The Chair

I recently watched The Chair, a Netflix original series about the first female Chair of an English department at a prestigious University. She is at the helm when a hurricane of change rips through campus, and a scandal, involving one of her colleagues, centers the storm directly over her department.

The show was interesting because it built characters and storylines around real life conflicts happening in American colleges and universities right now, which are in many ways emblematic of the tensions rising currently in our society. And it’s a comedy. So that’s cool. And I did laugh out loud a few times.

But I don’t really know if the show is any good. While I applaud its bravery to approach difficult and even urgent issues, I feel like the show ultimately just uses the conflict inherent in those issues as a backdrop to fabricate drama within their otherwise kind of mundane storylines and uninteresting characters. And I don’t think the show really delves deep enough into the issues to actually have anything meaningful to say about them.

But there’s one scene from the show that keeps kicking around on the floor of my brain like a bead that falls off a necklace at a Black Friday Sale. Now, the purpose of the scene is to show the great divide that exists between faculty and students as well as the faculty’s failure to engage the student’s perspective. And the scene accomplishes that purpose very well, and that purpose is insightful; however, the scene, like the show itself, is heavily slanted toward the students’ point of view, which I think is problematic for a host of reasons.

In the scene, Elliot, one of the older professors who has been teaching at struggling Pem”broke” University for 32 years, is lecturing about Moby Dick, and a student interrupts with a completely unrelated question that accuses Melville of abusing his wife. The tenured professor who has spent his entire career studying American literature, with a specialization in Melville, is stymied by the question. He is effortlessly outargued by the young student even as he is actively trying to shut him down.

In my mind, what is missing from this scene is a strong representation of the depth and texture of the professor’s perspective. Surely the professor with decades of experience at engaging intelligent and demanding work on American Literature and cultural theory would have something meaningful to say in such a situation. The student’s straight-forward feminist reading of the text (which isn’t actually a “reading” of the text at all but an indictment against the author) is well-articulated in the scene, but the wisdom and critical thinking nested within a more varied and holistic approach are strangely absent. So the lasting impression left by the scene is the terrifying certainty of an undergrad (for clarification on what I mean by “terrifying” in this context, I recommend reading The Coddling of the American Mind by Johnathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff).

It would have been an excellent opportunity for the professor to bring up the concept of the death of the author and discuss the implications, the purposes, the assumptions, and biases inherent within that way of thinking. And he could have introduced a postmodern reading of the text and discussed all the cultural powers and discourses at play at the time of the writing of Moby Dick and compare that with the interplay of powers and discourses happening today and how they impact our current interpretation of the work. And then he could talk about deconstruction and how the “meaning” of the text changes over time because the meaning of words and symbols and metaphors change over time because their “meaning” was never clear or universal in the first place. And then he could move into how the supposed meaning behind our current perspectives and interpretations is no more stable than they ever were. And he might even be able to get the student to identify the biases and assumptions within a feminist reading of the text in an effort to stress the importance of approaching the text with a diverse outlook of many different tools and ways of seeing. And how important it is to identify the inherent assumptions and biases within each one. That is a mark of wisdom and critical thinking. And that is part of the beauty of literature. Not certainty.

And there is also a follow-up scene later in the series where some of the students in that same class are up in front of the room (which is actually a pretty cool move by the writers), but the students, instead of using that time in front of the class to engage with the work, they lampoon it (or maybe harpoon it like the great whale itself and we all know how that ends for the harpooners in the book). They basically call Moby Dick and Herman Melville racist and mysoginistic. It makes you wonder what they learned from the class and the assignment. It makes you wonder how deeply they engaged with the work and how deeply they thought about all the possible meanings and how seriously they compared those outlooks on the world with their own. Lampooning something is easy, and it doesn’t challenge your certainty regarding your initial response to the work. Critiquing it is a completely different endeavor. Critiquing a creative work changes you in some way and changes your understanding of creativity, and it shifts the way you read and understand and extract meaning from the work itself. The work itself becomes new and different as you yourself grow and change.

College should be a place where we can safely have our assumptions and biases challenged and exposed, so that we can hopefully grow into the patient, humble, empathic, wise, and beautiful people that the world needs us to be.I’m not at all saying that college is the only way we can get there, but it is certainly an incredible opportunity to take significant steps toward wisdom and understanding. Colleges should be creating an environment that encourages that so students can work their way from a place of certainty to a place of wisdom and critical thinking.So that we can create a more beautiful world where we can share love, compassion, honesty, empathy, and understanding…instead of just sitting in our towers of certainty firing shots at other people hiding in their own towers.