What makes it worse is that the chair publicly appoints her to deliver an annual honorary lecture, but higher-ups overrule her and instead invite X-Files actor David Duchovny, who has an MA in English from Yale. The rising star is an African American woman with scholarship in PMLA and full classes (one course: “Sex and the Novel”), now up for tenure and courted by the Ivies. (The dean rightly points out that if the department doesn’t have “butts in seats,” she can forget about much support.) Her first words to colleagues raise a real problem-English enrollments have plummeted-and the dean tells her the same thing and presses her to get rid of dinosaurs in the department who have high salaries and whose classes are nearly empty. Crises arise faster than she can handle them. The show follows the new head of the department, an Asian American woman of moral scruple and progressive belief, as she pilots the English department through student complaints, “dead wood” faculty who won’t retire, a fractious professor-boyfriend who’s also a famous writer, a delicate tenure case, and brand-conscious administrators. But for all the earnestness, the show can’t break free of the most commonplace identity politics, and the moral instruction of this slice-of-academic-life drama is all too predictable and tiresome. There is even an insufferably cheery young Title IX administrator in cut-off jeans who has no sympathy for the aged female Chaucerian who has come to complain about an office move. We have six episodes so far, a rich cast of characters, plausible confrontations, accurate citations of criticism (Harold Bloom, feminists on Melville’s wife-beating, CRT, etc.), and the nicely insular setting of a small liberal arts college. Give credit, then, to the Netflix series The Chair for astutely catching some of the wacky nuances and abiding tensions of professorial reality. The universe of the academic department is so eccentric, overanxious, and implosively familial that people who’ve never been there can’t easily imagine what something as common as a committee meeting is really like. Bauerlein last appeared in these pages with his article “The Few, the Proud, the Profs.” in the spring of 2021.
Mark Bauerlein is professor emeritus of English at Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 His latest books are The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults (Regnery, 2022) The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism, co-edited with Adam Bellow (Templeton, 2015) and The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking (Jeremy P.
The Chair, a limited streaming television series,, 2021, 1 Season.
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