“Our job is to offer them refuge. Why should they trust us? The world is burning.”
Thus spoke Sandra Oh in her lead role as Ji-Yoon Kim, the new chair of the English Department at a private, second tier ivy league institution in New England called “Pembroke.” “They” refers to the students who protested for the firing of a professor for pretending to salute Adolf Hitler in a lecture—one of the many issues on this campus.
Netflix’s new series, “The Chair,” is one of the first shows to fully grapple with the college campus free speech argument, and surprisingly, excelled in their depiction. It’s a riveting watch, and one of the Best New Series of 2021, says Forbes Magazine.
The plot is all too familiar to most private universities today. The budget only allows some classes to stay, and the rest are booted. And getting bodies in seats means reforming classes and syllabi.
But back to Sandra Oh: Why is the world burning? Because the college students think it is. Let me explain.
The show’s entire plot focuses on the department’s looming fear of enrollment numbers and budget cuts. Essentially, since it is a private university, the classes students don’t attend will be abolished. And unfortunately, that means American literature and the British Novel are the first to go—much to everyone’s delight. At Pembroke, students don’t want to learn about the best American literature, but the best progressive criticism of it.
“Is this ‘Sex in the Novel’?” a girl asked a professor. They were both standing in an almost empty American literature class.
“No,” he said. “This is Survey of American Letters from 18…” but the girl had already left.
Cut to a scene showing a full, standing room only lecture hall with a young African American professor, Yaz, going for her tenure. “If you’re on the waiting list, shoot me an email,” she says. You guessed it; this was “Sex in the Novel.” Later, we get a taste of how the class actually runs.
They’re discussing Moby Dick. In the middle of the lecture, a student raises his hand and says, “Are we going to discuss the fact that Melville was a wife beater?”
Yaz and an old, tenured professor are tag-teaming it in this class. The old professor replies, “It is true that some feminist scholars have posited that, but in the absence of definitive proof, I think it’s best we attend to the text itself. We refer to Melville the author, not Melville the human being.” The students murmur to each other. The student replies with the fact that the professor had just spoken of Melville’s personal life by addressing his letters to Hawthorne as a young writer.
Then Yaz adds, “We’ll cover the wife-beating in my section. That and some important contributions to Melville’s work by the women in his life.” The students nod approvingly.
In this classroom, not only do students have authority over dialogue, but they also have authority over curriculum. Instead of discussing literary merits, the students take on the role of challenging every text they come in contact with because its author is guilty of having not been woke enough in the 1800s.
In a later scene, the students are still discussing Moby Dick, but this time, through a shockingly different critical lens. “What does the whale represent?” Yaz says while walking through the aisles. The student’s responses:
“Calvinism?”
“Capitalism?”
“White men?”
“White supremacy.”
Yaz turns back and points to the last student. “ooh. Say more!”
There is something so disturbingly wrong with this scene. Great literary texts are deduced to white supremacy, and off-handed, uneducated 19-year-old opinions are being received as raw masterpieces of true expression. The students are creating the curriculum and destroying it, too.
Must every term paper, opinion, thought even be funneled through an ultra-sensitive feminist, racist, homophobic word-processor? At many college campuses now, everything must be redefined and weighed, not by its literary merit, but by its inclusionary rating. And in “The Chair,” the students are leading the charge. The charge to find the sexism, racism, and homophobia in books written since the beginning of civilization. What is the purpose? Social justice, vindication, and duty to society.
And after all of this, what’s left? A sky-high stack of redacted, unusable words that once meant a lot of things to a lot of people. Now, all we have is the future—and what we make of it. This is what students are being taught. And their engagement in this method is pivotal to its success.
There’s a place for feminist, sexist, and other critiques of literature, and in rejecting these critiques, we’d lose the free speech argument. But modern, higher education humanities departments are reaching the point of no return when these critiques become the only correct interpretation. Once Moby Dick is proclaimed harmful to the reader because of Melville’s character, we’ve lost the merits of Moby Dick. Like clockwork, Moby Dick will eventually be removed from syllabi. We saw the same thing happen with Huckleberry Finn.
College boards and college curriculum are raising up contemporary college kids in their own naïve feelings about the society they were born in: the world is indeed burning.
If a university does not instruct, what does it do? Facilitate uneducated criticism? Provide a refuge for seemingly nihilistic 19-year-olds? Is the way of education to affirm one’s already formed opinion or is it to challenge it? Up until recently, most educators would have argued the latter.
It seems the only challenging or critiquing of one’s opinion is kept behind the closed doors of the English department, where professors are fired for saying the wrong thing and failing to say the right thing.
R.I.P to the college student who once read books to learn and went to class to think and listen. Forget him. He was too much in the past. All he learned was stuffy texts written by men with racist or sexist intentions. The “learned” student today learns vindictive and contrarian thinking instead of charity and listening.
“The Chair” makes an excellent argument. A good professor does not teach, he facilitates. And a good student does not listen, he critiques, challenges … and protests.
“Nobody’s coming to class. They’re too busy marching,” said the tenured professors refusing to change, in one scene.
“Who gives a f*** about an oxford comma?” was the hit Vampire Weekend song that played over the last scene which panned over the “Pembroke” college campus. The consistency is amazing, and still … devastating.
The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the values and beliefs of Cogitare Magazine, nor of Grove City College.
