Norway Doorway, pt 4: Way up North and Academic Travel

Randall Stephens

Academics do their fair share of traveling. Research trips. Conferences. Job interviews . . . Hiltons. Best Westerns. Off-season dorm rooms that smell of Ramen Noodles and stale beer. Roach motels that smell even worse.

For me, a trip to Svalbard this week for my work as a Fulbright Roving Scholar is without comparison.

Today I join my two colleagues, Sarah Anderson and Isaac Larison, at the Longyearbyen Skole. The three of us will be speaking with students about the American educational system, postwar US history, Native American culture, religion in the South, and more.

Longyearbyen's population hovers around 2,000, much more if you throw in polar bears and Siberian Huskys. The village looks a little bit like an IKEA-designed base camp on the planet Hoth. Very cool. We're thrilled to be up here 800 miles north of the arctic circle. And strangely, thanks to warm ocean currents, it's more mild than one would think. All three of us have spent plenty of time crisscrossing the country in planes, trains, and automobiles. It certainly helps that, like plenty of others in our profession, we like to travel.

In a primer for grad students who are about to make their way into their field of choice, Paul Gray and David E. Drew write in the Chronicle about one of the perks of higher ed: travel. (A shrinking perk, for sure, as states cut budgets, and deans slash and burn.) In "What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School 2.0," Gray and Drew write:

Travel is a major fringe benefit in academe. The amount of travel varies by field and by institution. In most fields, one or more major meetings a year take place at the national and regional levels. Despite financial stringencies, most institutions pay your way if you are on the program or involved in recruiting (usually restricted to senior faculty members). Furthermore, each meeting is scheduled in a different location. Because it is easier to win approval for a short trip than it is for a long one, take the opportunity to attend nearby meetings whenever they occur.

Food for thought for those, to quote the Pernice Brothers, "contemplating suicide or a graduate degree."

Perhaps the travel bit was a bigger boon in ages past. More than 30 years ago David Lodge parodied the academic jetset in his hilarious, exuberant novel Small World. (Sadly, no characters are zooming north to Svalbard.) As a send-up that's now become a period piece, Lodge's book reads like a Mad Men version of the tenured-and-sinecured classes. A choice passage:

The whole academic world seems to be on the move. Half the passengers on transatlantic flights these days are university teachers. Their luggage is heavier than average, weighed down with books and papers--and bulkier, because their wardrobes must embrace both formal wear and leisurewear, clothes for attending lectures in, and clothes for going to the beach in, or to the Museum, or the Schloss, or the Duomo, or the Folk Village. For that's the attraction of the conference circuit: it's a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism. . . (162)

Now where was that Svalbard Museum, and where did I put my extra hat?

Academic Novels as Therapy

Randall Stephens

"He was so tired of this: this job search, this whole process emptying him out like a vast, brutal enema again and again," the hapless protagonist thinks to himself in Ian McGuire's raucous, delightfully funny academic novel Incredible Bodies (Bloomsbury, 2006). Morris Gutman, a 37-year-old deadender, waits in his car, in a cold sweat on a typically gloomy English day, before his interview with Coketown University. The school is something like an updated, slightly better off Rummidge from David Lodge's hilarious classic Small World. "How many interviews had he had over the last five years? He added them up - Eccles, Peterborough, Gwent . . . twenty-two. Twenty-two interviews. He needed to bring it to an end one way or another. It had to stop." The book's dark comedy is a great distraction from the toils of academic labor.

Academic novels are surely gazpacho soup for the sick academic soul. Served cold and with a side of schadenfreude, it's still weirdly therapeutic.

Will the wretched job market turn around any time this side of 2112? Maybe, as Audrey Williams June writes in the latest Chronicle. But in the meantime, if you're adrift in the uncertain seas of the market, try reading academic novels for a little help.

Summer Fiction Reading

Randall Stephens

Have you noticed all the newspaper and magazine articles on summer reading? Can you take your iPad, Kindle, or Nook to the beach? (Someone must have invented a waterproof case already.)

Over at the Chronicle and the Guardian, you'll find some great suggestions.

Can't get enough of the academy? Already missing the longstanding cold wars, never-ending committee meetings, and seeing what your sartorially challenged colleagues are wearing? Do you have a taste for higher ed schadenfreude and the drama of the academy? Then have a look at Ms. Mentors' list of academic novels. "In real life, academicians do have flashes of wit, and they love gossip," she writes. "They're honest researchers and dedicated teachers, and some revel in committee work. They may even have romances and happily marry each other, despite their terrible fear of fun. They rarely kill anyone, even at MLA meetings. But they do love to write about themselves and about the classroom as a site for contested and resisted hermeneutical hegemonies." She highlights "Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis; The Lecturer's Tale and Publish and Perish, by James Hynes; Changing Places and Small World, by David Lodge; Straight Man, by Richard Russo; and Moo, by Jane Smiley," and a score of others.

Maybe historical fiction is more your bag. Over at the Guardian Andrew Miller offers up his "Top 10 Historical Novels: From Rosemary Sutcliff to Hilary Mantel, the novelist chooses his favourite books drawing on history's 'rattle-bag of wonderful stories.'" He notes: "The books listed here share the essential virtues of all good fiction: the renewal of our sense of the world, of ourselves, of language, the extension of ourselves across time and space. And how odd it would be, how dull, if novelists and readers confined themselves, in the name of some dubious notion of relevance, to the events and style of one particular period." Among others the list includes: Kepler by John Banville; Rites of Passage by William Golding; A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel; Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar; and I, Claudius by Robert Graves.

That last bit reminds me that I need to order the HBO series Rome for our library. Intrigue, violence, military campaigns, ancient occult . . . It will make for some great summer viewing.

Laughing at Us: Academic Novels

Randall Stephens

"Why is the academic novel my favorite genre?" asks American literary critic Elaine Showalter in Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). "Maybe it's just narcissistic pleasure. One theory about the rise of the novel argues that it developed because readers like to read about their own world, and indeed about themselves." Of the genre itself, Showalter writes that it "has arisen and flourished only since about 1950, when American universities were growing rapidly, first to absorb the returning veterans, and then to take in a larger and larger percentage of the baby-booming population" (Showalter, 1). In the academic novel one finds the "tribal rites" of the profession, the weird quirks of tweedy academics, and stories of professional dread. (I'm guessing it should be a boom time for academic novels, given all the Cassandras wailing about the decline of the humanities.) When Showalter was an undergad, such books filled "a novice's need to fit into the culture" (2).

I like academic novels mostly because they make me laugh.

I'm reading, for the first time, novelist Kingsley Amis's Luck Jim (1954), a university sendup about a hapless history lecturer. At his provincial English university, James Dixon, an utterly uncommitted medievalist, weaves a web of ridiculous deceptions, while preparing to deliver a lecture on "Merrie England." (Let's just say the lecture does not go well.) Fretting about his love life and his teaching prospects for the next year, Jim schemes to make things right. Yet, no matter how hard he tries, this déclassé son of working class parents just can't win.

The book fits into that classic English schadenfreude, black humor tradition, evident today in British TV shows like The Office and Worst Week of My Life.

A few fun history-related passages:

Jim rides in the car with his dry-as-dust, scatter-brained senior colleague, Welch, and frets over his work-in-progress article.

Dixon looked out of the window at the fields wheeling past, bright green after a wet April. It wasn't the double-exposure effect of the last half-minute's talk that had dumbfounded him, for such incidents formed the staple material of Welch colloquies; it was the prospect of reciting the title of the article he'd written. It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. "In considering this strangely neglected topic," it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself only more of a hypocrite and fool (14-15).

Jim Prepares to proctor an exam and thinks about the hideousness of the Middle Ages.

The examinations were now in progress, and Dixon had nothing to do that morning but turn up at the Assembly Hall at twelve-thirty to collect some scripts. They would contain answers to questions he'd set about the Middle Ages. As he approached the Common Room he thought briefly about the Middle Ages. Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chiang Kaishek, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages. Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as miserable, as cocksure, as bad at art, as dismally ludicrous, or as wrong as they'd been in the Middle Age - Margaret's way of referring to the Middle Ages? He grinned at this last thought, then stopped doing that on entering the Common Room . . . (87).

A real pleasure read. I'm now looking out for similar so-called campus novels. (Any suggestions? I've not read David Lodge, Vladimir Nabokov, or Zadie Smith's contributions to the genre.) The 2009 indie film Tenure, starring Luke Wilson, brings the genre back to the silver screen. (Watch it in full on Netflix.)

I'm still on the lookout for Ian McGuire's Incredible Bodies (2006). The Bloomsbury website describes McGuire's higher ed farce: "Coketown University, also known as the ‘plughole of England’, is where thirty-something Morris Gutman has achieved the mighty heights of temporary lecturer. . . . Now Morris is hoping to negotiate a permanent department job under the noses of smarter and better candidates by being obsequious, cheap and willing to do anything."

I can picture it clearly enough.