Bonfire of the humanities

With departments in decline, the English professor has become a risible figure in the British novel.

Photo by General Photographic Agency/Getty Images

“I really think that you should read Caledonian Road,” a colleague advised me, soon after the publication of Andrew O’Hagan’s state-of-the-nation novel. “The main character is actually a member of this department.” It sounded more like a warning than a recommendation. But what he said was true. O’Hagan’s protagonist, Campbell Flynn, described in the prefatory “Cast of Characters” as a “celebrity academic”, is a professor in the English department at University College London, of which I am currently the head. I read with foreboding. Would there be recognisable character sketches? Which of our institutional follies would be skewered? What picture of the state of academic Eng Lit would be drawn?

Campbell Flynn is certainly no advertisement for my profession. O’Hagan’s worldly-wise prof, dedicated mostly to podcasts and international travel, treats his post at UCL as a convenient sinecure, happy to visit the department because “he didn’t have many duties there”. He has little interest in literature; he does once express mild admiration for Henry James, but swiftly abandons this when one of the cooler graduate students retorts, “F**k Henry James!” He is largely unimpeded by teaching commitments and apparently does no examining, so he can spend May and June – busy months for jobbing academics – visiting Venice and Iceland. Mysteriously, none of his non-celebrity colleagues seem to do much either: “The department was empty at the best of times,” O’Hagan writes, “a sort of ghost village, the chief residents remaining inside their offices in a state of fear that they might be asked to teach.” Nice to think that you might be omitted from lecture lists if you keep your door shut.

It is unreasonable, of course, to hope for positive PR for academia from a satirical novel. British novelists have long loved to depict the absurdities of academics. From Casaubon in Middlemarch to Dr Tetuphenay, who crushes the hopes of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, the desiccated Oxbridge scholar has been a butt of novelists since the 19th century. But only with the postwar university expansion of the 1950s and 1960s did the campus novel escape from Oxford and Cambridge. The key text was Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), featuring an anti-hero, Jim Dixon, who was a lecturer in medieval history at an unnamed provincial university. Amis (himself a young English lecturer at Swansea University) depicted faculty life as farcical, and the senior academics as incompetents or phoneys.

In the US, meanwhile, Mary McCarthy’s sardonically titled The Groves of Academe (1952) was the earliest notable novel that featured English-literature academics. McCarthy used her experiences teaching literature at Bard and Sarah Lawrence colleges to depict the lively self-interest of the supposedly high-minded English lecturers at the fictional, “progressive” Jocelyn College. In Britain, it was David Lodge, who, in the 1970s and 1980s, focused the campus novel on English-literature academics. He acknowledged Lucky Jim as an inspiration, having read it “with exquisite pleasure”, while he was himself an English student at UCL. The success of his own novels Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988), all featuring English-lecturer protagonists, allowed him to ditch his own day job as professor of English at Birmingham University. The latter two novels were both adapted as primetime TV mini-series, cementing a public image of the English-lit academic as an unworldly, self-serious, accident-prone comic character. Compared to the diabolical Marxist sociology lecturer Howard Kirk in Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975), Lodge’s literature academics were pretty loveable.

Recently, literature academics have become more sensitive to comic depictions of our occupation. English literature has been in decline at A-level. University English departments are shrinking; parents, as much as politicians, are advising the young that studying Keats will not lead to gainful employment. Stem subjects are ascendant. Psychology and business studies and economics have elbowed English lit aside. It is unlikely that Caledonian Road will recruit more students. Will readers assume that its account of the life of a professor of English is based on truth? Reviewers have focused on whether O’Hagan reliably renders the argot and the mores of the London youth gangs he features. These are surely more plausibly drawn than the academics.

Much potential for satire is missed. The biggest cultural change in humanities departments came with the tuition fee rise to £9,000 a year in 2012, and the subsequent emphasis on the student-as-customer. O’Hagan has hardly tapped the comic potential of today’s official culture of student-pleasing. Campbell Flynn, indeed, makes no concessions to likely student demands. He declines to give classes, as such, running his course on “Culture and the Self” (seemingly the only one he teaches) as a series of lectures. He allows no discussion – no awkward questions from the ranks. Try getting that past today’s students!

Professor Flynn is apparently oblivious to endless demands from above that he bend to the ideological pieties of the day. He never has to sit through an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion meeting, or attend an Unconscious Bias Training Day. He never has to contemplate issuing trigger warnings about particular texts, or join in po-faced proclamations about decolonising the curriculum. Given his evident ambition and cynicism, it is strange that he remains untempted by the new forms of careerism that these might allow him. There is one little stab at ideological academic motivation. The head of the English department at UCL, we are told, is the “crimson-bobbed” Jennifer Mearns, “blamer of men” and “correctness vigilante”, who “had searched the universe (and the world’s archives) for evidence of famous writers making sexist remarks in or around the year 1888”. But this sort of caricature belongs in a Daily Telegraph opinion piece.

Academia is supposed to be cushy, and the cushiness of Cameron Flynn’s billet is literal. O’Hagan was good friends with Karl Miller, once head of English at UCL, so must have some faint memories of the tightly partitioned former furniture repository that is UCL’s English department. In Caledonian Road, it looks very different. Flynn has a capacious office, which is “like a club room designed by Matisse”. “It had Edwardian tapestries and Bloomsbury lamps sitting on tables from Heal’s”. There are prints and oil paintings on the walls, and even a drinks trolley. Flynn serves whisky to his students – a form of conviviality that would, in reality, bring the wrath of HR down upon his head.

Towards the end of the novel, Flynn finds out that “UCL wouldn’t be renewing his contract”. “If only,” managers at many a British university might think. Keen to shrink “uneconomic” subjects, some would love to be able to “not renew” the contracts of senior academics in the humanities, rather than having to bribe them into early retirement. Why exactly does he have to go? O’Hagan has heard about the power of student feedback. Flynn tells his sister, a Labour MP, that it is because he is no longer popular with his students. “My scores on Rate My Professor have gone through the floor. Like, multiple low stars.” So, he has to go. Some students might indeed think this a commendable form of justice, but it is not quite reality yet.

Campbell Flynn is not the first imaginary professor of English literature from my own department to have featured in 21st-century literary fiction. In Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 novel The Line of Beauty, the hero, Nick Guest, undertakes a PhD at UCL on Henry James. After his undergraduate days at Oxford, he is (rightly) struck by the grimness of the surroundings. He tells an acquaintance that “the English department used to be a mattress factory”. “It is a bit depressing. I suppose it’s no wonder half the staff are alcoholics.” Hollinghurst (once a graduate student at UCL) gives us something to cling to: secretly, Nick reveres Professor Ettrick, his intellectually subtle supervisor – but he will never admit it. Equally not-quite-flattering is Grace McCleen’s The Professor of Poetry (2013), centred on another member of the UCL English department, Elizabeth Stone, an academic so dedicated to the study and teaching of English poetry that she has allowed almost nothing else to enter her life. This anti-heroine at least loves literature – even if it makes her incapable of loving other people.

Is Rachel Cusk’s The Bradshaw Variations (2009) more complimentary about the business of academic English? Her main character, Tonie, is a recently appointed head of English at a university somewhere in southern England. It is a supposedly super-demanding job, needing “funds of time brought to it like a dowry”. How true. Yet is the exertion worthwhile? Tonie’s academic colleagues seem doomed to literature, rather than committed to it. “Books make you sick,” opines one of them. “Literature. A virus.” Cusk’s English-lit academics have been schooled by their occupation merely in emotional incontinence. In the English department, people flounce out of meetings and cry in corridors. They do not do these things in other departments.

Perhaps the most flattering depiction of the life of an English-literature scholar was in the 1990 novel Possession by AS Byatt, who was herself formerly a lecturer in English at UCL. It was written in more innocent times, when English departments were obscure nooks unnoticed by politicians or journalists. The two main characters – Roland, a male PhD student, and Maud, a young female lecturer – are shown to be passionately devoted to the Victorian poets whose secrets they disinter. Though there is still comedy – Byatt’s satire of then-modish critical theory – academic research is depicted as heady detection, and dead poets as alluring characters.

Academic fashions and prohibitions have always been more extreme in American universities, where the literary canon can be talked of as an oppressive conspiracy. American politicisation of literary dispute has allowed American novels to imagine literary academics as tragic figures. From John Williams’s Stoner (1965) to Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), we see honourable teachers of literature in American universities brought down by malevolent colleagues who, in their hearts, hate literature.

Recently, however, the Netflix drama series The Chair attempted to turn the culture wars of American English departments into comedy. Sandra Oh starred as Professor Ji-Yoon Kim, the new chair of the English department at Pembroke University. She is responsible for managing an alcoholic colleague who gives ideological offence to his students, geriatric faculty members who condescend to the (untenured) young, black, female lecturer, and a sinister dean who wants to sack academics whose enrolments have fallen. Despite her protests, she finds David Duchovny (playing himself) appointed as the department’s new “distinguished lecturer”. (The actor did, we are told, begin an English PhD at Yale in the 1980s.) “He has a country house around here,” a university trustee tells her. “I thought: here’s the kind of person who can revitalise the study of literature.”

We are supposed to be disarmed by Professor Kim’s humane ditziness. She deals with the boozy lecturer by snogging him in the street. She openly sympathises with the political demands of the students. She forces the reactionary old Herman Melville expert to share his classes with the sassy young lecturer, who teaches the undergraduates to perform raps about Moby-Dick, thus demonstrating why she should have tenure. The current anti-intellectual habits of American English faculties, utterly ripe for satire, get away scot-free. The current state of the academic study of English literature, in the US as well as Britain, awaits its accurate satirical analyst.