Thread by @zunguzungu

At the level of character and dialogue, The Chair is excellently done; at the level of plot, however, I have a lot of questions about how power is supposed to work at this university.

Everyone acts as if being chair of the department gives her a great deal of power--which allows everyone in the show to *blame* her for everything that goes wrong--but I honestly can't tell if the show thinks that being chair DOES give her any real power. If so, it is not shown.

The list she is given, in the first episode: what power does she have to force retirements? She is blamed for this list--and punished for it in the final episode--but the notion that a department chair can fire tenured faculty is... not supported by the text.

The show is, in many ways, about the trials and tribulations of middle management ("you got just enough responsibility to listen when people talk, but not so much you can't tell anybody to go fuck themselves.”)

Of course the show is sort of right about one thing: the Evil Dean--who should really be a provost or a vice chancellor or something--wants to fire every professor in the show. (note that every single professor character in this show battles with being forced out of their job)

Which is to say, it grasps an important dynamic in The Modern University, which is that the institution--qua corporatized, capitalized institution that has an endowment where its brain should be--hates tenured professors that it can't fire.

What it doesn't show--or can't clearly see? perhaps because it can't seem to decide whether this is a SLAC (tiny departments, no adjuncts/grad students) or an Ivy (large departments with massive NTT faculty)--is the kind of faculty Pembroke DOES like, as an institution

Is Yaz meant to be a *good* professor? Her class looked pretty bad to me, like a high school class; the students were having fun, but their engagement with the text looked incredibly superficial.

But I can't tell whether the show wants us to think she's more than just successful in "butts in seats" terms--which the dean should like!--and also think she's A GOOD TEACHER. Is she teaching these kids Melville?

She is extremely successful at drawing students to her class, but the Dean makes no effort to retain her; offscreen she is apparently a brilliant scholar (PMLA! Yales!), but onscreen she muses about Melville dying in obscurity, something everyone knows, as if she just learned it.

The show's big failure, in my opinion, is its portrayal of campus "cancel culture," whose awesome power is total, irrational, and drives the action; the only undergraduate who has a name is against it, of course, but the rest of them are a malevolent mob

It would be easy to come away from this show with the idea that the only real power in universities is:
1. the marketplace (the classes that students choose)
2. the mob (the power of organized student protest to ruin people)

The Dean bends to both of these powers. The Chair is powerless to influence either. The faculty live in fear of both.

Which is to say, this show offers no view onto What Ails the Modern University that doesn't, ultimately, find the problem to be students (who have power they misuse) and faculty (who suck because they are old and white)

Ji-Yoon gives a speech at the end about the students, and it's a good speech, as far as it goes, but it's like a prospectus for a different show (one that portrayed students as something other than beautiful threats)

I like the Joan character a lot--her desperation, her anger, and her intelligence are well-written and well-acted--but does the show think Chaucer should be taught? Her students hate her classes, and the case she intermittently makes for Chaucer is not convincing.

(Which gets to the biggest weakness of the show: the classroom. To portray what a good classroom looks like, how it works, it would have to center students in a way this show, structurally, does not. There is only one student character; does she have any classroom scenes?)

But how could a show that blames students for being social media SJWs (well-meaning in their politics but, frankly, complete idiots about what Dobson did) and also presumes their total lack of interest in Real Literature (requiring aggressive pandering) center student characters?

Which is to say, what the show never portrays--a successful scene of teaching--flows directly out of its failure to treat its students as adults.

But to go back to the question of whether the show thinks Chaucer should be taught--which is really the larger question of what the point of teaching literature is--it's interesting how unchanged the department's actual canon seems to be.

A petition to save ethnic studies is briefly mentioned--Ji-Yoon signs, but this plotline happens offscreen--yet it's striking how this department does not seem to teach anything but dead white people. Faculty diversity is a narrative flashpoint, not curricular diversity.

Ji-Yoon talks about Audre Lorde--in the most cliched, the-one-Lorde-quote-everyone-has-heard sort of way--but she's a Dickinson scholar, and at no point is the issue of UPDATING THE CURRICULUM part of the plot, and that means the department can never really solve its problems.

And that problem is that the show ultimately doesn't think students want to read Dead White Whales nor profs teaching other authors; neither imagines a department teaching classes on subjects that speak to the present, nor does it imagine students care about what Joan cares about

The missed opportunity here was to put curricular diversity at the center of the story. But imagine how different the story told in The Chair is from the story told here, where students mobilize to keep a popular professor and get steamrolled:
newyorker.com/news/annals-of…

And a story centered on *students* could show the power that classes like these rll-faculty.fas.harvard.edu/garciapena/cla… can have, for students who might not see themselves in Melville and Chaucer

(But perhaps I'm bitter, because I was a finalist for several jobs, teaching African literature, in English departments that eventually decided to hire *no one* to teach African literature; perhaps I'm sad, as someone that misses the classroom but does not miss the university)

In a very "why is no one wearing a mask?" sort of way, I also can't get past the show's haziness on portraying the hiring crisis; Ji-Yoon asks "will we even be here in 5 years?" but you'd think, from the show, that the problem is students who don't like their classes

(random note, on Duchovny's thesis: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…