Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents

"I love this book by Elaine Showalter. She takes the campus novel—of which there are many—as a social barometer of university life. She uses the novels as a way of trying to make sense of how the concerns of academics and university teachers have changed and shifted over time. The other thing that she does—which I think is just so brilliant I couldn’t help but steal it as an idea—is that she introduces this idea of ‘academic time.’ One of the things I love about working in the university is that the academic year has a kind of seasonal quality. We really are seasonal workers — though some people would say that that has been unsettled and changed, and that those seasons of academic or intellectual life aren’t quite as distinct as they once were. Elaine’s book also made me much more alert to how academic or campus novels very often pick up on emerging trends before they’ve even become part of the educational debate. One of the books that she mentions is a book by Frank Parkin called The Mind and Body Shop. It is a fantastic book written in the 1980s about a privatizing and commercializing university, where the philosophy department is basically going out of business. So they develop this new, branded, version of the philosophy department called ‘The Mind and Body Shop.’ It sets up in the local community and does all kinds of rather unsavoury and off-colour things, involving the sex industry. It’s a wonderfully comic and playful story. But the thing that is so deeply shocking about reading Frank Parkin’s book now is how many of the things he predicted in that book have actually come to pass. There is a passage when he talks about how there will no longer be pensions for academics in this new world. I can imagine readers in the late 1980s thinking, ‘That’s obviously science fiction!’ Also, there’s lots of wonderfully funny things about students as consumers and the student experience, much of which aren’t that far away from how it is today for students —doing serious intellectual work and having to do a lot of paid work at the same time. Yes, the portraits of academics in academic novels are often comic or parodies. But these are some wonderful insights. One of the key protagonists in Frank Parkin’s book is a man who is obsessed with George Orwel l. He makes these research trips to Wigan to find the commode, which George Orwell would have used when he was writing The Road to Wigan Pier . I have to say that though I’ve never looked for George Orwell’s commode I have done some pretty strangely esoteric forms of obsessive lead-following. Some of those observations are well aimed. Clifford Geertz, the American anthropologist said it was good for intellectuals to occasionally be made fun of. It is good for us to have some of the hubris of our lofty titles cut down to size. That is one of the lessons I draw, very often, from campus novels."