most remarkable in Fig. A.1. The genre’s eighty-year run is frankly an outlier in literary history. Franco Moretti, one of the pioneers of the distant reading method, finds in Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005) that genres tend to appear and disappear within windows spanning some 25 or 30 years. He charts 44 genres of the British novel from 1740 to 1900—village stories, silver-fork novels, imperial romances, and so forth—and finds not only that the genres share a roughly uniform lifespan. The genres also tend to arrive and disappear in clusters. “A rather regular changing of the guard takes place,” Moretti writes, “where half a dozen genres quickly leave the scene, as many move in, and then remain in place for twenty-five years or so. Instead of changing all the time and a little at a time, then, the system stands

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still for decades, and is then ‘punctuated’ by brief bursts of invention” (2005, 18). And as the British novel’s data demonstrate that this pattern is “external to the genres, and common to all,” Moretti reads the chart as signaling a sudden change in the audience—perhaps corresponding to human generations or tracking a rule of novelty in publication markets (2005, 21). Moretti’s finding of the law of cycles is affirmed in a related study led by Matthew Jockers. In Macroanalysis (2013), Jockers studies style as a defining characteristic of genre and finds that high-frequency terms and punctuation usage move together in the same pattern, indicating “thirty-year clusters of style. The generations are not of, course, perfect; nor would we expect them to be. But the presence of these roughly thirty-year clusters is undeniable” (83). How might we explain the campus novel’s longevity? Why does it beat the prognosis of a 25- or 30-year lifespan? Moretti acknowledges that a few genres don’t fit this generational paradigm. Science fiction and detective fiction, for instance, demonstrate long lifespans that would seem to require “a different approach” (Moretti 2005, 31). Those genres, for instance, produce sub-cycles that may follow the same generational patterns—the “ratiocinist” detectives of the late nineteenth century giving way to the hardboiled detectives of the 1920s and so forth. Perhaps we could expand on the work Kristina Quynn has provided in her study of the adjunctroman to identify further genre sub-cycles that might tally up to account for the genre’s longevity, but I don’t see enough evidence to support that explanation. Jeffrey Williams provides a twofold explanation for the faculty-driven campus novel’s longevity in “The Rise of the Academic Novel”: it grafts itself onto other genres, and through that evolutionary mutation it finds its way to the wider readership of the professional-managerial class. But Fig. A.1 hews to Kramer’s purist definition of the genre, so Williams’s argument about genre-grafting isn’t necessarily the only explanation. Here again I see also further supporting evidence for the argument I set forth in the introduction—that the peculiar authorship of the genre, often professionally trained creative writers or alumni of the settings they write about, relates to a peculiar driving need to explore the nature of higher learning institutions. How do the genre’s publication rates compare to overall publishing trends in the U.S.? Perhaps the genre’s upward trajectory simply maps tidily over the rate of publication of all fiction? Fig. A.2 shows the genre’s publication data in relief. Here the lighter points capture Kramer’s data for the genre, while bold bullets capture all the U.S. fiction from

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1828–2002 as recorded by the Library of Congress. Because of the vast difference in scale—the genre maxing out at 17 new titles in 1998 and all fiction maxing out at 9,020 in 2001—the two lines are set to relative terms: all of the U.S.’s fiction from the Library of Congress set to a maximum of 10,000 on the primary vertical axis on the left, and the genre set to a maximum of 100 on the secondary vertical axis on the right. Of course no one would rightly expect the genre’s publication rates to match those of U.S. fiction writ large. What we see in Fig. A.2 is that the genre holds a fairly steady share of the publication rates, somewhere in the ballpark of 2% of the overall fiction data from 1900 through the mid-century. And then the data show a last heave in 1963 before the genre’s share plummets steadily downward, ending in 2002 with 0.07% of the U.S.’s fiction. The graph’s vertical axes could be massaged to make that disparity look more or less dramatic, but the percentages of the production rates are absolute. In short, the genre held a pretty steady pace in proportion to overall publishing trends until the middle 1960s, when fiction publication begins to skyrocket in the U.S.7 It’s a surprising view of the 7 That precipitous leap in publishing, while not the focus of this project, is a huge question for literary historians to tackle. The Library of Congress’s count for fiction in 1963 is 945 new titles. By 1970 it’s 3,117 titles. Then in 1994 it’s 8,303 titles. The first burst is the more stunning, setting up the momentum for the second in a tight window of growth. These figures for fiction correspond to broader trends in book publishing. Albert N. Greco, in “Mergers and Acquisitions in the U.S. Book Industry, 1963–89” (1995) notes a massive increase in the value of book shipments during this same period. Between 1963 and 1989, the total number of publication houses increases from 993 to 2,298 with the most explosive growth taking place between 1963 and 1977, and the value of their publication output from 1963 to 1989 rises from 873%, relative to a mere 300% inflation rate over the same years (Greco 1995, 230). The profitability of the publication industry “caught the attention of many of Wall Street’s sharpest financiers,” and the relative prestige of investing in “ideas” was an added bonus (Greco 1995, 230). Similarly, Jean Peters’s data on overall book publication shows that from 1963 to 1989, the industry’s total output climbed from 25,784 to 53,483 (1992, 18). But there are confounding factors to all of these data. Peters discusses how the boom in publishers and titles in the mid-1970s outstripped cataloging capacity at the Library of Congress, and observes that the Library of Congress doesn’t catalog “most” massmarket paperbacks and instead focuses on so-called literary fiction (1992, 15). Moreover, the first spike in Library of Congress’s fiction data corresponds to the implementation of the first Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (A.A.C.R.) in 1967, which introduced more exhaustive cataloging than before and may have revised the “subject headings” we used to pull Fig. A.2’s data out of the Library of Congress. But that only applies if the A.A.C.R. brought in new titles that would have been “uncatalogued” under previous arrangements. And anyway, the A.A.C.R. takes effect four years after the beginning of the first burst; the

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Fig. A.2 2002

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Campus Fiction vs. Library of Congress Fiction Production, 1828–

genre, indicating that it generally fails to rise with the publishing tide at precisely the time that the genre might become a privileged vehicle of narrative during the Program Era and when university crises—Free Speech and the Black campus movement and Vietnam-era upheaval, affirmative action and the culture wars, so forth—put the academy in the mainstream of public discourse. It is not so much that the genre comes undone, however, as Fig. A.1’s small, steady data remain unquestioned. It’s that the genre simply doesn’t keep pace with the overall industry, marooned, so to speak, from the industry’s momentous burst. Here again we see the outlines of an isolated—but consistent—genre. A durable base of authorship is suggested in Fig. A.2, I would argue, but one that resists growth even while total publications take off. In the introduction chapter, Fig. 1.1 tracks an inclining prevalence of faculty protagonists in the genre. Figure A.3 here shows the total range of the genre’s protagonists in a static view. Kramer’s data indicate that from 1828 to 2002, the genre held a slight predisposition toward student protagonists, with 47% of the novels featuring students, 39% featuring faculty, and the remainder a mix of staff, multi-protagonist fiction, and two don’t coincide exactly. What else, in addition to investors’ interests in the publishing industry, drives the runaway publication rates in fiction?

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Campus Fiction Protagonists, 1828-2002

350 300 250 200

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Fig. A.3

fac, staff

fac, staff, fac, student student

other

staff

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student

Campus Fiction Protagonists, 1828–2002

“other” protagonists. “Other,” a troublesome enough term, in this case refers to a slew of oddities such as the speakeasy dancer in Edward Hope’s She Loves Me Not (1933) or the boy raised as a goat in John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966). The relative prevalence of faculty roles demonstrated by Fig. A.3, signals an inordinate interest in the experiences of one of the campus’s smallest populations—though in Williams’s argument a population with which the professional-managerial audience might identify. And what’s more remarkable still is the way in which the share of faculty protagonists rises in the latter twentieth century, as the introduction discusses further. Kramer’s bibliography offers consistent data on the various settings of the genre as well. For instance, Harvard University, the ur-campus of the American imagination, accounts for 11% of the genre’s settings through 2002. This figure includes texts in which Harvard is not the sole campus, such as John L’Heureux’s Having Everything (1999) which also takes place in part at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. But even standing on its own Harvard accounts for 8% of the genre’s settings. For comparison, Yale, the second-most common setting, sites totally or partially 4% of the genre’s novels, Princeton trails with 2.5% of total or partial campus settings, and from there the numbers become very sparse. Historic and prestigious, these universities are among the bywords for

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higher education in the U.S., and what surprises me in the setting data is that Harvard and the other Ivy League schools don’t account for more of the genre’s settings. Indeed, by Kramer’s measures, the genre’s novels are likelier to be set in indistinct regions: 15% sited totally in what he describes generically as “the northeast,” 14% in the mid-west, 6% in the west, and 5% in the south. Belying the standard bearers, then, the genre’s distribution of settings indicates something of the unruly nature of the American university—geographically disparate and hewing to a disorderly breadth of mission statements. However, the northeast asserts an even greater stranglehold on the genre when all of Kramer’s titles are collated into the U.S. Census’s regional schema: Northeast, South, Mid-west, and West. Figure A.4 renders the results of relabeling all the settings into the Census classifications, grouping together existing and generic institutions by region—the Vassar College of Gertrude Carrick’s Consider the Daisies (1941), the generic northeastern setting of John O’Hara’s Elizabeth Appleton (1963), and so forth. Viewed this way, the Northeast region claims a whopping 44% of the genre. This reflects the historic reality of the origins of higher Campus Fiction Settings by U.S. Census Region, 1828-2002 300

250

200

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Fig. A.4

Campus Fiction Settings by U.S. Census Region, 1828–2002

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education in the U.S., as well as the density of universities and colleges in the northeast today, but also demonstrates a mythic tie between the educated elites and northeasterly manners and customs. Figure A.4 graphs historical trajectories of power and prestige that channel through the American university, and especially through its representation in the genre. Corresponding to chapter three’s study of sexuality and gender on campus, Fig. A.5 shows how Kramer traces the authors’ sex through 2002: 69% by men, 29% by women, 1% by multiple authors of both sexes, and another 1% untraceable due to pseudonyms and otherwise unavailable biographical details. The binaries provide a dubious means of framing gender identity, but we can only expect so much of Kramer’s information, given his period of study. A vast chasm lies between men’s and women’s production in the genre, perhaps tied in part to the sexed standards of university enrollment that predominated until the middle of the twentieth century. Campus Fiction Authors' Sex, 1828-2002 500 450 400 350 300 250

Total

200 150 100 50 0 F

Fig. A.5

F, M

M

unknown

Campus Fiction Authors’ Sex, 1828–2002 (Synchronic)

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Fig. A.6 shows how the authors’ sex data develop over time. A 100% stacked bar chart using ten-year groupings through 2002, this one eliminates texts by multiple and unknown authors to clarify how the sexes’ share of the genre moves diachronically. Here women’s novels reach their highest share of 50% between 1908 and 1917, a period with a modest sample size of 14 total texts. Again the vastness of men’s authorship is on display, allowing little gains through the entirety of the twentieth century. One qualitative angle to these data is that they support a reading of the genre as a body of deep and congenital resentments, as discussed further in the fourth chapter. Here the genre’s authorship reflects the historically gendered territory of the university itself. And incursions of women into both—beginning at roughly the middle of the twentieth century, women students enrolling in higher numbers, women earning more faculty roles, feminist theory occupying more discursive territory in the humanities, women authors claiming more production of the genre— trigger the genre’s often reactionary politics. These resentments are not always enacted as viciously as Gnossos Pappadopoulis’s sexual assaults, nor Campus Fiction Authors’ Sex, 1828-2002 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% Count of M 40%

Count of F

30% 20% 10% 0%

Fig. A.6

Campus Fiction Authors’ Sex, 1828–2002 (Diachronic)

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are they always focused solely on women. In sum, suggestions of patriarchal territorialization plague even the quantitative outlines of the genre’s production These data indicate nothing about the genre’s content, at least not directly. I tried initially to extract a set of keywords from Kramer’s annotations in order to assess the content of the various works—this one a novel of pranks, that one a bildungsroman, here a novel of sexual escapades, there a study of intellectual disillusionment, and so forth. But the genre is simply too multitudinous to submit to that kind of accounting. How much sex does a novel have to warrant that label? Is the novel about sex, then, or is it about a love affair? Who can say what a book is “about,” anyway? Or a genre, for that matter? At the root of it, there’s a methodological shortcoming, too. Whatever the quantitative data from Kramer’s bibliography yield for us, the method is still largely subjective. Kramer’s synopses will reflect only what he was looking for. And likewise the data collection in Figs. 1.1 and A.1–A.6 is limited by my own view: the charts only show what I ask them to, only answer the questions I am capable of imagining. What would a more empirical method suggest about the contents of the genre itself? What is the stuff of the genre? These questions are the charge of machine reading, which can provide some measure of the genre’s contents. Digital humanities thinkers may call the approach of Figs. 1.1 and A.1–A.6 “supervised” in that I have worked closely with the Directory to answer specific questions about publication rates over time and types of protagonists and the sex of authors. Machine reading by contrast is “unsupervised” in that the human assignment of values, labels, and the like is set aside for a computational study of what this set of texts may have in common—a more impartial methodology and with greater potential for capturing the contents of the genre. The final data visualization is produced by topic modeling, a natural language processing tool. This method identifies the probability of a group of words’ occurrence across a corpus of texts, and can also identify co-occurrence, the probability of words’ proximity to each other. To generate this topic modeling, my colleague Tony Davis and our research assistant Zach Ward downloaded all of the Directory’s titles that are available in the HathiTrust’s digital library, and using MALLET software transformed the tokenized files into bag-of-words documents—the technical term for disarranged text files that allow for mass accounting of word

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frequency within and across texts. Over 1,000 successive iterations, the software trained itself to recognize the predominant patterns of different datasets, and it produced 170 topic ranges with 20 terms apiece indicating the genre’s likeliest groupings of keywords. Again the data collection and data analysis require contextualization, their results being as rhetorical as any other object of study. Three issues may skew the topic modeling data slightly. First, Hathi holds 406 of the 647 titles we’ve been charting in Figs. 1.1 and A.1–A.6. That’s a strong enough sample to afford us significant results, but perhaps Hathi’s collection—framed by copyright law, estate rights, and the raw facts of extant and nonextant texts that also stymied Kramer’s searching—may shade the outcomes of our study. For instance, Hathi holds a slightly higher share of faculty protagonist texts than the data indicated in Fig. 1.1, yielding 211 faculty protagonist texts and 195 student protagonist texts. Second, Hathi’s archived texts often include copyright information, prefaces, and other paratextual words that may sully the data, though the successive iterations of topic modeling should sideline their influence. Third, Hathi’s archives consist of optical character recognition (O.C.R.) scanned texts, and O.C.R. will very slightly contaminate data results with misrecognized vocabulary and terms that hyphenate at the end of a line. Fig. A.7 shows the thirteen most probable topic groupings for the genre in our team’s approach. The “topic” column bears a randomly assigned number as a title, and I’ve left those numbers randomized rather than relabeling them first through thirteenth in ordinal rank, largely as a reminder of the rhetorical nature of this information. The “weight” column indicates the predictability with which these terms would appear on a random passage from the genre, with higher weights indicating greater probability; we deal with the top thirteen because they have the weights above 1.00. And the “tokens” column supplies the 20 terms of each topic—the groups of words that are most probable to appear together The topics in Fig. A.7 show a fair deal of consistency. The topics indicate the genre’s preoccupation with matters of time and retrospection. Seven of the topics include “time,” and another seven include “back,” for instance. Topic 102, the most probable grouping of keywords, signals a kind of wistful nostalgia in pairing “back” and “time” as a likely co-occurrence—as well as a yearning sensibility, with “found” and “find” occupying the top line. Seven of these topics include the word “time,” with “year” or “years” appearing in three topics and “minutes”

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appearing in another. “Home” performs a supporting role, appearing as the driving, central force of Topic 78’s physical objects and Topic 40’s worldly stressors. A surprisingly wistful tone, then, dominates the genre’s highest probability topics. There might be some over-reading here: perhaps “back” is simply a casual, throwaway adverb that only takes on “nostalgic” signification in the alien, paratextual context of these topics. But the topics exercise is designed to uncover just this kind of latent meaning by gathering terms in ways that conventional reading cannot capture. The findings of these topics may be more significant in another view, however, given the transformations and dislocations experienced by many traditional students during their college years and by the prevalence of the bildungsroman across the genre’s student-centered narratives. But given the over-representation of faculty-centered narratives in the HathiTrust corpus, it’s remarkable that nostalgic tones would hold such sway. The topic modeling suggests not only a stable throughline for the genre across time, but also identifies a particularly conservative, retrospective predilection for the genre. Further throughlines appear in the topics’ conservatism. Topic 29, the third ranked set of terms, points to the genre’s high premium on commercial values: the term “future” indicates something more than a measure of time when grouped together with “business” and “position”—a cluster of financialization, we might anachronistically call it in the neoliberal era, or at any rate a signal of market pressures against the university. I also detect an undercurrent of the conventional romance in Topic 45’s “hand,” “eyes,” and “face,” and domestic relations are clearly at the fore of Topic 125, with its “wife” and “marriage” that provide a third semiotics of time in being grouped together with “years.” These topics expose a new view to the genre’s conservative elements. In addition to the discovery of the genre’s nostalgic, commercial, and domestic impulses, Fig. A.7’s topics may be most instructive in the absences that they circumscribe. First, they demonstrate a total lack of terms connoting degeneracy or scandal. Part of this is the function of the terms being stripped of their context; one can imagine a plot in which Topic 78’s “coffee” is a turning point in a scandalous affair or some such—though across 406 texts such a singular usage shouldn’t drive our reception of the term. At any rate, no terms immediately state dissolution until Topic 71, the 38th ranked grouping which Fig. A.7 does not include. This cluster seems to have it all out in one impious fit: “yeah back guy shit started hey guys hell big fucking fuck head ass great gonna

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Topic 102 110 29 46 103 78 62 45 40 13 85 145 125

Fig. A.7

219

Weight Tokens 1.45931 thought asked room looked knew wanted back time sat told walked made felt left found began find talk night called 1.27111 man asked make thought put made time good give told young heard work day knew woman looked head turned call 1.23465 hope friend end chance life make business position future change expected suppose figure general question personal admit effort failed nature 1.21793 fact found find sort point case place mind made idea hand small present bad time view boy matter apparently set 1.21168 good time make thing girl boy people lot thought god night things wanted big talk pretty told back guess feel 1.20135 back put bed room table floor coffee morning door good home kitchen front cold drink red window cigarette end night 1.19124 time class back college year day hall minutes side coming crowd room school half end line make story left caught 1.16867 looked hand turned door head stood eyes sat face hands back chair felt voice held leaned shook arm gave desk 1.16621 thought things back made long mind day thing cold home make time water left set wind hard bed hurt sleep 1.14841 time thing good things people kind moment point thought make long sense feel simply put back voice mind matter fact 1.09757 light long green sun feet boy air found dark sky began ground past snow lay knew fire drove yellow watched 1.08647 years man called white day high asked read street days son hundred big number money working twenty state gave war 1.07511 years words understand truth making longer wrong act wife death past experience face imagine simple living marriage meaning real speak

Topic Modeling of Genre, 1828–2002

hit jesus real smile beer.” Conveniently, Topic 71 pairs the only explicitly sexual terms of all the topics with reference to controlled substances that is rare in the topics: Topic 147, the 53rd ranked group, includes “redwine” and the term “smoke” that perhaps is dubious by association. Second, Fig. A.7’s topics confirm a lack, or perhaps a decentering, of scholarly life from the core of the genre. Topic 62, the 8th ranked grouping, stands alone here in its concerns for schooling, anchored around “class” and “school” and still more variations on temporality with “time,” “year,” and “minutes” coinciding. But even this bastion of schoolwork is clouded by an alternate reading: that Topic 62 regards athletics. Especially with the terms “minutes,” “crowd,” “half,” and “line,” Topic 62 imparts a timbre of sports, particularly American football. And it offers yet another variation on time, though in this case less reflective and retrospective in tone and more action-oriented than what we see in Topic 29. Read this way, Topic 62’s scholarly terms “class,”

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“college,” and “school” are subordinated to the playing field. Topic 62 illuminates the genre’s indifference to scholarship—either by reading its insistence on classroom terms against the other topics in a tracing of negative space, or by reading within the topic how a rare set of schoolwork terms still cannot outmatch the allure of sport. Put another way, Fig. A.7 reveals the extent to which the genre concerns itself with anything and everything but the stuff of the classroom. In sum, Fig. A.7 indicates a kind of homogeneity or stability across the genre—no radical, abrupt breaks from one topic to the next, instead positing a fairly smooth investment in retrospection and the measures of time. And perhaps this is no surprise, if we consider for instance the surprise cult status of John Williams’s Stoner (1965), which has been revitalized with a New York Review of Books republication in 2006, sparking a range of praise in popular criticism, prominent placement on the shelves of independent bookstores, and currency in book club reading lists. Stoner’s quiet, reflective protagonist may demonstrate an appeal of the genre that departs radically from the obtrusive and toxic protagonist of Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me (1966). But resorting to discrete textual analysis rather sidesteps the point. The payoff of this topic modeling exercise is learning the mundane, perhaps even conservative tendencies of the genre that appear here. This nostalgic conservatism is not equivalent to but perhaps supports the more reactionary anti-intellectualism that occupies the genre in its bildungsroman narratives and its disgust at critical theory. All this quantification—while affording the kind of detached and impartial overview that such a wide body of works deserves, these digital humanities methods are themselves a token of the quantification of the university itself, indeed, a demonstration of the university’s adoption of neoliberal tenets. Stefan Collini captures this movement in Speaking of Universities (2017), describing the “currently favored, but actually doomed” impulse to rank universities and generally to transform “judgments of quality into calculable measurements of quality” (57). “Surely,” he laments, “anything that matters can, in the end, be measured—or as the bullish slogan has it, ‘what counts can be counted’” (Collini 2017, 57). And this is not only a measure of external pressures against the university to justify itself. Rather, the university also undermines its own intellectual life, slowly replacing the qualifiable with the quantifiable in a range of assessment procedures which, at their worst, prioritize the raw accretion of data over the creation of knowledge.

Works Cited

Collini, Stefan. 2017. Speaking of Universities. London and New York: Verso. Greco, Albert N. 1995. “Mergers and Acquisitions in the U.S. Book Industry, 1960–89.” International Book Publishing: An Encyclopedia. Edited by Philip G. Altbach and Edith S. Hoshino, 229–42. New York and London: Garland Publishing. Jockers, Matthew L. 2013. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Kaiserman, Adam. 2017. “Morals, Manners, and the Middlebrow: Lionel Trilling and the Television Adaptation of ‘Of This Time, of That Place.’” Genre 50 (3) (December): 319–42. Kramer, John E. 2004. The American College Novel: An Annotated Bibliography, 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Moretti, Franco. 2005. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. London: Verso. Pearson, Adrian Jones. 2015. Cow Country. Cow Eye Press. Peters, Jean. 1992. “Book Industry Statistics from the R.R. Bowker Company.” Publishing Research Quarterly (Fall): 12–23. Rosmarin, Adena. 1985. The Power of Genre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Selejan, Corina. 2019. “‘How to Save Difference’: Contemporary Romanian, German, English, and American Academic Novels.” The Campus Novel: Regional or Global? Edited by Dieter Fuchs and Wojciech Klepuszewki, Brill Rodopi, 166–79. Leiden: Brill. Showalter, Elaine. 2005. Faculty Towers: the Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Williams, Jeffrey. 2012 “The Rise of the Academic Novel.” American Literary History 24 (3( (Fall): 561–89. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 W. Beal, Campus Fictions, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1

221

Index

A Abolition University, 16, 135 Academic freedom, 8, 15, 19, 20, 25, 39, 43, 62, 69, 90, 91, 93, 104–130, 135. See also Civility; Culture wars; Free speech; Hong Kong; Political correctness Adjuncts, 21, 39, 171, 176–181, 184, 188 adjunctification, 5, 26, 39, 40, 109, 130, 162, 180, 183, 188 adjunctroman, 15, 177, 181, 185, 188, 209 Affirmative action, 20, 156–159, 211 Alternative Right, 69, 70, 103, 107, 109 American Association of University Professors (A.A.U.P.), 108, 174 Anti-intellectual, 45, 46, 48, 56, 62, 64, 65, 68, 70, 189, 199 Anti-intellectualism, 5, 8, 19, 33, 40, 44–47, 49, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 65, 66, 68–70, 86, 90, 96,

120, 121, 149, 167, 200, 220. See also Theory Assessment, 109, 163, 173, 204, 220 Athleticism, 31 Athletics, 6, 26, 39, 62, 63, 79, 144, 204, 219. See also Football Authoritarian, 67, 69, 129 Authoritarianism, 70. See also Totalitarianism B Badiou, Alain, 36 Big man on campus/big men on campus, 4, 15, 19, 26, 31–35, 37, 77–79, 204 Bildungsroman, 49, 79, 143, 145, 179, 204, 206, 216, 218, 220 Biondi, Martha, 142, 143, 157 Black Campus Movement, 53 Black campus movement, 157 Black student union (B.S.U.), 137, 140, 142, 143 Bloch, Ernst, 37, 38, 168, 191. See also Utopia

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 W. Beal, Campus Fictions, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1

223

224

INDEX

Bloom, Allan, 52, 140 Buckley, William F., 69 C Campus sexual, 75, 86 Cather, Willa, 174 Cebula, Geoff, 39, 104 Césaire, Aimé, 61 Chabon, Michael, 19, 26, 34, 35 Chicago economics department, 125 Chicago School, 119, 124, 126 Chicago School of economics, 119, 123. See also Neoliberalism Choi, Susan, 156 Churchill, John, 2, 27 Civility, 104, 105, 114. See also Academic freedom; Free speech; Political correctness Coetzee, J.M., 147, 148 Collini, Stefan, 9, 26, 185, 189, 190, 220 Columbia University, 14, 74, 140. See also Great Books Core curriculum, 64, 137, 138, 140 Coronavirus, 38, 166. See also SARS-Cov-2 Coronavirus pandemic, 38 Corporatization, 2, 5, 26, 39, 40 Creative writing, 13, 14, 34, 47, 53, 57, 78, 87, 153, 154, 188 Creative writing program, 10, 11, 53. See also Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.); McGurl, Mark Crisis management, 9 Critical theory, 48, 50, 51, 55, 87, 89, 90, 220 Critical university studies, 3, 5, 16, 40, 142, 200, 201 Culture wars, 4, 5, 8, 11, 17, 20, 40, 43, 45–47, 50, 53, 56, 57, 60, 69, 86, 105, 107, 109, 124, 126, 133–137, 139, 144–147,

152–159, 211. See also Free speech; Great Books; Political correctness Curriculum, 37, 40, 69, 127, 140, 145, 203 D Dear Colleague Letter, 74, 76 DeLillo, Don, 19, 26–30, 33, 155 De Man, Paul, 46, 50–52, 54, 61 Department of Education, 74, 84, 109 Derrida, Jacques, 46, 50, 53, 67, 68 Digital humanities, 216, 220 Dilemma, 180 Directory, 14, 53, 99, 146, 206, 207, 216 Directory of the American campus novel, 11, 53, 203 E Exemption, 1–3, 5, 7, 8, 16–19, 24–30, 33–38, 40, 65, 76, 78, 130, 155, 157, 163, 168, 177, 184, 185, 191, 193, 204 F Fariña, Richard, 1–4, 17, 24, 26, 32, 163 Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966, 4), 1, 24, 78, 198, 220 Film, 12, 17, 32, 33, 35, 46, 77, 93, 152, 188, 194 Findeisen, Christopher, 11, 14, 15, 30, 31, 38, 79, 80, 198 Fitzgerald, F. Scott., 15, 21, 46, 163–165, 167, 168, 170, 181, 188 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, 19, 45, 66, 67, 69, 196, 197, 200

INDEX

225

Football, 19, 26–31, 73, 76, 104, 219. See also Athletics Formalized American creative writing, 12 Freedom of speech, 43, 106, 108, 111, 130 Free speech, 8, 20, 90, 103, 105–108, 130, 134–136, 143, 146, 211. See also Academic freedom; Civility; Culture wars; Free Speech Movement; Hong Kong; Political correctness Free Speech Movement, 103, 108

Human development. Cf. liberal arts, 25 Hunting Ground, The, 73–77, 85

G Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 60, 61, 136 G.I. Bill, 7, 207 Gnossos Pappadopoulis, 1, 17, 24, 25, 37, 215 Governor DeSantis, 43, 65 Green, Joseph E., 20, 137, 139–144

K Kaiserman, Adam, 205 Kendi, Ibram X., 53, 142, 157 Kramer, John E., 11, 12, 14, 156, 203, 205–207, 209, 211–214, 216, 217 Kudera, Alex, 21, 176–180, 182, 187, 188

H Hannah-Jones, Nikole, 104, 107–109, 124 Harry Potter, 203 Hartman, Andrew, 53, 134–136, 140, 141, 146, 152, 153 Harvard University, 14, 104, 158, 212 Harvey, David, 195 Hegeman, Susan, 25, 106, 108, 109, 114 Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 136, 142, 145, 159 Hofstadter, Richard, 6, 19, 44, 45, 47, 48, 56, 59, 66 Hong Kong, 32, 127–129. See also Academic freedom; Curricular studies Hong Konger academics, 20

I Intellectual dark web, 19, 148 J Jameson, Fredric, 36, 52, 168 Jockers, Matthew L., 209 Jonas, Julia May, 14, 20, 78, 86, 93–97

L Liberal arts. Cf. “human development”, 2, 6, 8, 31, 37, 137, 157, 204 Lyons, John, 162, 166, 167, 185, 205 M Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.), 11, 53, 153–155. See also Creative writing program; McGurl, Mark McCarthyism, 7, 109 McCarthyist, 6, 108, 116 McCarthy, Joe, 111 McCarthy, Mary, 20, 44, 45, 110–115, 117. See also Academic freedom

226

INDEX

McGurl, Mark, 10, 13–15, 18, 53–55, 154, 155, 188. See also Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) McMahon, Walter, 2, 195 M.F.A. writer, 16 Moretti, Franco, 208, 209 Murray, Charles, 104, 105, 107–109, 124 N Nabokovian, 94 Nabokov, Vladimir, 23–25 Pnin, 23, 24, 204 National Lampoon’s Animal House, 32 National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, 32 Neoliberal, 2, 6, 16, 39, 108–110, 119–121, 124, 130, 163, 176, 186, 187, 189, 190, 200, 218, 220 Neoliberalism, 3, 10, 189, 195. See also Chicago School of economics; Corporatization Newfield, Christopher, 18, 195, 196 Nietzschean, 32, 62 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 62 Novel of manners, 111, 115–117 Nussbaum, Martha, 74, 92, 93 P Pandemic, 40, 70, 166 Pearson, Adrian Jones, 204 Peterson, Jordan, 148 Pnin, Timofey, 23–25, 33, 37 Political correctness, 20, 48, 87, 103, 106, 134, 135, 137, 146, 148–152, 155, 156. See also Civility; Culture wars Porter, Lavelle, 33, 60, 61, 64, 138, 139, 144, 157 Pranks, 4, 78, 167, 216

Professionally trained creative writers, 15, 20, 53, 56, 57, 65, 100, 200, 209 Program Era, 10, 14, 15, 18, 54, 55, 80, 94, 154, 176, 198, 200, 205, 211 Prose, Francine, 13, 20, 56, 78, 86–92, 100, 176 Pynchon, Thomas, 2, 24, 25 Q Quynn, Kristina, 177, 178, 181, 209 R Race, 20, 28, 29, 33, 43, 50, 59, 77, 86, 112, 133–136, 144, 146, 150–154, 157–159, 194, 197. See also White supremacy Raced, 4, 19, 33, 38, 68, 78, 86, 134, 139, 149, 183 Racial, 8, 28, 56, 57, 85, 100, 104, 124, 133–136, 142–144, 147, 148, 150–153, 155, 158, 179 Racialized, 20, 61, 77, 85, 99 Racist, 3, 29, 57, 59, 60, 118, 134, 140, 144, 148, 156 Redfield, Marc, 6, 50–52. See also Theory Reed, Ishmael, 20, 57–62, 64, 65, 68, 99, 156, 157, 199, 200 Reichman, Henry, 105, 107, 108 Resentment, 8, 17, 47, 50, 54–59, 62–65, 68, 87, 89, 99, 100, 113, 134, 136, 145, 149, 156, 159, 164, 179, 182, 189, 215 Romanticism, 167, 168, 185 Rooks, Noliwe M., 157, 158 Rosmarin, Adena, 207 Rossen, Janice, 46 Roth, Philip, 20, 87, 137, 145–147, 149–155

INDEX

Russo, Richard, 18, 20, 47–49, 53, 55–58, 63–65, 68, 99 Rydsjö, Celia Aijmer, 162 S Safe spaces, 91, 109 Salaita, Steven, 104, 107–109, 124 SARS-Cov-2, 166. See also Coronavirus School novel, 203 Schumacher, Julie, 21, 169–178, 187, 188 Scott, Joan, 106, 107, 109, 111, 123, 129, 130 Selejan, Corina, 205 Sexual aggression, 75 Sexual assault, 3, 4, 17, 20, 32, 73–86, 88, 91, 93, 94, 97–100, 197–199, 215 Sexual harassment and assaults, 74 Sexual predation, 8, 20, 33, 78, 94, 97–99 Sexual violence, 3, 75, 77, 78, 85, 93, 98 Showalter, Elaine, 201, 204, 206 Smallwood, Christine, 21, 174, 180–184, 187 Smiley, Jane, 20, 62, 110, 117–123 Speech, 104–106, 118, 133, 152 Stephenson, Neal, 39 Storm, Christopher, 32 T Terkel, Studs, 187–189, 191 The Chair, 18, 89 The Chicago program, 126 The creative writer, 14, 15, 19, 47, 54, 56, 62 Theorists, 50, 51, 53, 154 Theory, 17, 20, 43, 46–68, 89, 90, 120, 149–152, 156, 167, 168,

227

184, 215. See also Anti-intellectualism Title I.X., 74, 76, 83, 99 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 74 Topic, 217–220 Topic modeling, 203, 216–220 Totalitarian, 36, 38 Totalitarianism, 36. See also Authoritarianism Trauma-informed pedagogy, 199 Trendel, Aristi, 91, 92 Trigger warnings, 91, 109, 198, 199 U United States Department of Education, 186 Utopia, 19, 26, 34–40, 168, 173, 191 Utopian, 3, 8, 19, 20, 26, 31, 35–38, 46, 70, 76–78, 100, 156, 168, 169, 178, 181, 185, 189, 193, 201 Utopianism, 35 V Veblen, Thorstein, 7, 186, 187, 189 W Weeks, Kathi, 166, 168, 173–175, 190, 191 Wegner, Phillip E., 10, 38 Weinstein, Bret, 148, 149, 155, 157 Western Civilization, 137, 140–142 Western Civilization curriculum, 138–140, 144, 145, 156. See also Culture wars; Curricular studies Whiteness, 26, 29, 33, 58–60, 86, 135, 151, 155 White supremacy, 69, 135, 138, 139, 144 Wilder, Craig Steven, 38, 135, 137, 139, 155, 183

228

INDEX

Williams, Jeffrey, 5, 10–14, 16, 19, 21, 32, 45, 48, 63, 176, 181, 193–196, 199, 200, 206, 209, 212, 220 Williams, John, 34, 162 Winston, Jameis, 76, 77, 85 Wolfe, Tom, 20, 78–86, 94, 198 Wonder Boys (film adaptation), 19, 26, 34, 35 Work, 4, 8, 9, 15, 19, 21, 24, 37, 45, 50, 55, 67, 77, 100, 137, 147,

161–181, 183–191, 201, 204–207, 209

Y Yam, Shui-Yin Sharon, 127, 129

Z Zaloom, Caitlin, 197