The Netflix web series "The Chair" began broadcasting at the end of August, and this drama has quickly become a hot topic in European and American cultural circles since September, not only attracting the attention of fans, but even universities and research institutions have held online seminars for this purpose. Why does a workplace drama depicting liberal arts teachers in colleges and universities trigger a big discussion in European and American academic circles and cultural circles?
Poster of the American drama "Head of the English Department".
At the same time, "Head of the English Department" has also attracted the attention of many liberal arts teachers and graduate students in China. In recent years, the situation of young teachers "either rising or leaving", the corporatization of universities, the KPIs of assessment indicators, and the marginalization of liberal arts have also made many young teachers feel empathy in this play. In this issue, we start with the "Head of the English Department" and take a look at the various problems of higher education in the United States and the difficult situation of liberal arts teachers.
The "out of the circle" web drama that has aroused heated discussion in academic circles
"English Department Chair" is a workplace drama depicting a university liberal arts teacher. Kim Ji-yoon, a Korean-American English professor starring Sandra Wu, became the first female Head of English in the history of Pembroke College, a fictional little Ivy League university. After taking office, she was overwhelmed by a series of crises in the department - the reduction of liberal arts funding, the loss of students, the infighting among teachers, sexism, racial discrimination, the closure of culture, the conflict between work and maternal employment, the clash of culture... The whole drama is like a hodgepodge, and the screenwriter writes the various phenomena that colleges and universities have repeatedly exposed in the media and the emotional "bursting points" of American society in a very ironic way. This also makes the drama a mirror reflecting the ecology of American higher education, which has triggered a hot discussion in north American academic circles.
Many university media outlets have commented on the show. Cecilia Barron, a reviewer at The Brown Daily Herald, believes that the English Department Chair was able to succeed because of its extremely precise positioning, which successfully met the needs of the market segment of liberal arts graduate students, college teachers, cultural media, and intellectuals. It's an academic Friend, because those characters are like people familiar to the teachers. "English Department Chair" reveals a lot of complex problems, but does not provide solutions for the audience.
The American drama "English Department Chair" caused a hot discussion on the Rotten Tomatoes website.
Indeed, this is a very rare web series. In the past, there have been countless workplace dramas in the United States depicting lawyers, doctors, police officers, firefighters, journalists, financial practitioners, and IT practitioners, but not many workplace dramas have featured university teachers—especially those in the humanities. This is the reason why many college liberal arts teachers share their feelings about watching this show online - they can finally "see" themselves in front of the screen! Mai-Linh Hong, an English teacher at the University of California, Merced, said, "As an Asian female English teacher, this drama is both hilarious and disturbing, and the play seems to be peeking at my brain, it is a black comedy specially tailored for me. For graduate students who are preparing to do liberal arts academics, this drama makes them feel as if they see the future, so they have a great sense of substitution, for example, Douban netizen "Blavatsky" commented, "Is the medieval literary wife with only three people in class my future..."
Of course, the film and television drama is fictional after all, and some teachers also pointed out that the drama has misunderstood the academic community, for example, Professor Lisa Zeidner of the English Department of Rutgers University Camden joked that in fact, 73% of college teachers in the United States today are contracted, and they do not have tenure. So every time the head of the department walked around the campus, there would be a non-tenured teacher who would follow the head of the department breathlessly and plead for one more class. Because they can average $2,500 a course, they need to take at least five courses a semester to meet a lower quality of life. In the play, most of the teachers in the English department of Pembroke College have tenure. The tragic situation of teachers who are not tenured is not well represented. What exactly does this show depict that makes it a blockbuster web drama in American cultural circles and academia?
The crisis of liberal arts education, the lingering shadow
At the beginning of the first episode of "Head of the English Department", Kim Ji-yoon becomes the head of the English department at Pembroke College. In the English department where the "old white man" has a huge advantage, it is not easy for Kim Ji-yoon to sit in this position. As she happily plays with the department chair name tag with foul language, her chair suddenly falls apart — a pun on the title The Chair, which means that her path to head of the department isn't going well.
As soon as Kim took office, he had to deal with the mess of the English department — a 30 percent drop in the number of students in the department, a decline in the number of students taking courses, and a drastic cut in the budget of the English department. If students cannot be retained, whether the English department at Pembroke College can continue to exist will become a problem. The university wants to retire professors with the highest salaries and tenure but few students to choose from, in order to reduce expenses. But Kim Ji-yoon, who wants to be a "good old man," refuted the proposal. In order to dissuade the professors who held tenured teaching positions, the university even moved the office of a female professor to a dirty basement.
Stills of the American drama "Head of the English Department", pictured is the protagonist Kim Ji-yun.
The crisis of humanistic education has become the source of all the plot evolution of "English Department Chair". The drama brought to the table the crisis of humanistic education that is commonly seen in the American newspapers every day. In the United States, the humanities crisis has returned since the 2008 financial crisis. It is an indisputable fact that the number of students in the drama Chinese, the decline in the number of course students, and the financial crisis of liberal arts departments. According to The Atlantic, the percentage of all graduates in the humanities has now fallen to a low in nearly four decades in the United States. Meanwhile, the total number of people who have earned the four major humanities degrees in philosophy, history, language and English has fallen below 100,000 for the first time in nearly 20 years.
The decline in student population has been accompanied by a wave of school closures. In recent years, there has been a lot of news of fiscal deficits and closures of private liberal arts colleges in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the merger and closure of private universities in the United States will grow rapidly in the next few years, and 25% of private universities have fiscal deficits last year. Among them, many liberal arts colleges and arts colleges that pursue liberal arts education bear the brunt. This has also led many schools to cut funding for liberal arts faculties, cut off teachers in liberal arts faculties, and even close certain liberal arts departments. Pembroke College in English Heads is a top private liberal arts college at the "Little Ivy League" level. The financial crisis of private liberal arts colleges in the United States is the background of this story.
Did classroom reform in the humanities work?
In "The Head of the English Department," In order to reverse the decline of the English Department, Kim Ji-yoon took on the heavy responsibility of reform, hoping to help the building fall — she favored a young black female teacher, Yates— the winner of the annual paper award in the journal Of the American Modern Linguistics Society, a top American journal, and was good at studying American literature from the perspective of cultural studies. In addition, her class style is very popular with students, for example, she allows students to take classes in the way of hip-hop adaptation of "Moby Dick". Because of the charisma of her classroom and the "political correctness" of her progressive left, Kim decided to nominate the female teacher for tenure. On the one hand, this will attract more students to continue to choose classes in the English department; on the other hand, in the research methods of literary studies, Kim Ji-yoon hopes to introduce a critical perspective of cultural studies in the department and balance the academic atmosphere of the "old white men" professors in the department who are relatively "conservative" (they prefer Harold Bloom's literary canon).
Is this a classroom reform to alleviate the crisis of humanistic education? Yates's curriculum and research directions do reflect the reform proposals of many people in the American higher education community. Benjamin Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, argued in The Atlantic that the phenomenon of English and history as core majors in the humanities is disappearing, and he pins his hopes on the rise of cultural studies, which can provide students with a new way of seeing the world.
In the September 3 "Inside Higher ED," Robert D. Newman, president of the National Humanities Center, wrote that in the face of the humanities crisis, many on the right label the humanities as elitist — arguing that the humanities themselves have no economic value and should be studied by the wealthy. To that end, Newman called for the humanities to safely preserve what is profound only if it caters to the needs of the times. Interdisciplinary teaching is the future of the humanities, and the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by introducing them into practical disciplines and leading students to think critically. Also in Internal References to Higher Education, Steve Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, gives specific advice directly on how to respond to the humanities crisis: providing students with guidelines on how to live; introducing humanities care into practical disciplines; critical humanities; and emphasizing a cross-cultural perspective on research.
Stills from the American drama "English Department Chair", pictured is Yates, a black female teacher.
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Eric Hayot, a professor of comparative literature and Asian studies at Penn State University, wrote that marketing in the humanities is problematic. With the exception of gender studies and race studies, the curriculum titles in the humanities are no longer attractive in their own right. Moreover, the vast majority of courses are organized around the needs of specialized disciplines, and most undergraduates simply do not want to become liberal arts professors. Eric Hayott's proposal for reform is to combine existing courses into modules, each of which includes knowledge from a variety of humanities and social sciences. Through an interdisciplinary perspective, teachers can better lead students to think about a series of problems in a certain field.
In general, understanding student needs, cultural research positions, thematic and interdisciplinary teaching is one way for the humanities to re-engage students to class. In "Head of the English Department", a special topic course as "Sex and Literature" offered by Yates seems to be an answer - which is similar to doing cultural media - in terms of topics, choose the topics that the progressive left pays attention to, for which the teacher must accurately grasp the focus of the audience, and then combine the knowledge and perspectives of various disciplines, and package the knowledge as "delicious" as possible in the form of teaching, and then send it to the audience. Yates did this almost perfectly, which made the department's relatively conservative and rigid "old white man" professor Elliot very jealous of her popularity. In order to increase Elliot's student numbers and prevent him from being fired from the school, Kim Ji-yoon merged Elliot and Yates's curriculum. But this directly triggered the contradiction between Elliot and Yates. Moreover, Elliott, who chairs the Tenure Review Committee, decided to declare a personal vendetta against the black female teacher from obtaining tenure.
"Corporatization of universities" is the root cause of the liberal arts crisis
In The Head of the English Department, The contradiction between Yates and Eliot can be seen as a contradiction between two positions—conservative and progressive, male and female, older and newer, white and black, guarding literary canon and political position first. However, this contradiction should not rise to the level of job title ratings, which should be fair in a process. Douban user "put poof" commented that this drama shows that the literati's purity is nothing more than a legend, for the benefit of teaching, welfare, status and other interests, the literati engage in small groups, gangs, coupled with a strong sense of self-esteem - but will make the struggle become very fierce. There is nothing wrong with this statement, especially in the case of relatively reduced resources, and the personnel struggle for interests will become more intense.
Stills from the American drama "Head of the English Department", pictured is Professor Eliot.
The most fundamental reason for this problem lies in the corporatization of universities. Our beautiful imagination of the literati's "qinggao" and the scholar's "ivory tower" of pursuing academic ideals is based on the premise that the academic community has not been "colonized" by commercial logic. After the corporatization of universities, academia seems to be becoming more and more similar to the workplace. The employment system of "either rise or go" is increasing, and the performance appraisal of scientific research projects is constantly increasing... In the United States, the corporatization of universities is also an important reason for the decline of the "useless" liberal arts.
"English Department Chair" can be filmed according to the routine of workplace dramas, but also because the university itself is no longer a pure "ivory tower", but has become a "workplace" where you fight with each other. "English Heads" is a good illustration of the harm that university corporatization has done to liberal arts education — for example, the attempt to lay off old professors with tenured faculty positions. In the play, the old professors said that the reason why they were engaged in academia was because being a professor was a rare profession that was more respected as they got older, and layoffs were undoubtedly a thunderbolt for them. Moreover, in order to attract traffic, the school also disregarded the quality of teaching and the reputation of the school, and planned to hire stars and best-selling authors as teachers. In the face of performance logic, the quality of education in the liberal arts becomes an option that can be sacrificed.
There is an article in Times Higher Education calling for the situation of non-tenure-track teachers that we should pay more attention to the situation of non-tenure-track teachers that are ignored in the play after reading the English Department Chair. According to Insidescholar, in 1969, about 78 percent of U.S. faculty members had tenure, but today, most teachers in schools are without tenure in order to reduce costs. This means that they lack a social safety net, which can create great feelings of insecurity and anxiety among many teachers. In addition, a review in Dialogue magazine said the show did not do a good job of showing class inequality in universities. Moreover, the promotion system at higher schools is very unfavorable to women, people of color, and academics from working class backgrounds.
In the play, Yates, a black female teacher who works as a contract worker, is actually very market-oriented—she publishes papers in top journals in order to find better teaching positions; she understands the psychological needs of her students and makes the curriculum more engaging. Traditional intellectuals may not approve of Yates's curriculum reform, but will think that she is too pandering to students and is not the right way to teach. Old professor Joan especially did not like to see students on the teacher evaluation network to evaluate her (this is like consumer evaluation of goods), when she saw that some students made bad comments on her, she also found her students through hackers, and reprimanded her to maintain her dignity. Is it the old professors who are not enterprising and are out of touch with the times, or the problems with the higher education system itself?
Stills from the American drama "Head of the English Department", pictured is Joan, a female professor who burned student evaluations.
All in all, the imagination of a purely "academic community" has been shattered in the footsteps of university corporatization. In Slow Professor, authors Maggie Berg and Barbara Seaber argue that college campuses are increasingly looking like shopping malls. The instrumentalist values of university corporatization not only allow teachers to use time as a tool, but also lead teachers to use each other as tools. As a result, colleagues become increasingly difficult to get along with – because they are competitors in the workplace – and then the pure "academic community" begins to disintegrate. In this fiercely competitive internal atmosphere, university teachers not only become more lonely, but "palace fights" will also be displayed in various forms. Among them, in the decision of tenure review and title promotion, various forms of discrimination have also become common.
What is the problem with "banning culture"?
The discussion caused by "English Department Chair" is not limited to American higher education, but also brings out many important issues in the "culture war" between the left and right wings of American society - the dilemma of women in the workplace and the impact of "blocking culture". Academia, as the forefront of the "culture war" in the United States, these contradictions have been fiercely displayed. Beyond the main plot line, "English Department Chair" also depicts Kim Ji-yun as a female professor, the difficult balance between the motherhood and professional life of raising her daughter. For Kim Ji-yoon, things are a mess at school, and her relationship with her adopted daughter has become precarious. This is precisely the life troubles that many female scholars live in. Moreover, the play also portrays sexism in the workplace – female professor Joan once complained that her salary in her youth was far less than that of male faculty members; Professor Lenz's wife resigned after giving birth to a child before she was given a tenured faculty position because she had to stay at home to cook dinner...
In addition, Kim Ji-yoon also developed an ambiguous relationship with another teacher, Bill. Bill was once a popular teacher, and his students loved him very much, but an accident took his wife's life, and since then, he has been devastated and confused. In one class, Bill made Nazi salute gestures in order to enliven the classroom atmosphere, and some students recorded it and put it online for pranks, which made Bill a public enemy on campus. Students marched to protest the expulsion of the "Nazi" Bill (Bill was certainly not a "Nazi") from the campus, which eventually led to a public relations disaster.
Stills from the American drama "Head of the English Department", pictured is the teacher Bill facing student protests.
This part of the plot actually reflects the problems caused by the "blocking culture" that is popular in American society. As the forefront of the "cultural war", colleges and universities are also the hardest hit areas of "banning culture". In real life, there are indeed similar absurdities in American colleges and universities. Last year, professor Greg Patton of the University of Southern California, when teaching students a communication course, taught the use of "filler words" in various cultures, saying: "Different cultures, the mantra will be different, it is based on your native language." Just like the common English word "that, that, that", in Chinese it will say 'that, that, that.' Because the "that" in the Chinese sounded a lot like a discriminatory word against African Americans, Greg Patton was suspended from school after student protests.
This "culture of banning" also continues into the classroom content, where students re-examine the characters in the historical canon with contemporary "political correctness." There is a scene in "English Department Chair" that has caused a lot of controversy. When Eliot was lecturing on stage about the moby dick, some students in the audience said that Melville was a domestic violence man. Elliot explained a few words and then continued. At this time, Yates, a black female professor, stood up and said, When the time comes, I will tell you about his domestic violence. This part of the plot touches on the sensitive point of American society - can we deny Melville's literary achievements and contributions because he is a domestic violence man? Because Melville's contributions to American literature are so great, can we ignore his domestic violence?
Under the wave of young Americans re-examining history and tearing down the sculptures of Columbus and Confederate generals, "English Department Chair" reflects on the scale of "political correctness" in American society with Bill's line. That's one of the reasons the show has garnered cultural attention, just as Imani Perry, a professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, believes that the success of English Chair is not because of any solid message or position it conveys, but because of its political ambiguity. Perry also commented that teachers in schools encountered reports from left-wing ideological police as often as right-wing students went to spy on left-wing professors. "English Department Chair" does not simply create a binary opposition, but makes everyone reflect. Is radical banning culture another kind of shackle? How should we view "political correctness"? This may be the question that the show raises for American society.
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Written by | Xu Yuedong
Edit | Li Yongbo Qingqingzi
Proofreading | Wang Xin