Excerpt: The structure remains intact.
Spoilers ahead.
In one of the first scenes in The Chair, Ji-Yoon Kim (Sandra Oh) makes her way to her new office, on her first day as the first woman head of the English Department. She takes in the new space, unwraps the gift left by her friend Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass), and sits in her chair behind the desk, savouring her heady first moments.
As she sat there literally smelling her new success, I watched and thought, That chair will give way and she’ll fall.
A split second later, that is exactly what happens.
Netflix’s valiant new limited series about life in an English Department in an era of Wokeness is often disappointingly predictable even as it does get a lot right. In the end, it doesn’t offer more than a comforting narrative about the university and, worse, offers a narrative about women that’s even older than any such institution.
Set in a Harvard-aspiring private university named Pembroke (no public university has ever had the budget for this many leather chairs and stained glass windows), The Chair follows the trials of Ji-Yoon as she begins her groundbreaking journey, and her determination to shake things up in a moribund department that, even in 2021, is still populated mostly by white men, at a university whose faculty is 87 percent white. It doesn’t take too long for her to realise that she may have been allowed to become head simply because the entire department, blasted by falling enrollments and weighted by salaries paid to older faculty who sometimes have only five students in every class, is going to hell. So, really, why not have a woman of colour lead the way into the fiery pit of extinction?
Is The Chair accurate in its rendition of academia? Well, yes and no. It’s unlikely but not impossible that an entire department in a university so determined to aspire to Harvard-dom as this one is would still be composed mostly of white men. Even the dean refers to it as a “lumbering dinosaur” and he’s a lumbering dinosaur who can’t be bothered to remember that his top new hire, a Black woman, the only such in the entire department ever, is named “Yasmin,” not “Jasmin.” Ji-Yoon’s child Ju-Ju is a brat who walks in on her babysitter in the bathroom and screams to get her way. As someone who has had to make her way around the extremely bratty children of University of Chicago faculty, I can confirm that some academics’ children tend to be, and there is no kind way to put this, assholes. (Boundaries are a problem with this lot as are basic manners, of which they have none. I can’t wait till they’re grown-up and I can traumatise them by calling them assholes to their entitled faces).
At Ji-Yoon’s first departmental meeting, one aging male turns to another with a pill in his hand and asks if it’s blue or green. He also unhesitatingly gropes his fellow female faculty member and compliments her ass. Years ago, I heard of a graduate student who worked as a bartender at her English department’s Modern Language Association party and spent the entire night dodging the gropey hands of creepy male faculty while pouring shots. #MeToo hasn’t ended such behaviour: faculty simply outsource their behaviour at other people’s departmental gatherings. I used to attend faculty meetings as the representative of adjuncts in an English department and was relegated to the children’s corner with my grad student compatriot: we stayed awake by drawing cartoons and scribbling notes to each other—I suspect most of the tenure track faculty did the same. At one point, there were fifty-one tenure-track faculty and fifty adjuncts. This was in the Aughts and a friend looked at the two lists and mused, “All we need is a Jim Jeffords in that lot, and we could take over…”
The complete absence of adjuncts is perhaps the most curious feature of Ji-Yoon’s department. The Chair wants to distill approximately ten centuries (about how long English departments have existed in one form or another, if you go back to at least Oxford) into six episodes and that’s a hard task, so I’m sympathetic to the creative decisions that had to be made. But. English Departments have been increasingly pressed to justify their existence, and very few exist without adjuncts who take on the burden of teaching all the required courses so that “real” faculty may focus on the task at hand. There are other weird anachronisms: Ji-Yoon quotes Harold Bloom at her first departmental meeting, a fact that would have raised eyebrows even among the septuagenarians in the room and perhaps the comment, “Please, can you not?”
Yasmin McKay (Nana Mensah) is the only Black faculty member, something that’s both likely and unlikely. It’s easy to assume that contemporary English departments are just swimming in faculty of colour, especially given their supposedly progressive politics (most are liberal, at best) but the fact remains that in universities overall, between 2013 and 2017, “the number of Hispanic and Latino faculty members grew by less than 1% and the number of black faculty members grew by only one-tenth of a percent.” English departments may have a better showing, perhaps because of area studies like African American or Postcolonial Studies within the field (which raises the problematic issue that Black and other faculty of colour are also expected to only teach subjects deemed suitable for their ethnicity and race). But they are still majority white for the most part.
The Chair wants to be satirical, but is mostly just maybe-kinda-sometimes funny (hence the pratfall in the opening sequence). Two genius bits are when the Title IX office merges (mutates?) with the “ethics and compliance” office, with the very same person fronting it all: “We’re now a department of one.” It’s a plotline that is positively Escher-esque in its twisted logic and nails the absurdity of university bureaucracies. And David Duchovny is very, very good playing an entitled David Duchovny who wants to present his 30-year-old PhD thesis at a Distinguished Lectureship, unaware of all the changes in the field but still willing to make a crack about his Ivy League degree being superior to anything from the place that’s about to shell out money and an office for his celebrity. If you have to watch the series, these two bits are really all you need.
Pembroke is also unusually diverse, with classrooms filled to the brim with Black, brown, and Asian students of all colours. But, and this is awkward, most of those literal bodies are literally recycled, showing up in all the classrooms and at various protests, as if it was difficult to find more than, say, ten different people (“No one will know the difference, they all look alike,” I imagine the casting agent saying, and they are wrong because I kept wondering: “Wait, wasn’t that the same guy who….?” ). Said protests ensue when the perpetually inebriated white male professor Dobson, a throwback to an era when English professors freely peed drunkenly in parking lots, as he does, and showed up late for classes, as he also does, makes what he thinks is a jokey Nazi salute (try saying “jokey Nazi salute” out loud and you see why this was always a horrible idea). There’s a hint that he’s not quite made for the changing times because his Wisecracking Popular Cool Male Prof demeanor and attempts to sway his students back to supporting him fail him, miserably. Dobson is mostly kind and not that much of a jerk when he’s partly or somewhat sober and Ji-Yoon’s brat loves him, adopting him as a father (a brat loves a brat as a father-figure: seems par for the course in this show).
But, but, but. Oh, so many, many buts. The Chair gets it both wrong and right about English departments and academia, and it’s not much more than a slight, light attempt at the kind of show that only the New York Times and English department faculty could love because it ultimately reflects and reaffirms the kind of “Literature Is Truly Great And Makes Us Think of Our Higher Purpose” message that is just this side of Dead Poets’ Society (which the students here would have torn to pieces, as they should). It’s humanist at its core and is made for an audience that expects a series about an English department to show all the foibles the Times’s readers are used to reading about in reports concerning, say, sushi at Oberlin but without actually tearing the entire enterprise apart. At the end of the day, everybody agrees that LIT-AH-RA-TURE matters deeply. Of course it does, but why does it need to exist outside of an English department? Can it, without the labour of the many—women, adjuncts, women adjuncts—who make it all happen?
Those aren’t questions with pre-determined answers but real ones, and they may be unfair questions, too large to place upon the shoulders of such a wee, twee frame but The Chair plays it mostly safe and dives into sentimental reasons (something about opening your mind but to what is unclear). It makes the protesting students the butt of the joke, blaming them for the fact that, apparently no one wants to read LIT-AH-RA-TURE unless it can be rapped (as is Moby Dick in one class). It endows faculty with a desire to pursue The Life of the Mind but it can’t conceive of students, who are going into debt for an expensive education, as having entered the doubtless-built-by-plantation-owners august buildings with minds and lives of their own and a desire to grasp and grapple with texts with complexity. The parts where Yasmin McKay draws out her students’ comments that Moby Dick is about white supremacy are double-edged enough to absolve the show of any responsibility: they could be read as either critiquing or commenting on How Texts Are Read These Days (it’s not that Moby Dick cannot be read through a critique of white supremacy, but that the reading here is presented as facile and it’s unclear whether the show is mocking that or not). As John Warner points out, The Chair isn’t a satire because, “Effective satire takes sides. It must put something in its sights and take it down.” This show doesn’t go beyond a few good lines, that first pratfall and some gentle ribbing of English profs. The structure remains intact.
All of this is mildly annoying, but nothing compared to the real travesty of the show, which is that it can’t conceive of a woman—and a woman of colour—who has been audaciously ambitious all of her professional life and gets to stay that way. Instead, Ji-Yoon is willing to throw it all away for a drunken mess of a mediocre white man. We learn that she was once engaged to someone else, approved of by all her Korean aunties even, but he had to move to Michigan for a tenure-track position. That university only offered her an adjunct position with a heavy teaching load, and she pitched her stakes at Pembroke instead because they gave her a deal and a tenure-track position she couldn’t pass up. She waited for years to be able to adopt a child from Mexico who bitterly resents her because she’s been bullied by her Korean American cousins for her origins. Ji-Yoon can’t find babysitters for her intractable daughter (even her own father is reluctant to spend time with his granddaughter) and juggles parenting responsibilities with her demanding academic career. She makes it through the grueling tenure process and then becomes the chair of a department whose aging denizens would like to see her roast in hell. But, she persists and the show begins with her finally savouring her triumph.
And then it makes her give up all that for a slob who is so addled he can’t even remember the name of his own course. At one point, he falls asleep in her office. She comes upon him (naturally: he’s in her office) and wakes him up because he’s late for his class—and has to help him even put on his shoes. There is no woman organiser or professor or adjunct or, hell, any kind of woman in any job anywhere who has not had an experience like this: A male co-worker fucks up, she is expected to clean up his mess and, more often than not, do his shoddy work for him as well. Ji-Yoon literally dresses this incompetent man-baby and trots him towards his classroom.
It doesn’t end there: at the hearing about his dismissal, with the chants of protesting students ringing outside, Ji-Yoon decides that Bill’s firing would be counterproductive (something-something, again, about the work and reading and teaching) and refuses to participate in the process. When the Old Guard faculty in her own department try to stage a coup, she gives up her position as Head to Joan Hambling (Holland Taylor), one of the septugenarians. The moment is presented as some kind of feminist triumph because Joan has been slighted for years in the department, forced to act like a social secretary despite her academic work. At the end, we find Ji-Yoon chatting with Bill who has decided to fight the university for his job back, having somehow cleared his head enough that he thinks, at least this week, that he wants to remain a professor. We leave them presumably about to engage in a life together.
There has been, over the last few decades, much talk about female academics and the “work-life balance.” This is, of course, a necessary conversation to have. Structurally, academia, especially the kind of Research 1 institution represented by Pembroke, makes it nearly impossible for women who are mothers, married or not, to publish as much as their male counterparts whose wives often take up parenting and household duties. But a lot of the conversation tends to assume that the best option is to lower the expectations for women, to make it possible for them to gain tenure or upward mobility by publishing and presenting less. Where does that leave extremely ambitious women who want to have careers packed to the brim with publications and academic honours? Where might that leave ambitious women of colour who don’t want children? Or ambitious women who are also married with children? What happens when the head of a department who is also a woman of colour manages to…wait, is this actually possible? … succeed? The Chair engages in sleight of hand: it gives us a woman of colour: look, diversity! It gives her a complicated multicultural life: look, more diversity! It gives us classrooms filled with students of colour: can you even handle this much diversity? But in the end, the message is simple: that Korean-American first-gen chick just wants to shack up with that white slob and, really, at the end of the day, it’s not a career she wants but a life of contentment she only grasps when she sees the possibility of romance. All those years of burning ambition? Pfft, false consciousness, clearly.
You could argue that The Chair is just showing us a slice of life and that what emerges is simply a naturalistic portrayal of what could be. But the show is carefully calibrated, with a plot driven by headlines about academia, and it’s deeply self-conscious about its engagement with matters of race and ethnicity: nothing here is unintentional. The question of whether or not The Chair is realistic is the wrong one to ask. The much more interesting and revealing question is: how and why does it deploy all the elements it had at its disposal and still manage to wrest from all that only a retrograde message that, really, a brilliant, ambitious woman of colour is doomed to fail. The message at the end is: Let’s just figure out a way to turn it all back to the lumbering dinosaurs.
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Image: Mary Cassat, Young Woman Reading, 1876.