The Chair and Academic Mobbing

Given that the six episodes of the Netflix limited series The Chair, starring the always-amazing (and Canadian-raised) Sandra Oh, were released in 2021, I’ve averaged an episode per calendar year.

I finally wrapped up the last episode yesterday, after a very long day occasioned by the administrative details required to plan a community gathering in honour of a late colleague, on top of teaching, on top of research, on top of applying to an MFA program and seeking funding.

Long day.

But it was also the kind of day where I’m reminded that I teach at a college where our class members and colleagues are amazing. World class.

It’s not a term we throw around at our small, modest-in-ambition-but-outsized-in-achievement community college. I spent the fall doing research at U of T, where “world class” is shouted from the rooftops. Extraordinary research is being done by U of T scholars, no question.

But there is terrific teaching and research taking place across Canada, even in very difficult circumstances of funding cuts, the general denigration of the humanities, steep drops in traditional-age student populations, and federal government immigration policies that whipsaw with public opinion.

This is not the best of times in academia.

But what was?

The halcyon period of the 1960s hiring boom, shadowed in the U.S. by the Vietnam War? Or perhaps an earlier era, like the pre-World War II idyll of Brideshead Revisted?

Or earlier, even, as in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night, when determined women stormed the academy?

Women couldn’t yet get degrees at Cambridge and Oxford, mind you, during their first years at Oxbridge, and punting on the Cam is less fun than it appears on television. The cream teas, however, are an education in themselves. (Discuss: cream before jam, or jam before cream?)

The Chair is set at a small, prestigious liberal arts college with an aging English Department that is not quite in step with contemporary student needs. The heroic titular Chair is well aware that she’s been scapegoated, not elevated to her role: “I feel like someone handed me a ticking time bomb because they wanted to make sure a woman was holding it when it explodes.”

The Chair is about a lot of things, but one of them is academic mobbing, which is academic bullying writ large: a single faculty member singled out for systemic mistreatment by colleagues, sometimes via coordinated attacks.

That’s what happens to Bill when his embarrassingly sophomoric misstep (a Hitler imitation, FFS) spirals into campus scandal because he can’t bring himself to apologize or make amends. He’s stuck in a defensive position, insisting on everything from parody to academic freedom to the loss of his wife as a valid excuse for his conduct.

Not surprisingly, the lack of an apology makes things worse.

My experience is that academia, more than other workplaces, is a bit allergic to apologies. One former supervisor told me, after I offered a mea culpa for something that she and I had jointly screwed up, that “apologizing makes you look weak.”

She may be right. It may be that in her circumstances, fifteen or twenty years before my own, when the world was at a different stage of academic feminist teaching and research, apologies were career-harming rather than career-enhancing rhetorical gestures.

But my own experience has been that apologies start the process of healing wounds. Because without at all intending to, we all cause harm, all the time. Taking accountability for that, and figuring out how (and sometimes if) it can be mitigated or atoned for, is both an ethical obligation and a burden.

The Chair‘s portrayal of academia was a hot topic of conversation, c. 2021. Here’s a detailed and accurate description by David Yamada:

“‘The Chair’ illustrates with exclamation marks topics such as academic freedom and tenure, diversity and identity (especially race, gender, and age), career arcs and ambitions, substance use, student-faculty relations, institutional governance, and academic administration. Neither professors nor senior administrators play heroic roles. They operate in, and contribute to, a self-absorbed bubble. They also curse a lot, tossing f-bombs with regularity.”

It’s much better than the more recent After the Hunt, which I dutifully sat through, taking copious notes. I won’t burden you with my observations, because in the end it’s a film about cyclical trauma, not really about academia: that’s just one site where the trauma is enacted.

But The Chair is more focused, as Yamada suggests above, on processes and policies. There are fun scenes, like the one with an aging male professor (Bill, again) who attempts to gently decline the sexual overtures of a comely student only to realize she was seeking professional satisfaction: she just wants him to read and, ideally, endorse her novel.

It’s “too real to be good,” as a former colleague remarked. And The Chair has thus been painful viewing for many of us.

One of the thoughts I’ve had lately is about reconciliation. Sometimes people get redress very belatedly, perhaps too late for it to even be of any use. Collectively, however, I think there’s a net benefit when academia acknowledges its harms.

Releases people from the NDAs they’ve signed, for instance.

Makes reparations to scholars whose careers were stymied by systemic academic mobbing.

There was some really interesting work (and some very intense backlash) a decade ago, when a research university’s president disappeared abruptly. “Masculinity contests” and racism in Canadian higher education had a brief but important moment of discussion. And I’m not citing the scholar who did crucial research and commentary on this, because she paid a significant price.

Similarly, I have a former colleague who deserved a great deal of redress. Like Bill, in The Chair, he was deeply committed to his students and to his institution, to systemic change and disability equity and setting limits on the exploitation of graduate students and contract faculty.

Universities need more people like that.

Some of his colleagues, of course, tried to wreck his career. It was the worst thing I’ve witnessed, aggravated by the fact that most of the bystanders seemed indifferent.

Now that I’ve finished my six-year-long odyssey of watching The Chair, I’m contemplating options for next steps.

As always, Sara Ahmed’s work on killjoys and complaint is the most helpful guide. I’m on the market, somewhat reluctantly, because I have the least seniority in my department as of this term, and I’m worried that a post-secondary sector review is unlikely to provide the infusion of funds that colleges and universities in Canada need to make up for lost millions–billions?–in international student fees.

But I’ve also been quietly re-arranging my life to prepare for something completely outside of academia. My preferences for career shifts are underwater archaeology and journalism, so it’s unfortunate that my attempt at scuba diving was a bust. Instead, I’ve worked on a business plan and pivot strategy.

Two book projects are percolating, and a third is in a second stage of revisions and is inching towards completion. At least two of these are easier to complete while away from higher ed.

I’m so grateful to all of the colleagues who have committed themselves to making academia a better place, but I’m also so tired of fighting the same battles for resources and credibility that we’ve undertaken for decades. Reading and writing and research matter so much that they present a political threat. In the United States, universities and colleges have been under attack. But I’m not seeing a way forward, right now.

And then I remember Kirsty Duncan, MP and federal cabinet minister, coming to Congress when she was Minister of Science. She was so engaged with the research that people were doing in the humanities and social sciences. She saw benefits for climate change science and activism in interdisciplinary alliances.

I wish that we were holding Congress this year so that we could honour her commitment to fostering research outside of the sciences, too. She made a difference.