American higher education is in crisis. What else is new?
Last year, allegations of scholarly malfeasance brought down the presidents of Stanford and Harvard. Now, public attention is focused on D.E.I. policies and the continuing fallout from the war in Gaza. Our colleges find themselves caught in (take your pick) the cross hairs of the right, the tentacles of the left, the vise grip of bureaucracy, the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Or all of the above.
This situation is urgent and alarming, for sure. It also carries the unmistakable aroma of déjà vu. Back in the early 1990s, when I was in graduate school, professors and pundits fought about political correctness and the literary canon against a backdrop of budget cuts and shifting demographics. In the 1960s, during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, campuses were rattled by student unrest. Even before that, the academy was menaced from the outside by rampant anti-intellectualism and from within by administrative bloat.
Every squawking buzzard in American public life — every quarrel about race, class, sex, foreign policy, pronoun usage — takes wing from or comes home to roost on campus. The crisis is permanent, structural, a feature of the conflicting expectations we impose on our schools.
There is a vast body of scholarship to explain why this is so. Academia is a serious place, and it takes itself seriously. But it is also, like Hollywood or Washington, profoundly ridiculous — the kind of symbolically overburdened, sociologically peculiar environment that can only really be understood through satire. Luckily, we have an entire literary subgenre, the campus novel, to fulfill that requirement.
Mary McCarthy drew on her experience teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 1940s to write “The Groves of Academe.”Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Since the end of World War II, when the G.I. Bill, the baby boom and Cold War-driven federal spending began to feed the furious expansion of higher education, more and more novelists have found employment in colleges and universities. Writers write what they know. What countless postwar American writers have known most intimately is an endless cycle of classes and meetings.
To compensate for this prevailing tedium, the campus novel has occasionally dabbled in Gothic melodrama (Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History,” most luridly), wild experimentalism (Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” most extravagantly) and topical indignation (Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain,” most Rothily).
As in the novel in general, a principal source of narrative intrigue has been adultery, which sometimes results in public scandal — Francine Prose’s “Blue Angel,” published in 2000, looks now like a canary in the coal mine of cancel culture — and sometimes in private anguish.
But the mood, what English professors might call the mode, is overwhelmingly comic. I would go so far as to claim that the modern university campus — in actuality one of the most systematically humorless habitats ever devised by human beings — is the only reliably funny place in contemporary literature.
The humor arises, as humor often does, from discrepancy. It’s been said that academic debates are so intense because the stakes are so low, but this isn’t quite right, at least insofar as fiction is concerned. The stakes in these stories are real enough: Reputations, marriages and careers are gambled and lost. What is striking — appalling, amusing, revealing — is the gap between those dowdy quotidian concerns and the lofty, abstract language in which they are discussed. To be a (fictional) intellectual is to confuse the scramble for sex and tenure with the crusade for truth, honor and human progress.
Or, as the literary scholar Michael Trask has put it, professors in campus novels contend with “two impulses that appear to run amok in every institution of higher learning: a single-minded quest for self-actualization and an equally quixotic pursuit of social revolution.” Nowhere have these entwined forces of narcissism and idealism run quite so farcically amok as at Jocelyn College, a progressive liberal-arts educational boutique in rural Pennsylvania. Image
“The Groves of Academe” is a relentless skewering of professorial vanity and liberal self-regard, and at the same time a defense of educational ideals and intellectual idealists.
Ostensibly “founded in the late 1930s by an experimental educator and lecturer, backed by a group of society-women in Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati,” Jocelyn is the invention of Mary McCarthy, who drew on her experiences teaching at Bard and Sarah Lawrence in the late ’40s. It’s the setting for “The Groves of Academe,” her 1952 novel about a literature instructor — the sublimely unctuous Henry Mulcahy — fighting to hold onto his job after being denied reappointment by the college president. Enlisting his credulous colleagues as allies in his dubious cause, Mulcahy throws the pastoral campus into turmoil. The plot careens through tense office-hour conclaves and late-night strategy sessions toward a climactic and chaotic symposium on the state of American poetry.
I would hesitate to call “Groves” the greatest of all campus novels; McCarthy herself might have reserved that status for “Pale Fire,” which she ranked among the finest of all modern novels, period. But it is surely among the most prescient, the most piercing, the most perpetually relevant. Even as it meticulously evokes the fashions, idioms and prejudices of its moment, the book achieves an almost platonic quintessence of the genre, while drawing a still reliable map of the real-world landscape that underlies it.
The moment, not incidentally, is haunted by the specter of another McCarthy — the junior senator from Wisconsin whose name has become synonymous with ideological persecution.
Since McCarthyism is frequently invoked, by the left and the right, as a damning precedent for whatever the other side is up to, it helps to be reminded of the specific climate of fear and suspicion that existed in the early 1950s. The dinner parties, tutorials and other routines of life at Jocelyn take place against a backdrop of loyalty oaths, firings and alarming extramural (and pointedly nonfictional) developments.
In the months since Mulcahy’s arrival at Jocelyn Dr. Fuchs had confessed; Mr. Hiss had been convicted; Mr. Greenglass and others (including a former Jocelyn physics student) had been tried for atomic spying; Senator McCarthy had appeared; at Jocelyn there had been a suicide among the former Students for Wallace, an attack from a Catholic pulpit, the withdrawal of a promised gift, a deepening of the budgetary crisis.
For Mulcahy, a James Joyce scholar and the only Ph.D. on the literature faculty, this dire atmosphere presents a perverse opportunity. He reckons that if he can convince the world, or at least a critical mass of his colleagues, that he has been dismissed for political reasons, a petty administrative issue will become a matter of principle.
Maynard Hoar, Jocelyn’s president and Mulcahy’s nemesis, is both a public defender of intellectual freedom and a cautious administrator, walking the well-trod moral tightrope of conventional liberalism in an illiberal time. He is vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy and cowardice. As Mulcahy sees it, “the dismissal of an outspoken teacher, at this turning point in the college’s affairs, might seem a leetle too opportune, especially if it could be shown that the teacher in question had engaged in political activities of the type now considered suspect.”
One problem is that Mulcahy, in spite of a history of dabbling in left-wing causes, was never a bona fide Communist. His recent outspokenness consists mainly of endless complaining about the policies and procedures of the college (including calling for “an investigation of the Buildings and Grounds Department” and pestering the school’s dietitian). His solution is to slander himself, to offer a false confession of party membership to the friends who rally to his side, and, for good measure, to exaggerate the gravity of his wife’s health problems.
The forging of a victim card is Mulcahy’s great inspiration, and McCarthy’s most inspired conceit. Mulcahy’s duplicity is a powerful comic engine. His presence has the effect of making everyone around him look ridiculous: impetuous, naïve, snobbish, scheming, cold.
And also, in the end, honorable. “The Groves of Academe” is a relentless skewering of professorial vanity and liberal self-regard, and at the same time a defense of educational ideals and intellectual idealists. Among Mulcahy’s dupes are Domna Rejnev, a 23-year-old Russian émigré who teaches Tolstoy to bewildered undergraduates, and John Bentkoop, a devout scholar of religion with an interest in Kierkegaard. They are comically serious in their support of Mulcahy, and eventually in their disillusionment with him, but their earnest commitment to truth gives the book a surprising moral gravity.
Which is another reason to revisit it now. American higher education is in crisis. It’s no laughing matter.
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