Lechers, Psychos & Frauds: Professors Portrayed In Novels Of The Last Fifty Years

by Laurie Henry
Michael Chabon, “Wonder Boys”, 1995; Jane Smiley, “Moo”, 1995; Don DeLillo, “White Noise”, 1985; Gail Godwin, “The Odd Woman”, 1974; Alison Lurie, “The War Between the Tates”, 1974; John Barth, “The End of the Road”, 1967; Randall Jarrell, “Pictures From an Institution”, 1952; Mary McCarthy, “The Groves of Academe”, 1951
AFTER CREATIVE-WRITING professor Grady Tripp encourages a student to nose around in his department head’s locked bedroom cabinet; after the student shoots and kills the department head’s dog; after a drunken visitor reveals Grady’s affair with the department head’s wife, Grady either leaves or is fired from his job. He marries his pregnant lover and tries to get back to work:

Sara landed the position of dean of students at Coxley College and arranged for me to be hired, part-time. I do my writing in the morning, now, if the boy will let me, and in the afternoon when I’m not teaching, and sometimes in the evening when I get home from the Alibi Tavern. On a day when my work hasn’t gone well, I like to spend a couple of hours at the Alibi’s dented steel bar, and you will find me there on Tuesday nights after the advanced workshop lets out.” – Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

Despite his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, I’d guess that Michael Chabon must not be doing much teaching these days. Since when do part-time faculty members, even writers like Grady Tripp with three published books, get to teach the advanced workshop? And is it really likely that a tenured professor would leave a full-time job without a major fight over such minor departmental misunderstandings?
I looked at college professors as they’ve been portrayed by American writers in literary fiction within the last fifty years, and the results aren’t pretty. Professors in fiction are academically lazy: (from Moo: “Timothy Monahan, associate professor of English and teacher of fiction writing, had never returned to the campus more than twelve hours before the beginning of his first class, and often cut it closer than that, to two hours, or even ten minutes.”) If not lazy, they’re incompetent or unscrupulous, ready to embrace any trend. In White Noise, Jack Gladney, though chair of the department of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the Hill, cannot speak a word of German. One of his colleagues has been having trouble “establishing an Elvis Presley power base in the department of American Environments.” Professors are personally unscrupulous too. Henry Mulcahy, an English instructor in The Groves of Academe, bullies his students into free babysitting.
No matter if their creators are men or women, most male professors since the 60s are lechers. Though in relationships with perfectly nice women their own age, they’re easily attracted by students, younger wives of colleagues, and promiscuous female professors. Grady Tripp, though married and with a pregnant lover, is “desperately in love” with a twenty-year-old student. Brian Tate, the history professor in The War Between the Tates, deserts his wife for a flaky grad student in part because he hasn’t been chosen chair of his department. Jacob Horner, in The End of the Road, gives a “diagnostic spelling test” on the first day of class:

One hundred spelling words dictated rapidly enough to keep their heads down, and I, perched
high on my desk, could diagnose to my heart’s content every bump of femininity in the room
(praised by American grade schools, where little girls learn to sit up front!)

Women professors, if allowed to have love relationships, must pay for their unnatural academic credentials. In The Odd Woman, Jane Clifford, an English instructor, carries on a long-distance romance with a married and much older art history professor. After staying up late one night drawing a picture of a woman making love with six different men at one time, Jane flushes her artwork down the toilet, which results in an embarrassing visit from a plumber.
Fictional professors are eccentric, often not appealingly so. The head of the horticulture department in Moo refers to himself, without humor, as “Chairman X,” and to his wife as “The Lady X.” Also in Moo, agriculturist Nils Harstad, in his mid-fifties, dreams of conceiving five or six children via “one or two artificially induced multiple births that would make up for lost time and, as a side benefit, bring science into the service of the greater glory of God.” Professors in White Noise boast about the length of time they’ve been able to drive with their eyes closed. One confides:

I’ve closed my eyes for up to six seconds on winding country roads but that’s only doing thirty
or thirty-five. On multilane highways I usually hover at seventy before I close my eyes. You
do this on straightaways. I’ve closed my eyes for up to five seconds on straightaways driving
with other people in the car. You wait till they’re drowsy is how you do it.

About Manny Gumbiner, a departed writing professor in Pictures from an Institution, the narrator observes that if another teacher “had made her writing students take off all their clothes, pile them on the table with the chairs and then had had them burn the next classroom’s Spanish teacher on the pile, the old students would only have said to the new, with smile: You should have been in Manny’s class.”
Fictional professors particularly enjoy abusing the powerless. In Pictures from an Institution, the writing teacher, Gertrude, insults the welded sculptures of an art professor: “She was a shipyard welder during the war, and the sculpture just naturally followed.” Joe Morgan, star professor of the history department in The End of the Road, hits his wife twice for apologizing to guests that there’s not enough furniture in their house. A professor in War Between the Tates asks a graduate student, “Do you know what percentage of our female graduates go on to make any use whatever of their expensive education?”
Still, apart from the political scientist above, do fictional professors make good teachers? Well, some of them do. Grady Tripp’s motives for befriending a suicidal writing student who’s carved “Frank Capra” into his hand seem unselfish, and the student certainly benefits from their association. The writing assignments Tim Monahan of Moo gives are useful and imaginative. Jane Clifford in The Odd Woman talks patiently on the phone to an academically weak student, although it’s nearly midnight and she’s hoping for a call from her boyfriend.
Even in the books written in the 50s, there’s little about the life of the fictional professor that seems incomprehensible today. The only truly inexplicable point comes in Pictures from an Institution, when a woman professor is said to have lost her job for cooking a hen on a Bunsen burner in a science lab. How would that have cost her her job? The danger of fire? The misuse of university property? Also, the boundaries between male fictional professors and their female students were also once firmer than they are today. In The Groves of Academe, Henry Mulcahy chaperones school dances in a non-lascivious way. Gottfried Rosenbaum in Pictures from an Institution is as decent a mentor toward the talented young musician Constance as a parent could desire.
In fiction, as in life, it used to be easier to find work. Jacob Horner, instructor of prescriptive grammar (four sections) at Wicomico State Teachers College, gets his job not by answering an ad but by writing a letter of inquiry to the department head. And this despite having passed his MA oral exam but not even starting on the thesis, and despite saying at the job interview, “My doctor recommended that I go back to teaching. He seems to think it’s the thing I’m best at, and the thing that’s best for me.” Henry Mulcahy in The Groves of Academe is the only Ph.D. in his department; another full-time language teacher is just twenty-three years old with only a BA. It’s not until The Odd Woman that the scene becomes familiar: Jane Clifford, ABD, is hired for a one-year replacement job and is happy to get it.
If professors in literary and popular fiction must live with ambiguous reputations, professors in mysteries except for the professor-sleuth, who is usually a scholar and decent human being, have it even worse. Lev Raphael, author of The Edith Wharton Murders, points out on his web site, http://www.levraphael.com/index.html, “Who says academia isn’t the real world? It’s got the vanity of professional sports; the hypocrisy of politics; the cruelty of big business; and the inhumanity of organized crime.” Typing “Academic Mystery” into a search engine calls up a variety of appealing sites. Philip Rider, a former part-time faculty member at Northern Illinois University, lists about a hundred academic mysteries on his web page http://www.niu.edu/acs/prr/myslist.html. He also points readers in the direction of College Mystery Novels (John E. Kramer, Garland, 1983). The Winter 1996-1997 edition of Mystery Readers Journal, http://www.murderonthemenu.com/mystery/Academic.html, is devoted to the academic mystery, with articles written mostly by mystery writers. In the journal’s online excerpt, writer Robert Barnard, who taught for twenty-two years, describes feelings that seem to be common to an awful lot of writers:

“There’s nothing that irritates me more than people who condemn whole professions: the police are pigs, all soldiers are fascists-that kind of thing. I call it jobism, and it’s quite as bad as racism. Still, I have to say that I have not greatly liked the academics I have come into contact with in the course of my life. They have seemed the most sniveling, self-important scraps of humanity you can imagine, and as windy and whiney a bunch as ever demanded special privileges without doing anything to deserve them.”