The sad professors of campus fiction tend to be either clowns or saints. If they are clowns, what emerges is a comedy of academic malaise, such as Richard Russo’s “Straight Man” or Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim.” (Amis’s protagonist characterizes his scholarly output as “a funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts” that throws “pseudo-light . . . upon non-problems.”) If they are saints, the novel becomes a sorrowful attack on the internal and external forces that devalue the life of the mind. In John Williams’s “Stoner,” an assistant professor of English arrives at university an idealist; decades later, he assesses his devotion’s thin harvest: “He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance.”
Professor Jay Fitger—the beleaguered star of “Dear Committee Members,” the Thurber Prize-winning novel by Julie Schumacher, from 2014—at first seems firmly Team Clown, but gradually reveals his Team Saint stripes in an academic enclave buckling under neoliberal and end-stage-capitalist pressures. “Dear Committee Members” unfolds Fitger’s professional blunders and romantic trials through a series of increasingly unhinged recommendation letters. He is a dish towel of disillusion who advocates for one student on the grounds that “the poor kid . . . can read and write.” The novel that contains him—a cataract of useless paperwork tumbling from a reservoir of pique—skewers, mostly cheerfully, the mediocrity and bickering it deems endemic to academia. Now, Fitger returns to work for “The Shakespeare Requirement,” which finds him freshly installed as chair of the Payne University English department. He must contend with a broken phone, a broken computer, a wasp infestation, a crumbling building dotted with toxic mold, common spaces occupied by hostile powers (the economics department), and tetchy administrators. Jay still loves his ex-wife, who is dating the milquetoast dean, and his students, whom he finds “as tender and unsuspecting as asparagus tips.” He still arms himself with acidic volubility against colleagues who illustrate the varieties of human pettiness, narcissism, and affectation. “The Shakespeare Requirement,” like “Straight Man,” sublimates Professor Stoner by using his gentle shade as fuel for humor; the book leans into Fitger’s haplessness but remains attuned to his essential nobility.
Schumacher grounds her sequel in current real-life woes of the academy. The novel centers on Fitger’s quest to craft, at the dean’s behest, a “Statement of Vision”—upon which all the faculty must agree, and without which no budget can be approved—that summarizes the aims and purposes of the English major. What distinguishes the Payne of 2014 from the Payne of the present are quickening winds of professionalization and illiberalism, personified in the fearsome chair of economics, Roland Gladwell, who has made the abolition of the humanities his personal crusade. Fitger’s counterproposal—to attract more English majors by waiving the canonical graduation requirements—awakens the wrath of a moss-backed traditionalist, Dennis Cassovan, who becomes swept up in a media campaign to “SOS” (Save Our Shakespeare). Cassovan is the animal equivalent of a migraine headache, but Fitger needs him as an ally in a Darwinian scrum for university resources and clout. Pressing contemporary questions—What is to be done about the great white men of the English canon? Why is tenure so precarious?—batter the college and its discontents. In “The Shakespeare Requirement,” Schumacher blends satire with righteousness; she seeks to circle collegiate wagons against external threats to the liberal arts. Myopic professors are no longer her chief target. Now the targets are all the bastards who get in their way.
In contrast to his biliousness in “Dear Committee Members,” Fitger’s choler feels suddenly ardent in the manner of Joan of Arc: he burns with a moral anger, and “The Shakespeare Requirement” imagines the work of teaching with compassion and urgency. “Like most of the English faculty,” Schumacher writes, about a colleague of Fitger’s, “she had dealt with suicidal and homicidal students, students with eating disorders who fainted in class, students with depression, cancer, learning disabilities, dead or dying parents, autism, schizophrenia, gender identity issues, romantic heartbreak, and various syndromes involving the inability to sit quietly and read.” The villains opposing these seminar-room heroes exude a storybook malice. (The notion of a “broadly diverse education” strikes Roland as “a steaming, politically correct pile of shit.”) What drama results feels more Miltonic than strictly funny: the torch of knowledge versus the lowering dark. “Do I like it?” a language scholar answers Fitger, when he asks about her job. “This is not about liking or not liking . . . it is about staying alive . . . a blood sport.”
The comedy of Jordy Rosenberg’s recent campus novel, “Confessions of the Fox,” has similarly high stakes. The book’s university setting is a shrine to end-stage capitalism, in which corporate interests hold hostage the last valiant resisters. The scholar-narrator, Dr. Voth, makes his great discovery when his college guts its library in favor of “a dining atrium for upper-echelon administrators”; he is forced to work for a sinister pharmaceutical company and answers to a “Dean of Surveillance” whose fantastical stupidity only sometimes veils his menace. One of the intense pleasures of Rosenberg and Schumacher’s novels is the indignation with which their embattled professors try to succor knowledge, riding to its defense like blazing Quixotes. “I’m familiar with Lockean theories of possessive individualism,” Voth snaps, cutting through his dean’s bureaucratic niceties; Fitger, meanwhile, refuses to order misspelled dishes on restaurant menus, as he believes “that transparency of meaning and lucid expression traveled hand-in-hand, like Hansel and Gretel through the terrible woods; and furthermore, that carelessness in language—syntactical clumsiness, boneheaded usage, confusion of affect and effect, lie and lay—betrayed a dubiety of purpose.” His close third-person narration is studded with aggressively arcane terms: muculent, feculent, furfuraceous, erotopath.
The uncompromising moral center of “The Shakespeare Requirement,” however, is not the protagonist but his seeming antagonist, Cassovan—and here the book deliberately raises the ghost of Stoner. Moribund and obdurate, Cassovan represents the old guard; he is the custodian and elegist of an unalienable tragedy. Jokes glance off him; like Williams’s literary scholar, he has dedicated his life, for better or worse, to the bottled light of words and the illumination of the soul. When Roland Gladwell confronts him about retirement, the tiny professor’s “eyes were bloodshot, rheumy, set deep in his face like matching fires in two ancient caves.” He had been thinking “of the impermanence of his work: how deeply invested in it he was, and how little it meant to almost anyone else—which was as it should be.” The economist preens; the Shakespearean knows that “all scholarly endeavor was eventually . . . tucked . . . into endless paper beds, installed within tombstone covers and seldom disturbed.” This statement, an epitaph for the human condition, also alludes to Stoner, who realizes in death that “it hardly mattered to him that [his] book was forgotten and served no use.” Pathetic, futile, absurd: to the Gladwells of the world, Cassovan and his ilk could easily read as failures. But Schumacher refuses to make them the butt of the joke.
