by Don Hall

There's a moment in Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman's Netflix series The Chair that struck me as a bit of an epiphany.

Nana Mensah as Dr. Yaz McKay is coerced to teach a course about Herman Melville with staunch old school professor Dr. Elliot Rent (Bob Balaban). Rent has been content to recycle his lectures for the past thirty years and students aren't signing up for his class. Under his teaching, the class is boring and antiquated. McKay, on the other hand, is young and exciting and her teaching style is engaging and fun.

The moment comes when Rent witnesses McKay's class. Students are up on a stage performing creative take-downs of Moby Dick using song and poetry.

Wait a minute! That's what the eighth grade classes I taught on opera looked like!

For a slim percentage of the population the state of our colleges is crucial; for the extended majority that world is merely entertaining and unnecessarily frustrating. Figuring out how things either went off the rails or is in the flux of great change is the past time of the highly educated and those with stake in the developments.

According to the data, in the past seven years or so, more and more of the college population is being comprised of those whom college was never really an option. Back in the crusty days of 1984, going to a university past high school was an option if you had a specific focus. The idea of going without a major was considered flakey. Today, the number of students without a declared major eclipses those who have a degree and career in mind.

Plainly, it isn't that today's students are more entitled or lazy. It is that, for many of them, college is simply an extension of high school. Professors of Rent's age are used to students attending to learn; McKay is confronted with a bored class looking for someone to convince them that learning has value or go away.

High school students these days have a different kind of autonomy than I had and a focus on their feelings is far higher than we idiots of the 80s. Is it any wonder that college kids today want to retain that 'customer is always right' power rather than be told what to do? Thus, the disconnect is between professors unused to performing for classes in order to get them interested enough to put the work in and a population of students looking to be entertained and persuaded to work.

Taking place at the fictional Pembroke University (an almost Ivy Leaguer) and centering on the English Department, the nearly perfect three-hour satire skewers everyone involved: the aged out professors like Rent as they are forced to reckon with a student class resistant to being taught from the rote acceptance of the writing of so many dead white men, the zealotry of students so focused on social justice that they brand a professor making a joke in class a Nazi, the clueless administrators. At the center is Sandra Oh as the first woman and first woman of color to chair the ancient department and charged to bring it into the 21st Century.

The professors in The Chair bear some blame for their department’s dire situation. Pembroke’s English department consists mostly of septuagenarians who drone on in lecture as students avoid their classes, spend time on their smartphones, or doze off. 

There are also three younger professors at the center of the show: charming and unhinged Bill (Jay Duplass), progressive and hungry Yaz McKay, and Sandra Oh's Ji-Yoon. Bill is grieving his wife’s recent death as the show opens, and Yaz is about to go up for tenure and is uncertain of the support of her senior colleagues, who find her success threatening. Ji-Yoon is pragmatic yet anxious, aware that any or all of her actions in leadership will be ignored, undermined, or cited as the reason to remove her from power and defund her department. 

The older professors are the more obvious anvil on Ji-Yoon’s leadership, but Bill is wildly unprofessional and Yaz befriends rather than teaches. Ji-Yoon struggles with her infatuation with Bill while also dealing with raising her adoptive daughter and juggling the politics of academia.

With all of this as backdrop, Bill, in a discussion of Fascism and Absurdism, performs a mock Nazi salute which is captured by dozens of smartphones. In short order, Twitter is filled with memes of him as a Nazi and the students, already bored by their classes, start the mechanics of 'cancel culture'. Not content with an apology (which Bill is unwilling to provide), the students want him gone. Ji-Yoon advises his teaching assistant to avoid the campus press which is spun into an accusation that she has instituted a gag order regarding the issue.

In the scene where Bill tries to engage his critics and explain himself, the students aren’t clear about what they’re asking for. They're simply angry and exercising a power they've discovered via social media for the sake of wielding it.

There are no villains in this tale save for David Morse's administrator so fearful of the bad press of Twitter that he violates every foundation of tenure to appease the opportunistic student body. Inept but not malevolent.

Peet and Wyman successfully avoid the tropes of the current mania about Critical Race Theory and the hysteria over micro aggressions on campus. They also present some insight on the professor/student relationship by upending it spectacularly (the student has no interest in boning Bill and only wants him to critique her novel). They even get to send up celebrity academics with a surprise appearance by David Duchovny as himself looking to boost his credentials with an honorary doctorate.

The fact that there are thinkpieces out in the ether complaining that the series doesn't skewer the teachers, the students, Melville, or any of the other popular demons but centers its criticism on all involved indicates the thing has legs.

I believe that if both extremes find you to be the devil, you're probably right on track.