To watch Netflix’s The Chair as an actual English professor is a decidedly uncomfortable experience. Yes, the six-episode series, which takes as its subject the long twilight of college literature programs, is as witty, insightful, and layered as has been generally reported. Yet viewing it from the faculty lounge is akin to observing one’s own terminal decline. A useful corollary may be the prime-time hospital drama. For decades a staple of American television, such shows are doubtless bittersweet for those audience members who really are bedbound and dying.
Set at the fictional Pembroke University, The Chair stars Sandra Oh as Ji-Yoon Kim, an Emily Dickinson scholar who has recently been elected to the leadership post of her struggling department. Though surrounded by the trappings of “sub-Ivy” wealth, Ji-Yoon and her colleagues lack the peace of mind to enjoy their finely appointed quarters. Enrollment numbers, the sine qua non of the modern educational institution, are down throughout the humanities. Sensing major cuts on the horizon, faculty have begun to divide into rival coalitions.
Comprising the older faction in this campus-based cold war are a band of traditionalists for whom contemporary academe represents an endless series of compromises and humiliations. Elliot Rentz (Bob Balaban), a long-tenured Americanist, is so unpopular with undergraduates that Ji-Yoon has resorted to merging his seminar with that of a younger professor. Joan Hambling (the wonderful Holland Taylor) has been banished to a far-flung office despite 32 years of service and has lately become acquainted with a pile of insulting student evaluations (e.g., “more dumpty than humpty”). Laboring alongside the department’s oldsters is a pair of relative youths beset by problems of their own. For Yaz McKay (Nana Mensah), the star professor forced to co-teach with Elliot, the immediate hurdle is a tenure application process that hinges on the good opinion of her more conventional peers. For Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass), Ji-Yoon’s ally and sometime lover, the crisis du jour arises during a moment of classroom spontaneity. Attempting to illustrate the relationship between fascism and the absurd, Bill allows himself to be recorded performing an impromptu Nazi salute.
Though the uproar surrounding Bill’s political error is arguably The Chair’s timeliest plotline, the show gives a great deal of its attention to the more amusing aspects of life at Pembroke. Having made an ally of a resourceful IT guy, Joan unmasks the author of her worst evaluation and delivers a takedown for the ages. (“What are you teaching next semester?” an impressed onlooker inquires.) Informed by her dean that a significant college lecture will be delivered by the actor David Duchovny (convincingly played by David Duchovny), Ji-Yoon must enter a Beckettian nightmare of damage control, fundraising, and ego management. Among The Chair’s highest virtues is its ability to toggle between broad comedy and searing drama without weakening the efficacy of either. To be sure, the series is laugh-out-loud funny and will delight even those who have never set foot on a quad. Yet it is no less compelling when trading humor for tragedy, as any program that looks closely at higher education in the 21st century inevitably must.
Unsurprisingly given its interest in generational tension, some of The Chair’s most affecting scenes unfold in the American literature survey shared by Elliot and Yaz. There, reduced first to the role of bully and ultimately to that of brooding observer, Elliot witnesses firsthand the inconsequentiality of his decades of expertise. A onetime superstar whom the show wisely treats as a figure of sympathy rather than fun, the older professor is too dull, too inflexible, and (by implication) too white to reach the students in front of him. That Yaz, an exuberant young black woman, manages to enthrall the class with seeming effortlessness is not only a lesson in humility. Rather, it suggests that Elliot’s plight is at least partly due to circumstances beyond his control. At liberal Pembroke, Yaz possesses a social currency that Elliot can never again hope to enjoy.
In a lesser series, so fraught a dynamic might have been allowed to simmer without additional ingredients. The Chair, however, enhances this brew with a punishing twist. Despite her unmistakable popularity with students, Yaz is every bit as bad a teacher as Elliot: a classroom dilettante who assigns Moby Dick-themed raps but fails to engage her charges on an intellectual level. From his perch on Yaz’s tenure committee, Elliot could argue as much if he so chose, yet to do so would merely drive Yaz into the arms of competing universities anxious to increase their “diversity” stats. If the objective is genuine education, to jettison the young professor might actually be a victory for Pembroke. If the goal is to look woke by tending the minority-employment numbers, however, her loss would be devastating.
A storyline of comparable prickliness, the trouble that follows Bill’s facetious Sieg Heil provides yet another example of the excruciating ironies that attend life on campus. Certain of his own guiltlessness, Bill refuses to grovel and is forced to watch as university administrators close ranks against him. That Ji-Yoon is soon swept up in the scandal is immaterial: The mob must be pacified, and the career of one blameless woman is a small price to pay. Given this turn of events, the decision of The Chair’s creators to build their program around an Asian American lead appears masterful in retrospect. If the student protesters wish to dismantle “white supremacy,” they will have to bulldoze a woman “of color” first. Their eagerness to do so reveals much about the insincerity of their aims.
Indeed, to the extent that Netflix’s series has obvious villains, they are the immature men and women who fill its seminar seats and quad, a throng of backbiters and crybabies whose utopianism is poor cover for their urge to destroy. In Ji-Yoon’s judgment, delivered in a poignant closing-episode scene, the fault for this sorry state of affairs lies primarily with their teachers. After all she’s been through, however, one wonders whether she really means it.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
