Veritas and Stuff

The satirical novel about college life has a lively postwar history, including celebrated contributions from the likes of Kingsley Amis, Mary McCarthy, and David Lodge. Roger Rosenblatt has taken to picking this low-hanging fruit in Beet, about a fantastical college of the same name a bit north of Boston. Life even in real colleges seems fantastical to many in the workaday world. Just that a large number of employees (tenured faculty) can’t be fired puts it on a somewhat extraterrestrial basis.

This satire–really, almost a comic book without the pictures, rather like Rosenblatt’s funny, over-the-top first novel, Lapham Rising–is a manic send-up of contemporary college life. It might have been better if the author had curbed his love of hyperbole and verbal pirouettes a tad, but what he has produced may stir the creative juices of the Disney animators. His Buckleysque proclivity for exotic words, even when more common ones might work better, and scenes preposterous in the extreme, may sometimes leave the reader feeling that he’s trying too hard.

The hero is the Candide-like Beet English professor Peace (named by Sixties parents) Porterfield, who is the occasionally hapless chairman of a panel charged (in what is the Beet leadership’s window dressing; its real plan is to close the college and make a killing off its real estate and cultural treasures) with trying to save the institution (“Will the Beet Go On?” ask headlines as the story goes national) whose $250 million endowment has mysteriously evaporated. That last item is one of Beet‘s all-too-incredible elements.

As he innocently tries to reinvent Beet’s curriculum to make it more alluring to students willing to pay the sky-high tuition even while actually strengthening intellectual standards, the implausibly uncynical Porterfield must contend with a profoundly corrupt chairman of the board of trustees (he’s eyeing the bucolic campus for real-estate development) and his lackey, the sniveling Beet president who is also intent on looting the institution, as well as rich leftist (or anarchist?) student-agitators, and a sweet-natured “Islamic” terrorist from Scarsdale who wants to blow up the place.

The faculty oversee such courses as “Nippocano Studies: Where Tokyo Meets Tijuana” and “Little People of Color,” such departments as Women’s and Fashion Studies, and such organs as the Sensitivity and Diversity Council. While Beet is a bastard to get into (think Williams or Bowdoin), and most of the students are very smart, clearly large parts of the college are worthless to those students seeking rewards in the Life of the Mind. Named after an 18th-century worthy who was New England’s largest pig farmer, Beet College has all the pathologies of the politically correct to the nth power. (The book is also replete with pig jokes, including a Trojan pig on a hydraulic lift that would have looked handsome in Animal House.) Along the way, Rosenblatt evokes with eloquence the numerous depressing aspects of New England, including its darkness and cold, saddening earth colors, claustrophobia, and residents’ tendency to hypocritical sanctimony.

He also details the sort of events you’d expect: building takeovers, town-and-gown socio-economic relations, silly sex, and other colorful undergraduate undertakings. And he takes to it with a Waugh-like love of weird names: The chairman of the board of trustees is Joel Bollovate, the lead female is named after Martha Stewart but has changed her name to Matha because she thinks it sounds more revolutionary, and the young terrorist has changed his name to Akim Ben Laden from Arthur Horowitz. Then there’s the college chaplain, Bucky Lookatme.

The Simpsons comes to mind; virtually all the characters are stock comic figures. The droll physician wife of Professor Porterfield and his best friend are the only two major players who would seem very plausible in Nature (as opposed to Art). But it doesn’t matter all that much. This short tale has more than an adequate number of hilarious scenes while it raises important points about some of the absurdity and vacuity of American higher education.

Of course, it bears remembering that while there are many worthless courses at elite American colleges, their students are so ambitious that most will take at least some serious ones to obtain postgraduation jobs and graduate-school admissions. (And after all, their tormented parents don’t want their children, at $50,000 a year, to waste four years at a private college on drivel.) But Rosenblatt has a field day with one of the worst ills of American academia: the increasing commercialization of college and university life–with bloated administrations and overpaid administrators seeking the next hot college-marketing tool at the expense of the verities of tried and true academic disciplines.

This all suggests that we may have too many colleges, and would do well to have fewer, but better, ones. Why should everyone go to college, anyway? And why would Professor Porterfield even bother to try to save Beet? That’s the biggest unanswered question in Beet, but it doesn’t matter: It’s a joke.

Meanwhile, Mary Lefkowitz’s History Lesson: A Race Odyssey is, on the face of it, a very different creation from Roger Rosenblatt’s. Yet this memoir of a Wellesley classics professor emerita contains a trenchant analysis of some of the same themes, including political correctness at the expense of intellectual rigor and truth, timid administrators, and angry, trendy, cowardly professors.

Like Rosenblatt, Lefkowitz deals with academic fantasies, except that hers came out of all-too-real controversies over the propositions that ancient Greece “stole” many of its ideas from Africans, and that the Jews ran the slave trade. These notions have been heavily promoted by such dubious scholars as Lefkowitz’s sometime Wellesley colleague Anthony Martin, an incoherent anti-Semite (and author of The Jewish Onslaught ) who seeks to promote black pride by way of wishful thinking.

The propositions here are unsupported by anything like rigorous scholarship into the origins of the golden age of Greece, but as Lefkowitz (author of Not Out of Africa) notes, that something is preposterous doesn’t get in the way of its being widely promoted and accepted–especially in the academy, the very place where fact-based scholarship should be permitted to shoot it down. These ideas are also allowed currency, in part, because of the desire of their proponents to obtain the benefits (hefty speaking and publishing fees, TV appearances, etc.) of professional victimhood.

When Lefkowitz sought to deconstruct these opinions, she was bound to run into a buzzsaw, which included a lawsuit aimed at silencing her. She describes her battle in deadpan prose, detailing the sort of racial tensions and unpleasant incidents (one involving a screaming match between Martin and a student in a dorm) that sometimes soil American campuses. However tranquil it appears, Wellesley College is rife with the conflicts and anxieties of American society.

As does Roger Rosenblatt, Mary Lefkowitz shows how common administrative and faculty evasion can be when it comes to defending intellectual rigor and integrity. (In the end, Wellesley does pretty much the right thing and backs her up.) Unlike Beet, however, none of her account is intentionally funny. Still, Lefkowitz’s painful struggle and ultimate victory are edifying–and, perhaps, a hopeful sign for higher education. Things might not be as bad as we think, or as bad as they were. Too bad History Lesson isn’t destined for Hollywood, as Beet might well be.

Robert Whitcomb is editor of the editorial pages at the Providence Journal.