There have been several farcical fictional treatments of university life in the United States over the past couple of decades. The 2021 Netflix series The Chair, revolving around Jay Duplass’s disillusioned English professor who finds himself canceled after performing an illustrative Nazi salute during a lecture, was at its most interesting when it abandoned the usual platitudes about affirmative action in a Harvard-esque English department and dared to offer distinctly un-woke moments. When Duplass defiantly sings a snatch of “Springtime for Hitler” in front of a disciplinary board, the scene felt dangerous and edgy, as it must have done when the song was first heard in 1967’s The Producers. When the character later says “Universities are supposed to encourage dissent,” the line seems almost risible in its idealism.
The Chair’s satire takes its place among the campus novels of Philip Roth, most notably 2000’s The Human Stain — in which a light-skinned African American professor “passing” as white causes outrage by referring to “spooks” — and 2008’s Indignation, following the travails of a Jewish college student at the fictitious Winesburg College in Ohio. The same genre must also include the goings-on at Devon University in Scott Johnston’s 2019 Campusland, and the even broader antics at Faber College in the great 1978 comedy Animal House, where one of the few academics on screen, Donald Sutherland’s louche Professor Jennings, is, naturally, having a sexual relationship with one of his students, back when such activities were regarded as a perk of the job rather than a criminal breach of trust.
