Whispering noise
This issue of "Whispering Noise" found two women in the whirlpool of american colleges and universities to talk about the recent Netflix series "English Department Chair" that everyone was watching.
What is the situation in American universities for free speech, left-wing movements, coalitions of female professors, and the disintegration? Where to go in the face of radical Gen-Z confusion? How to teach while taking a baby? How do you find your own legitimacy in that space in a room full of white men?
We invited two female scholars, Yuan Yuan, who graduated from Yale University's PhD in Philosophy and is now teaching at NYU-Shanghai, and Eileen, director of the Shemei Memorial Hall at Ren Shih-hsin University and currently teaching at Duke University, to give the most truthful answers in this episode.
This article is a transcript published by Whispering Podcast in cooperation with The Paper, compiled by Gong Siliang, a reporter of the www.thepaper.cn.
Poster of the Head of the English Department
Qian Juan: The TV series we are talking about today is called "The Chair", and the Chinese translation is "English Department Head". It has spawned numerous review articles on Netflix and is also very relevant to two guests working within the Academy. The play is about Dr. Kim Ji-yun, played by Sandra Ng, who became the head of the English department at the prestigious Pembroke University. As the first female department chair in the school's history and a minority, she has faced various challenges in the workplace and difficulties in her personal life as soon as she was appointed.
In addition to the protagonist Ji Yun, several of the main characters in the play include Bill, the widowed former head of the English department who has recently left office; a few old pedants who are very old and well paid, but not liked by students; Yaz, a talented black female professor, and Ji Yun's adopted daughter Ju-Hee, and Joan, a white female professor whom I like very much. The reason why we emphasize each person's gender and race in the introduction is because these two themes are factors that cannot be ignored throughout the TV series. I also have mixed feelings after watching this play, but I would like to ask the two professors who work in the academy first, what is the first reaction after watching the play?
Eileen: I tweeted a month ago that things that are too close to my industry can't be seen, because if you act well, it will make you numb, and if you don't act well, it will make your whole body numb, so I was originally more resistant to this show. Although I was originally interested in this kind of "leadership and staff" theme, the drama itself with "parental feelings" was very interested, because I had three children, and I was also a person who was sandwiched between the workplace and the family.
As soon as this play was launched, someone sent a push I agreed with, saying that Netflix saw that basically the people in the college were "people who are willing to publish opinions and articles for free all day long", so if you make a story about them, then the show will get free marketing, because people will continue to write articles about "English Department Chair". We can see how many articles this month are about the show. Even when I originally posted on Facebook that I was not ready to read it, a string of colleagues responded with various tirade comments. Even, on the eve of recording the program, after reading it late last night, I wrote a sentence on Facebook that I didn't like, and a vote of people immediately discussed, debated, and argued with me. My gut reaction was, "Oh my God, we're so stereotyped as if we guys really don't have anything to do." "It can be seen that the teachers of the Department of Humanities are such personalities. Therefore, there will be a lot of free public opinion when filming a theme like "English Department Chair". To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, "What people fear most is not to be talked about, but not to be talked about", a large group of literature professors suddenly have this feeling, saying "God, we are talked about, we are being talked about by people." In addition, although I think the acting skills of this play are really good, and the shaping of individual characters is also very successful, there are still many big problems in the whole play.
Qian Juan: My first feeling after watching it at that time was that this was a very well-made drama. The conversation of the university professors in it is very credible, and occasionally some book bags are dropped, which makes me feel as if the readings I didn't read in college have caught up, how to be a little incomprehensible. But this drama does not have the feeling of being addicted and having to watch it in one breath, because it is still a more realistic TV series. And although we have not been teachers, we have all been to college, and the school environment is not particularly far away, so looking back, we can still see a lot of very touching things, especially the depiction of women's intergenerational and interracial friendships in the workplace, which is still quite natural.
In addition, I think the writers of this TV series are very ambitious, and want to present the most intense contradictions in the entire contemporary American colleges and universities in such a short period of time, such as the decline in investment and interest in humanistic education and literary education, the criticism of whether the literature curriculum is too old and white, and the boundaries of free speech and academic freedom on campus. Therefore, the narrative rhythm of the whole film is very fast, and the secondary characters are very important, so sometimes I feel that some places are not explained, and I feel how to throw me into the deep water at once. Until the end of the last episode, I was still waiting for the next episode of Netflix to load, and I felt as if the play was not over. Of course, I'm sure the second season should already be in production, and as Eileen just said, the actor's performance is still very commendable.
Eileen: I feel like the show does have this shorthand feel, it doesn't fully lay out the story and the background, it just gives you a kind of déjà vu, a vague familiar joy. When I talked to Yuan Yuan before, I also talked about a point, the abbreviation of this drama is very American right, although it seems to be packaged as a very American leftist and very progressive, but the campus situation it presents is still more in line with the fantasies and myths of the rightists and mass media about elite universities.
So, watching this show off campus is wonderful, and that's something I can fully understand. But if you're on campus and you still find the show wonderful, I'm a little skeptical about how you see your own students and your own colleagues.
Yuan Yuan: Just like Eileen just said, our group is rarely paid attention to, everyone used to watch legal films, police films, and suddenly there was a drama about our group. In fact, I am not a drama chaser, I chase this drama because I think it is closer to my life, and I especially want to know how the screen will present the current college campus.
I agree that the show is very ambitious, but I think the problem is that it is too ambitious to really think clearly about the problems behind many phenomena. In addition, it is actually looking at college campuses from a right-wing perspective. So, I was very enthusiastic when I first started watching it, but I didn't want to watch the next season at the end, and I didn't want it to have another season. I think if you use such an ideology to describe a college campus, you would rather this show does not have a next season.
In fact, there are many points in this drama that I can empathize with, from the screenwriter to the protagonist, the proportion of women is very large. In particular, the screenwriters are all women, so I feel very much in their struggles with women's friendships and in their depictions of the struggle between motherhood and faculty as a university professor. But I think it's basically off the other points. To give a few more obvious examples, it portrays progressive students as if they were a group of very unreasonable people, and without providing any context, it comes up with a short video of Bill wearing a Nazi uniform and paying homage to the Nazi salute, and involuntarily demands the dismissal of a professor who has been given a tenured teaching position. This is very inconsistent with my view of the student movement I experienced during my years at Yale.
And the show, at the very beginning, is a more realistic presentation of Yaz's academic dilemmas as a black woman, including colleagues judging her clothing, teaching with her but treating her as a "teaching assistant," and the unfair treatment she encountered when judging tenure. But suddenly Yale gave her an offer of employment, which immediately washed away the real struggle of black women in the academic circle, resulting in the final impression of the show becoming "black women benefit from the affirmative action movement", as long as they do a little better, the "cow school" will line up to wait for you to pick, which is very unrealistic. If you really look at the statistics, the proportion of black female professors in academia is much lower than the proportion of their group in society, and they face more prejudices and difficulties in recruiting and evaluating tenured professors. For example, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the main academic advisor to the 1619 program[1], was rejected in 2021 when he was named a tenured professor at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. There are many more examples of this, and you may have done a good job, but whether it's because of someone else's racial bias or your ideology (such as society as a whole thinking you're too left), the school may refuse to give you a tenure.
Afra: Yes, for example, a professor who is very famous, or who has more followers on Twitter, or who often writes articles in the media, all of which becomes a "handle" that can be humiliated. Critics will be humiliated and say, you see him showing his face outside. There is a line in the play: "Jesus only has 12 believers, I don't want so many followers", and that line has a great impact on me. An elderly white professor, when his class was not popular with Yaz, used Christian imagery to suppress a young professor and thus justify his position.
Eileen: Actually, there are a lot of small ironies in the show that I have experienced firsthand, and what is particularly ridiculous is that I feel very familiar when I watch the trailer. Why is it particularly familiar? On the one hand, our experiences are very similar, and on the other hand, one of the screenwriters of the show, Annie Julia Wyman, and I had similar experiences when we were students. When she was a graduate student at Harvard, I was also at Harvard, and then she went to Stanford, and I spent both campuses, so what I saw in the play was actually these campuses. If she's satirizing these campuses, I think it's a good irony.
If she wants to portray the characters of that era or to do satire dramas, then she does capture the characteristics of the old professors of that era, but these schools are not like this now, so the play is a little out of touch. It doesn't matter if we are out of touch with the times, for example, we all like to watch "Please Answer 1988", and we all like to watch dramas placed in a certain era. But this play puts some left-wing student elements in it, making you feel that this is a very contemporary drama, but the English department it presents is at least 15 or 20 years ago, and now there are really no such old professors, they have all been "retired".
In elite schools, including Ivy League schools, 75% of teachers are mostly part-time teachers and non-tenure-long. They weren't the old white man Elliot, nor the young black female professor Yaz, a star-level female professor. In fact, whether it is in elite schools or general universities, the department will mostly be controlled by a middle-aged person like Wu Shanzhuo, and then almost all of the professors she manages are part-time professors. Of course, film and television dramas do not have to pursue authenticity, but because it adds a lot of real elements, projects a lot of the questions we see in the media about universities and colleges, making you feel that this drama is about the present, but it is not the case.
Qian Juan: I strongly agree, including the fact that Joan first discovered that there was a website where students graded teachers called Rate My Professor. I felt that Joan had been teaching for decades, how could I know this site now, this site was very popular when I was in college. So the show will have a feeling for you: it's modern, but there seems to be something out of place.
Eileen: Yes, the play is set entirely in the era when I first started as a professor. When I took my first class, my mentor, my college instructor, went back to my alma mater to teach. The first thing he said to me was, "Your class is so many people coming to listen, probably because the kind of class you teach students can eat popcorn while they go to class." "I was very heartbroken and sad. Because that course happened to teach movies, it was still very new to teach movies in 2000. Many of my old colleagues also say that there are more than 200 people in your class because you teach movies. Of course, this is the routine of 20 years ago, and I would never say such a thing to a young teacher now, and a young teacher will not hear such a thing, so I think this drama is still stuck in the previous era.
Yuan Yuan: Just now Eileen said that the English department presented in this play is more like the situation when she was just a professor, but I think the situation presented in this play may be closer to the current philosophy department. Many teachers in the department of philosophy study the traditional so-called "hard philosophy", such as metaphysics, philosophy of language, and so on. These classes were particularly popular in the 1950s and 1960s, but now there are basically not too many people willing to learn them, and students feel that these fields lack care about reality, and students will ask why schools can't recruit more feminist scholars or more scholars who do critical racist theories. If the school does recruit someone who teaches feminism, his classes will often be very popular, but the classes that teach traditional language philosophy may be more deserted. Even if older teachers don't directly say, "What you teach is something that is good and 'soft' for your students, so your class is so attractive," the chain of contempt for "hard philosophy" and "soft philosophy" occasionally exists.
Afra: My first impression is that the atmosphere in the play is particularly well rendered. I am very grateful for the portrayal of many subtle atmospheres in the play, such as when Sandra Wu walked into a conference room full of English professors, I felt very close to the life I had experienced. The setting of the conference room is very similar to the classroom I had for a seminar when I was in graduate school, including the shelves full of books at the back of the classroom, the texture and color of the table, and even the number of chairs.
The class I took was called "American History and Capitalism," and as soon as I went in, I would see a classroom full of well-dressed white men, and I believe that Sandra Wu's character, like me in the play, would feel a sense of impact and depression, and would always remind myself in my mind, "This space does not belong to me, I must perform well."
There's also a scene where the English department holds a dinner party where the white professors are laughing with champagne, saying high-level jokes that you may not understand very well, and giving each other a knowing look, and when you stand next to them, the feeling will come back. First, you may feel "disobedient", and second, you will feel that you are stared at by them, disciplined by them, and degraded in that space.
Qian Juan: There will be a need to justify your existence in this place.
Afra: Yes, I feel like I'm not a poster here. My mental activity is not to say how I enjoy this night today, but to constantly reflect on my own failures and successful experiences, and then sway at these two poles. At the same time, you need to use another part of your brain power to talk to them.
Eileen: I think it's a systemic problem, and I remember walking into Harvard campus in my freshman year and feeling disciplined. For international students, whether you grew up in this environment or not, you will feel this way. This became a secret that no one wanted to talk about. Everyone is affected by this discipline, or this feeling that seems to exclude you.
When I was a freshman, a sophomore said to me, "When you come to Harvard, people all over the world think you're smart, and then you suddenly realize that you're not smart at all." The outside world thinks that you are too good at attending a school like Harvard yale, but you are stressed every day about how stupid you are and how you should not be in this place. "It wasn't until I was teaching myself that I realized that every student feels this way, every teacher feels this way. How do you overcome this dirty secret is to make others feel that you don't feel that way, like every old professor and little professor at the party feels that they are performing, and they shouldn't actually be there, but some people obviously feel that they shouldn't be here, and some people pretend that they should be here. This is already a systemic repression, but if you are a woman, a minority, a young person, the feeling of exclusion is even stronger.
Yuan Yuan: What Eileen just said makes me think about this again. I used to feel as if I was the only one being excluded because I always felt like a party wasn't my party, that partying was harder than work. Originally in the workshop, I already felt marginalized. I am the only girl in my grade and the only minority in my grade. In the compulsory seminar for first-year students, there were only 4 of us in a grade, in addition to me and three other boys, there were two white male professors.
I go to class every week, and when I walk into that room, it's like Ji Yoon walks into the head of the department, and you don't know where you should sit, where you should go when they go to chat after class. Every time I would deliberately say I was going to get some fresh air and leave the classroom, they would have a good chat over there.
I would feel like only I didn't belong to this party. Of course, I've also met a lot of Self-Conscious Yale students, dressed handsomely, always confident, and the teacher raises his hand as soon as he asks a question, which makes me think that this school is theirs. I don't know how I should behave to prove that there should be my place here, that I have equal rights to education, and that I was chosen here because others felt I had the potential. In reality, it's very difficult, and I always feel like people are telling me that I don't belong here. The two professors who took the first-year seminar that year and the three boys in my class were good colleagues and were very supportive of me later. I think my difficult experiences in first-year workshops reflect more not the lack of individual support for minority, female, or international students, but rather the systemic barriers that marginalized groups face in a field that has traditionally been dominated by white men. Even without racists and sexists, a system of structural inequality can continue to produce and exacerbate racial and gender inequalities.
Eileen: The feeling you're talking about, I feel like it's been reborn. Why would I say bill is actually the most realistic character in the play. It's because he's the kind of white man who is very comfortable and lives completely safely in this world, smart and talented. I remember when I was in the first and second years of research, there was a tall, handsome white male classmate, and the head of our department asked him to play tennis with him every weekend. I was very annoyed at that time, why didn't anyone ask me to play tennis? (Although I won't fight!) It made me feel like I couldn't get into this men's club at all. But the downfall in Bill's play makes me think that even the white man who is most suitable for this environment may one day fall out of favor in this system and fall out of the circle.
Yuan Yuan: Just now Eileen said Bill, I especially want to complain about a point. Bill was indeed the kind of star student he was, and everyone thought he would become an academic leader, and he did, and he was very popular with students. But why did he become a very depressed person in this system? I very much agree with Eileen that at the ultimate level of life, there may be an impression syndrome that everyone is acting out who they are not. But I don't think Bill's "downfall" is the same as the "failure" that many women and minority scholars have suffered. His downfall is more caused by personal life experiences (such as the loss of a beloved wife), and many women and minorities leave the academic circle in frustration often because of their systematic rejection and double standards. The show's portrayal of Bill takes a seemingly progressive but is actually the most clichéd. The screenwriter's description of Bill is that he seems to have many shortcomings, but in the end these shortcomings become the foil of his shining quality. In the play, Ji Yoon and Bill have such a dialogue, to the effect that you don't think you are white, you can easily throw the pot on any problem, that era has passed. At first glance, it may seem like a reflection and rejection of the privileges of the white man, but the play is exactly contrary to the spirit of this line, because the plot of the play makes Bill very easy to pass in the audience's moral scrutiny.
He didn't teach seriously, he was late for class because his wife died, and then he was too affectionate with his wife; he was a victim of cancel culture; he had ignored graduate students before, but once he got the spirit up, he suddenly wrote a lot of good suggestions for students' doctoral dissertations, and recommended students' works to publishing houses. In real life, a bad mentor often ruins the future of countless students. This script shows the great trouble that bad mentors bring to students (especially his own graduate students, Lila), and finally let Bill give Lila great support, making everyone think that Bill is actually a good mentor and he cares about the future of students. He very easily got rid of all these professional habits that would cause great harm to others.
Afra: This is the tolerance of the whole society for so-called genius whites, male freaks. You imagine if Bill was a female professor who was late for class every day and was disheveled and needed students to drive her, and then she went to steal someone else's bike and ride to class.
If this character is a female professor, is it not the same look and feel? There is also a scene where Bill accidentally plays a private video of his wife half naked during class, although this video is a very warm kind, but we as viewers still can't imagine what it will be like after the gender transition of this character.
Eileen: I think Yuan Yuan is particularly right, if we look at Bill's whole discourse, his whole ups and downs, it's like making the audience sympathize with the genius man. In fact, China's genius man has also been treated similarly, no matter how much he spoils himself, or wants women to be his mother every day, to take care of him, to soothe his wounded heart, to pity his fragile soul. Moreover, all the clues in the play are hinting that the reason why Bill is so lost is because his wife was his kennai helper when he was alive, playing the role of a professor who cares for Caizi.
Qian Juan: I thought the same thing at first, but I suddenly wanted to jump out of the frame and see why the screenwriter wrote it. I feel like the audience actually wants to see stories like this, we like to see a white man ugly, and we even welcome and tolerate this flawed white man because he's so cute and very real. But our requirements for Ji Yoon, including her requirements for herself, are perfect, and the clothes she wears are buttoned to the top one every time, and wearing a shirt plus a sweater and a trench coat is simply the first picture that the university professor typed 4 words into Google and jumped out.
She had fully armed herself into the most acceptable form of American college campuses and could not make any mistakes. But in the end, she still did not sit firmly at the head of the department. I love one of the lines in it: "They gave you this position because they wanted to get screwed up in the hands of a woman when the whole department was 'screwed up.'" ”
I felt the same way when I heard this, as if a woman could never be forgiven for messing up, and that mess was given to her by Bill. In the play, Bill is not only the object of her interest, but also her former department head, so it is the previous department head who messed everything up and let her pick up the mess.
Eileen: It's the same with the corporate world, if Fortune 500's company is going to hire a minority or a woman as president, it's a crisis in the company and they're going to settle the mess. I think Sandra Wu and Bill are the two most authentic characters in the whole show, especially Ji Yoon: completely stuck between two generations, whether in school, or in the administrative level, or a sense of belonging to first- and second-generation immigrants, or as a daughter or mother.
My first teaching position was to go back to my undergraduate school and make me feel like an adult and a child: stuck between the generations of my teachers and my students. Young professors, such as Yaz, ask Ji-yun why he supports the old professors so much, and why do you seem to owe them? I think it's actually because in the era when Ji Yun was in the middle, you were this system, these old professors trained, you respected them very much, no matter how bad they were, they were your elders and mentors.
Afra: And Ji Yun also has an East Asian background blessing, emphasizing a background of the East Asian master.
Eileen: Yes, Ji Yoon will always have to be the middleman. Whether it is in the workplace or as a single mother and a daughter complex coexistence, the audience on the one hand feels that if there is such a disobedient child, on the other hand, they are very sympathetic to this child, and the mother is always busy. I think Ji Yoon's attitude towards children is a mixture of guilt and laissez-faire feelings, which is actually very similar to the attitude of many Gen-X mothers to their children, because these mothers can't take care of it at all, can't do everything, and then they feel guilty every day and feel that they have done everything wrong.
Qian Juan: Because Ju-Hee is a child adopted by Ji Yoon and is not a Korean child, she adopted a child with a different cultural background as a single mother, wanted to love her, and felt that she owed her; her career was such a mess, and she had to help others make this mess, which really made people feel very sympathetic. Another point that I find very good is that she does not shy away from her Korean background in it at all, and integrates it very naturally into the contradictions of the character itself: including the seemingly understated but actually very complicated father-daughter relationship between her and her father, and her own family that is now a single parent.
Yuan Yuan: The role of Zhiyun makes me feel a lot of things. I think some of the problems that Asian women scholars face in academia are common to women, some are problems that we face as Asians (minorities), and some are unique problems that we face at the intersection of the dual identities of women and Asians. As women, for example, our research is often undervalued and marginalized: otherwise, for similar reasons, the work of female scholars is less cited, discussed, and selected for reading in the classroom. Colleagues and students often evaluate our work and emphasize how good our attitude is, rather than how skilled and capable we are. As Elieen just mentioned, we usually walk hard under the double bondage of motherhood and work, feel guilty and doubt that we are not doing a good job as a mother when we are at work, and worry that our work will be delayed when we work for our baby's life, study, and entertainment. As an Asian (especially if I was an international student, not counting first-generation immigrants), I had to switch between two cultures, and there were many discomforts in language and culture. There is often social phobia and social awkwardness. There are many opportunities lost in the past. In addition, there are some overt and covert discrimination. When I got my first teaching position, a professor congratulated me and said, "Congratulations on your foothold in the civilized world," and I don't know how to answer. As an Asian woman (not to represent anyone else, I'm just talking about a dilemma of my own), I feel that it is difficult for me to get rid of some of the deep-seated discipline of women in East Asian cultures, and even if I am influenced by feminist theory, it is difficult for me to practice what I believe. For example, when I first arrived in the United States, I would habitually pour tea for older male professors, and until now I have not been very reasonable to demand and defend my rights and interests.
In addition, as an Asian woman, the legitimacy of my research interests will be questioned. This point is also presented in the play, and Ji Yoon will be asked: You are a Korean woman, why do you study the American female poet Emily Dickinson? I will be hinted at intentionally or unintentionally by others: you are a Chinese woman, why don't you study traditional Chinese philosophy or feminism, and come to do mainstream philosophical issues in Europe and the United States? The implication is that women and ethnic minorities are mostly engaged in identity politics, and they can do research related to their own identity, and they should not do "universal" and mainstream things. In fact, many scholars from marginalized groups have been forceful in pointing out that the long dominance of white men in the field of research has created many academic blind spots. Scholars from marginalized groups, whether they are working on issues closer to their own identities or entering the so-called mainstream field, often bring unique perspectives on knowledge production, help academia eliminate blind spots, reflect the world more realistically, reveal hidden injustices more critically, and often propose better solutions to improve reality. So marginalized scholars who devote themselves to researching topics traditionally done by "whites" should have been encouraged and supported, rather than being asked to make additional defenses.
Stills from "Head of English Department"
Qian Juan: I actually want to talk about Bill, why the character of Bill is very cute, because the screenwriter is particularly fond of him. The relationship between him and Ji Yoon is brilliantly written. The audience can see that the spark between the two of them is real, the two of them are like-minded, indeed confidants and friends, or may be lovers. But beyond this layer, on the surface, the screenwriter shows us a story of a white man who is stupid, but the audience and Ji Yoon see the untimely innocent enthusiasm of him, a broken and affectionate image, which is really vivid and complete and worthy of empathy. And in this drama, Most of the time Zhiyun is pitying him, angry at him, and then using his own life experience, and even using the political capital he has earned little by little over the years to give him a bottom. She didn't realize that the person least needed in our society was someone like Bill. Even if he falls to such a degree, society will still catch him, he will be fine, and there will always be women like Ji Yun in his life who are excellent and perfect, but they are very difficult to help him.
Of course, I don't think I can escape this society in so many years, with so many high-level literary and artistic works, subtly wrote this set of scripts for me. I was very angry and helpless when I watched this play, such as the scenes where Ji Yoon angrily scolded Bill, I watched it very enjoyably, and she scolded very ruthlessly, for example, there is a passage in it that says, "Do you think this is really a problem with your Nazi salute?" We all know that this is not the problem at all, it's that you think you can still get rid of these things in your own right. But on the other hand, Bill is such a warm and thoughtful man who can make up for Ji Yoon's broken family. In the end, Ji Yoon still needs Bill to save, but in order to comply with the feminist rights of the 21st century, it has turned this rescue into cooking with children, which makes me very uncomfortable and proves that the screenwriter is really a chicken thief.
Eileen: Actually, if we pay attention to the old professor Elliot, we see that he is completely unacceptable to the young professor Yaz and cannot teach, but Yaz finds that he was also a teacher who loved his students, including in the title of his book.
However, the scene between him and his wife still returns to the point that "the white man is always saved", because he seems to stand in the perspective of feminism, saying that his wife should have received the lifelong system. His wife said very lightly, I was with the kids, if I get a tenured teaching position, who will cook?
So in those days, there was no female version of Elliot. The female Elliot is actually Joan, and Joan is childless and cannot be a full professor. Even Gen-X, who is a generation younger than Joan, is still unable to survive, as a single mother, her daughter is disobedient, but needs Bill to help her... So the more I watched it, the more I felt that this drama was actually very conservative and very cold.
Qian Juan: From the perspective of an Asian woman, I have never seen an Asian man play a funny, humorous, romantic and considerate husband in mainstream TV dramas in the United States. An interesting Asian man can't exist, Ji Yoon's husband doesn't exist, and only mentions that this man left the family and went to Michigan in order to pursue his career, which is very problematic when you think about it.
Eileen: Actually, I think of a role like Marcus, played by Korean-American star Randall Park in the 2019 Romance drama "Always Be My Maybe", but even Millenial, a millennial, is reluctant to play the role of a supporting girlfriend.
Afra: There's actually a particularly interesting white male protagonist in there, who is often overlooked, and that star professor, David Duchovny. Cramming this person into the play, as if the screenwriter feels the need to compensate the audience, suddenly stuffing you with such a sexy, hot, rich, and very suitable date man near the end. He could also sit next to him, playing the guitar, and listen to Sandra Wu teach him why his papers were outdated. The role is abrupt and makes me very uncomfortable. I feel that this character is not Ji Yun's lover, this person is a star. It seems to be specially arranged to comfort the audience, so that the audience feels that Wu Shanzhuo's life in the play is not so miserable.
Eileen: For those of us who were early fans of X Files, David Duchovny was an icon. But his appearance also made me think, is this drama doing a kind of social criticism, or is it doing hilarious comedy? For an audience my age, it's funny that he plays himself in a self-deprecating way. But this shift seems to turn the student resistance in the play into a nonsensical comedy.
Qian Juan: The tone of this drama is always changing, sometimes too ironic, sometimes too real. In fact, another point that is better portrayed in this drama is the friendship between women, as if a large group of people sit in a room, and you know at a glance who your natural allies are, that is, two other women. I wanted to hear if the two who taught at the university had such an experience.
Eileen: When I first started teaching at Harvard, only 16 percent of professors were women. So you walk into any conference room and you immediately realize that there are another woman or two, glancing at each other and giving each other encouragement. Several of my current henchmen are friends of the tribulations I made in this situation at the time.
So these storylines are real, but now because there are a lot of part-time professors, that proportion has changed a lot. Meetings of this kind are definitely not like this. However, the people in power are still the same people, including the "friend" Joan tied in the play, did not end up in a party to betray Zhiyun, so how to look at this kind of friendship is also very complicated.
Qian Juan: This is to go back to who the whole American society wants to give power to, it must be given to white men first, then white women, and finally to people of color. In people of color, it should be given to men of color first, and finally it will be the turn of someone like Ji Yun. But Zhiyun relied on his own excellence, with his own perennial assimilation, to integrate his whole person into the mission of the English Department. It was only after a lifetime that she was allowed to take power. But I think assimilation is a huge American Dream trap, it's a bubble that makes you feel that you can approach power by assimilation, but in fact you can only be a vassal of power. Once you really have real power in your hands, you realize that you will make a mistake every step you take, and in the end you will definitely be pulled down. This is the end of many good people of color in real life.
Afra: That's also a paradox of the show, first of all Joan's presence as a professor in the '80s or '90s, when it was certainly a model of women, a pioneering, radical woman.
But one of her more paradoxical points is that she needs to form alliances with other female professors as both as a woman and with her entire generation in her intergenerational capacity. This in itself is very tearful and has a strong tension.
In contemporary American campuses, when we anchor a position, we are actually mapping with people of different generations, different races, and different genders. This mapping process is actually a flowing process.
We are forever in a fluid political spectrum that itself is constantly changing in the accumulated political changes in the United States, its boundaries are expanded, and your position in the spectrum is constantly changing. Joan, for example, was a female pioneer in the 1970s and 1980s; but by 2021, she may be a moral defender who criticizes women in school law departments for dressing too revealingly.
If you throw me into a college, I'll probably also be dismissed by an 18-year-old college student who says I'm not radical enough. Because their generation has internalized many of the achievements of the struggle. Our millennial generation may still be constantly moving, sighing, and grateful, saying that "Me too" is the result of so many years of struggle, but the younger generation has absorbed the fruits of progress, and these achievements are already their default state.
Qian Juan: So one of the things that I sympathize with Joan is that she can't get rid of some of the toxic marks that she has left on her in the era she once walked through. Because there is no way to make up for the trauma she has suffered, and her entire career has passed, so her final position as the head of the department was also given to her by others, and she did not want to be the head of the department at all. But Ji Yoon felt that instead of letting you people take power, it would be better to give the position to Joan. It is also a kind of acquiescence, a seat given to her, which is completely different from Bill's unanimous selection of academic stars because of his talent.
Yuan Yuan: First of all, I would like to respond to Eileen's statement that when she first came to Harvard to teach, she had only 16% of female faculty. This data may have changed in many departments, but it has not made much progress in philosophy. For a long time at Yale, the philosophy department had about twenty permanent tracks and tenured professors, of whom only 3 were women. I joined VCU last year, we have 10 professors in the philosophy department, and there is only one female professor (white female professor) besides me. Really from my zoom interview, we looked at each other and had a special sense of pity for each other, and I felt that I could intuitively understand her long-term feelings as the only female professor in the department. When I visited the campus, she also pulled me aside and said, "I'm afraid you won't be able to ask others, our school has a parental leave policy, and if you have a child, you can take paid leave for a semester." Solidarity between women across ages, races, and countries has been a force that has sustained me in my philosophical circles.
Back in the play, I feel that it ends up setting up the plot to make Joan head of the department is a very cheap, so that the audience can get a kind of intergenerational compensation to achieve satisfaction. The play highlights that Joan ran to the Ethics and Compliance Office and said, "I came here with unequal pay for equal work, and I was assigned so many service jobs that I couldn't become a full-time professor; I wanted someone who wasn't you to recognize me." Then the show chose a very simple way to give people psychological satisfaction, that is, I gave you this thing you wanted, so that Joan inexplicably became the head of the department.
What Afra is quite right about just now is that the show does have alliances between women, but the characters are also looking for alliances between generations, and which alliance is greater in their decision may be fixed and fluid. But the struggle in her heart is very real, such as Joan telling the two white male professors that we are going to vote no confidence in Ji Yoon together, and when it comes to voting in the office, she can't vote against it. Joan's reaction was still very touching to me, and it was very convincing to me, not the kind of emotion that was specifically sensational. In the end, Ji Yoon completely forgives Joan, not counting that Joan conspired with the white male professors to vote for her no confidence. Ji Yoon said, "If there is one person to be the head of the department, I would rather let Joan do it, she can at least have an office."
I think it's a very real portrayal of the results of the feminist movement, and we can understand each other's trade-offs and compromises in a variety of realistic conditions, but in the end we seem to be able to stick to this bottom line: Elliot has been the head of the department several times, he has dominated the department for 40 years, and our real consensus is that we can't let power come back into his hands.
Qian Juan: In fact, the whole university and the whole department are not ready for ZhiYun to be the head of the department, but they also want to let a face of An Asian woman become their department head, as if they have ushered in a new era, but in fact, they have not yet entered a new era.
Eileen: I think we are all zhiyun, and the Gen-X professors of our time have basically been disciplined by the higher education system to do such a position, and then they have to go out, but they always have to appease their mentors, and the next generation will always think that you are not radical enough. This is why so many middle-aged professors are particularly touched after watching the play. I was also touched to see Ji Yoon's final decision, because whether or not someone betrayed you, the point is that this is not necessarily a true friendship, these are allies made under a special ecological environment. You might consider that in a given situation, you'd rather choose someone who isn't Elliot as the head of the department, just as she would have to compromise with the dean and question Bill.
But what makes me most unconvinced is the presentation of the students, the students in the play have become very bad, is the cool drama you made for the middle-aged so-called "centrist liberal "middle liberal)" to see, is it to show that the current students are terrible?
Qian Juan: The portrayal of students in this play is a little too facial, but it is strange to give them a few very correct lines. It reminds me a bit of a TV series written by Aaron Sorkin, who often writes a very unconvincing female character, but then makes her say a very depressing sentence at a critical moment.
Eileen: The screenwriter gave the student characters a sense of contemporaneity, but its whole ecology was the same as the campus ecology of 20 years ago, and then some of the current students were inserted and made to make them face-like, which produced a very strange feeling. I also explained to people that day why this gap in time and space is very abrupt - just like "The Story of the Editorial Department" as an ecological environment, and then insert a few 20-year-old young people, it can be used to interpret and understand the contemporary Beijing workplace.
Qian Juan: The reason why the audience thinks that these students are very facetious is because they seem to be a group of people who can't listen to the truth, think that there are only black and white people in the world, and even dare to rush to Zhiyun's office and say that you really don't understand female teaching positions, especially women and women of color. Ji Yoon just had to laugh helplessly while looking at them dotingly and saying, "I understand, I know, I understand." That paragraph will make you wonder how this group of children is so ignorant.
But this kind of ignorance is a very big prejudice, a hat that any previous generation likes to buckle to the next generation, and this drama does not reflect on it, but instead presents it to you in a way that relieves anger, which makes me feel very insincere.
Afra: It's also presented in a very superficial way, such as students playing with their phones in class and then inadvertently recording this short video of Bill performing a Nazi salute. Then I added a variety of filters to it and turned it into a GIF and posted it on Twitter. The message of all this series of shots is that "viralization" and "memeization" are the characteristics of this generation of Gen-Z, so the screenwriter must enlarge this feature or the thin cognition of this intergenerational thinness to the limit in this situation.
I am very dissatisfied that if the nazi salute is really fermented into an event that can affect the whole school, why does the play only amplify the very irrational side of the radical students on the left, but not the other right? Obviously you can feel that there must be a group of alt-right-wingers in the school, who will be moved by the white male's nazi salute in class, and thus silently shout "blood and soil" in his heart (blood and soil, German: Blut und Boden, one of the racial ideologies of modern Germany and the slogan of neo-Nazis), but this side is not presented.
In addition, I saw a review in which the screenwriter himself said that I wanted to describe the various groups on american college campuses without prejudice and fairness, including: radical left-wing students, left-wing professors standing among radical students, and white professors (they), alternative right-wing groups, campus police, school administration, etc.
But the screenwriter obviously did not give the students a fair portrayal, and her cognition of this so-called fair portrayal may be a little self-moving, very Sorkinian: insert a few meaningful long shots of several students, let their young and lovely faces shine with justice, and let them say things that make people feel very reasonable. Then in some situation, you feel that Bill is indeed exercising the privileges of a white person, and his white privileges may actually be terminated at this moment. But in retrospect, the premise of the radical behavior of the entire student is unreliable in the story, a trap deliberately created by the screenwriter.
Qian Juan: And the play is like the campus is a vacuum. What is the social environment in the United States like now, and what are people doing elsewhere? Why do they react to the fact that if college campuses can no longer provide us with a safe environment, where should we students of color go? It seems that all these things are absent, and you can only see a very extreme picture in a miniature classroom.
Yuan Yuan: I very much agree with everyone's dissatisfaction with the portrayal of students in the play. I would like to add a little observation of the student movement that I personally experienced at Yale, hoping to correct the play's biased imagination of the student movement to some extent. First of all, many times students are opposed to serious injustice, and their targeted demands are very reasonable. Examples include demanding changes to the residential college named after John C. Calhoun, a white supremacist and fervent advocate of slavery, or demanding the dismissal of professors who have sexually assaulted students multiple times and in aggravating circumstances. Second, students are honest, moving, and creative in their accounting and debating of injustices on campus and in proposing solutions accordingly. For example, in an effort to get Callaun College to change its name, many students spoke at the school-wide assembly about the repression they felt as descendants of slaves living under the name of slave defenders every day. And the college name will follow them throughout their lives as part of their accomplishments as a graduate of Yale, which exacerbates the irony they feel. After the university authorities first rejected the students' request for a name change, the students took a particularly creative approach, each proposing a new name for the college they wanted to see, such as Grace Hopper or Edward Bouchet, etc... There were so many, and made into paper plaques, neatly inserted on the lawn outside the original Callaun College, and I was really shocked and inspired when I passed. [2] Moreover, there are many legitimate divisions within even the progressive student body. For example, before our department, some students protested that some teachers specifically mentioned "N-word" to make a point. Some people think that the use of N-word is a manifestation of racism on any occasion. But it has also been suggested that the professor may have been less sensitive to race in his words, but that mentioning N-word is not necessarily inherently racist. This example is just to illustrate that it is very unfair to present students in the play as monolithic people who do not listen to explanations.
Afra: The only more realistic image of the student is that poor Asian-American teaching assistant, who lives in a dilapidated place, carries a student loan, and looks at the sky every day and says, "What the hell am I going to do, my thesis is not finished, the tutor is not there after writing, and I have to clean up the mess of the tutor." In fact, Bill's mess is not only cleaned up by Ji Yun, another Asian assistant teacher also has to help him clean up, and finally no matter how Bill throws the pot and how irresponsible, he is still the talented star professor with a broken soul, which is really infuriating.
Eileen: I've been through this! The teacher did not appear, and later I, the little teaching assistant, had to come to the scene to talk about Kant. It was a really scary feeling, and you were put up there, and you could only stand in front of the stage and say, WELL, I'm going to give a lecture today, and then the big professor will show up after 25 minutes.
Yuan Yuan: I think the writer's description of Bill is very real, but the screenwriter really let him go easily. I think we finally have a chance to think hard about the privilege of these white male professors. For example, not changing the doctoral dissertation of graduate students, ignoring students, being late for class, etc., these are all things they often do in their daily lives, and they do not have any consequences. After we watched the "Head of the English Department", we should know how much harm and heavy psychological burden these professors have brought to the students, and as a result, after watching the play, everyone loves him so much that they love him, which is where I am most angry. Of course, I also understand that this society has been feeding you this set, so the screenwriters write very refreshingly, and we eat very refreshingly. But I don't think people who do cultural work can feed you something refreshing all the time.
Qian Juan: I think it's not just the screenwriter doing something refreshing, the content of this drama is what really happens, the screenwriter doesn't want to show the audience "Shuangwen", the big heroine in this drama is not in love, but has been wiping Bill's ass; want to see her engage in career, it is better to start a career at the end of a season than when she did not start a career. This drama is a TV series that makes middle-aged people sigh silently after watching it. In real life, a man like Bill just doesn't pay any price, and it shows us what we'll see in reality.
Yuan Yuan: I think it's right to let the audience see what will happen in reality, but the key is that the screenwriter is manipulating our perception of reality. If in reality capital exploits laborers, and a drama makes us feel that capitalists are far-sighted and people-minded people after watching it, then the screenwriter's ass must be crooked. Similarly, I think the show is sitting on the ass of Bill's people because it's not making us reflect on and reject the white male privilege of academic circles but washing them.
Afra: And what made me feel very angry was that in the end, Bill was about to be fired from the school, but he turned to Ji Yoon and said, "Let's go to Paris!" It seems that the spiritual penal colony of all middle-class American literary and artistic men is Paris, and once life goes wrong, "it's okay, we can also go to the left bank of Paris to rent a house, and go there to live and write." Many of david Duchovny's previous roles were such downcast, broken, genius-style American male literati, who one day suddenly suffered misfortune in his life and then went to live in a spiritual exile for two or three years.
Eileen: Yeah, so I like David Duchovny because he's very self-deprecating. But back to his famed X Files, we can still see that he is a character who believes in all ghosts, and Gillian Anderson is a scientist, always taking care of him. Their relationship is still a routine and pattern of a woman taking care of men and a woman being a mother.
I also want to talk about how cruel this drama is to the elderly, I don't know what you think?
Afra: Yeah, I want to talk about ageism in it. In the play, the physical inconvenience of the elderly people and then the embarrassment of life are made very mercilessly mocked. Indeed, the old trio represents the rigidity of the system we hate the most, the rigidity of scholarship, and the confidence and domineering that we show for no reason because of our race, gender, and some characteristics. But the portrayal of the elderly in the play is really cruel, which makes me feel a little sad.
Qian Juan: There is an old male professor in the play, and the only meaning of his existence is to make everyone laugh with universal ugliness. Including snoozing, farting while asleep, taking medicine and eating something very ugly, etc. The plot of the relationship between Joan and the male students, as well as IT Guy, is unclear. I don't know if this is some plot from one of Chaucer's books, and then it was moved to the play.
Eileen: One of the most famous novels that mocks campus is "Small World", written by the British writer David Lodge, who was a teenager, and he wrote a series of novels that have deeply influenced me. On the one hand, these novels are very good, much better than this drama. On the other hand, because one of the star professors in this novel is the background of this play, if you are an insider, you will feel that the whole play is the popular culture absorbed by screenwriter Annie Wyman, the David Lodge she watched, the classes she attended, and so on. Some of the old professors she presented were old professors at Harvard, including Helen Vendler, the most famous professor in the English department at the time, but later they all lost power and were retired. But these are the people who have the most influence when the screenwriters are young, and they will always be the giants in your memory. Although Wyman left campus for show business, she seems to have stayed in her graduate school years, writing about the people who gave her a huge shadow, but I think these people are no longer there. So just now Afra said that he didn't seem to understand the background behind it, in fact, the plot behind it is the shadow of these Ivy League school teachers.
Qian Juan: I think the age discrimination in the play is not only upward, but also downward, and the screenwriter's portrayal of the Title IX office student makes me a little uncomfortable, as if young girls are dressed like this, and then they are all full of political words.
Although today's universities are different from the portrayal in TV dramas in every way, from faculty to culture, we cannot say that the repression of minorities and women presented in TV dramas is already a thing of the past. It's just that part-time professors in universities are more diverse, but the real power is still in the hands of those people. Even if we reflect on the previous masterpieces, those classics, those giants, can we stop looking at them as people without race, without gender, as a capitalized person? Can you look at them as lowercase people? I think it's okay. Even now, when literature is published, I looked up the data, and 86 percent of the published works of fictional writing are white writers, and the entire publishing world is far from being equal. So "The Head of the English Department" is a work that I don't know how to place at a point in time, but the problems it mentions are very sharp and always existent.
Afra: Actually, there has always been an invisible force in this drama, which is the huge power of school management. Whether it's the so-called professional image managers hired by the school to the so-called social media managers, the role of management in promoting the whole plot is huge. In real American campuses, governing bodies also play an important and controversial role.
As we all know, American universities are super expensive, and many students carry a bunch of student loans after school. Where is this money spent? In the 1980s and 1990s, schools may have spent half as much money on management as professors, but now that number has been flat, American universities are now paying professors the same as they are for school management. When I was very young in China, I heard that the management system of American universities is very different from That of China, and that professors run schools. At the same time, there is a system of tenured professors to guarantee freedom of speech. But now management is getting bigger, more powerful, and more bureaucratic.
Many professors have written articles complaining that one of the biggest problems in contemporary American campuses is that management is too much power, depriving them of academic resources and funds, but on the contrary, only when schools set up some cross-cultural centers or African American student centers, and then allocate some administrators, can we ensure that minority students have a comfortable and safe environment of their own ethnic groups in the school. So, this has become a point of contradiction again.
Of course, in the play, the school management has also been portrayed as a more depressing, hypocritical, chicken thief, and even a little absurd existence, engaging in some of the non-existent every day. But on another level, it is indeed a force to protect students.
Yuan Yuan: I agree with the basic characterization of management in the play, and management is basically interest-oriented. Including the cultural centers it has set up, it is also because the social culture has changed, and it has to respond to it. Now that they're starting to pay attention to how minorities feel in school, they're setting up these things; when there's a PR crisis, they're also paying a lot of money to hire people who specialize in dealing with the problem. In the whole campus, although it is said that the students and professors at the front desk are at the forefront, it seems that the atmosphere of the whole campus is relatively free, but behind it is a company-style organization in control.
For example, Yale changed Calloun College to the current Grace Hopper College. You will feel that in such a "progressive" campus, the vast majority of professors are very sympathetic to the students' demands, and on this issue, everyone basically does not feel that the students' demands are cancel culture ( cancel culture ) is too much, so it seems natural to change the name. But the matter was initially vetoed by Yale Corporation's management. It did not agree to change the name because it would offend many conservative donors.
I think this is a dilemma of the literati since ancient times, we are not engaged in direct production, we must use other people's money, and then take people's hands short, eat people soft. In the end, there is always a capital that limits you behind it, influencing and even deciding what research will be funded, who will get tenure, and so on. This is the root cause of the fact that college campuses that seem to be firmly controlled by the left tend to make surprisingly conservative decisions at many critical moments.
Eileen: Humanities teachers and students account for more than 1 percent of an elite school's total budget, less than 2 percent. But what you see in the newspapers and magazines, in the mass media, is the humanities, like critical racism. In fact, many people say that these universities are actually venture capital companies with a university. So the operation of the university is subsidiary, its investment and budget, and this whole operation is a mode of operation that it is now. As Churchill said, why do scholars always argue so fiercely, because they argue about things that are so trivial that the less important they are, the more intense the arguments.
I want to go back to a point and want to talk about the teaching model. On the one hand, I like to teach, and I feel that I am close to my students. But of course I am out of touch with their times, they are the new generation, I am the old generation. But what I can do is make students realize that good literature is always there. For example, I like Du Fu's "Dew is white from tonight, the moon is hometown Ming", I like Emily Dickinson's "Tell the truth but tell it slant", even after more than a hundred years, more than a thousand years later, you will still have feelings about such poetry and literature. So how do you let students know the literature that they didn't feel belonged to through the feelings that belonged to their times? I don't think it's a succumb or flattery if you teach along the popular culture that your students like. This is actually a basic communication and dialogue with students.
Qian Juan: I think watching this film will make you have a lot of feelings. And I really like Sandra Wu, she can throw her life experience and her own cultural background in front of you, saying that this is my role, this is the person I want to play, you understand.
Afra: Wu Shanzhuo herself said that this is all the scenes that happen in the first play she played, very much like a role in the scenes of her life. Including conversations with his father, the switching of language in ordinary life scenes, and so on.
In fact, the minority actors in the script still have a very high evaluation of the script, especially the actress who plays Yaz, she initially doubted that a white female screenwriter could write a black female scholar well, but when she read the script, she was quite convinced of the portrayal of many details in it. Although everyone is not particularly satisfied with the ending, Yaz got a heavenly Yale faculty work is derailed from reality, but the actor himself still recognizes some things in the play.
Qian Juan: I think the screenwriters are still not separated from their own times and their own backgrounds when they are creating, and the most unreal thing written here is that the young students, probably because the whole team does not understand their voices. Thank you very much to both of you for attending. Working so hard in your own field can in itself give us hope.
External links:
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html
[2] https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2016/04/29/students-hold-calhoun-renaming-ceremony/
Editor-in-Charge: Gong Siliang
Proofreader: Yijia Xu