It's embarrassing to see how eager academics are for The Chair on Netflix. The series stars Sandra Oh as a professor at Pembroke University and the chair of the Ivy Leagueish English Department. Since the streamer published a fake news story from Pembroke Daily about professor Ji-Yoon Kims appointment to the English department's first female and POCChair in its 179-year-old history, academic Twitter has been buzzing with speculation about everything from Ohs character as a forty-something scholar who studies Emily Dickinson. Memes were created where scholars viewed the faculty offices in the trailers. Actual professors were more concerned about the lack of modernist art and wood paneling in faculty offices, if they had the chance to see them in real life.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
One year ago, I was the first woman of color to achieve the rank of full professor in the English Department in my university's 140-year history. While I was absorbed in trusting the process, I didn't realize it would become so significant. I was then asked to be the chair of the department for gender and sexuality studies. My relationship to The Chairs is so deeply overdetermined, so I approached the series with a set of expectations.
Advertisement
It is easy to see why there is a need for television and film that accurately portray academia. Most drama about academia and humanities professors fails because it is a lot of minutiae. It is invisible labor that takes its toll on the mind, both in isolation and behind closed doors. The material rewards that academia offers are far less than those of other elite professions. Wendy Rhoades of Billions was right when she pointed out that academics do not have the same material rewards as other elite professions.
Advertisement
Subscribe to the Slate Culture newsletter and receive the best movies, TV, music, books, and other news straight to your inbox. Signing you up was not possible due to an error Please try again. To use this form, please enable jаvascript. Email address: I would like to receive updates on Slate special offers. You agree to our Privacy Policy & Terms by signing up. Thank you for signing up! You can cancel your subscription at any time.
The sitcom Community is saved. A recurring sketch on SNL featuring Rachel Dratch as a professorial lovah and Will Ferrell playing a professorial sexy eroticism to strangers in hot TUBS. Few shows portray scholarly subjects with any senses of humor. Perhaps academia takes itself too seriously in order to protect its cultural heritage.
The absurdism underneath academia's shabby-genteel displays and intellectual grandiosity in small, but still life-altering stakes is what The Chairs cocreators Amanda Peet, who earned her Ph.D. from Harvard, really get right. The series shuns the drama and earnestness of previous small-screen efforts to portray the professoriate, and instead uses a silly comedic tone that reflects the zaniness of the subject. Even though there are many pratfalls in the first episode, we are treated to the slick B-roll of college life: a Northeastern campus covered by snow, a leather bound edition of Thomas Carlyles Sator Resartus and stained glass windows that depict scenes of medieval piety, anguish and a massive oil portrait of the names of the old white men who adorn the buildings.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Because Ji-Yoon is a familiar face of Sandra Oh's messy put-togetherness, we are naturally inclined to support her new chair. Her somewhat anxious and idealistic personality is typical of a college professor who is overworked and frazzled. Ji-Yoon may not be completely insane, but she's not on solid ground either. The opening scene highlights when Ji-Yoon's first act as department head is to literally fall from her broken office chair. Oh's expertly cut, "What the fu?" helps to lighten the heavy handedness of the metaphor.
The Chair, in its best moments, is a workplace farce that runs for only 30 minutes. Instead of glorifying the literary classroom as a source of inspiration, the series shows how Ji-Yoon's tireless efforts are continually crushed by structural racisms and sexism. We were given the impression that Ji-Yoon will not be able heal the institution or bring her faculty into the new millenium, regardless of how many Harold Bloom quotes she gives in department meetings.
Advertisement
Ji-Yoons initial focus is on guiding rising star Yaz McKay, played by Nana Mensah, to tenure. She also happens to be both the only junior scholar in the department and the only Black woman. However, her time as chair is consumed with shaming the wounded egos and salaries of white older faculty members. She must also deal with the constant pressure from the top administration to increase enrollments or decrease size. It seems that the only commitment of deans, provosts and higher-ed legal team trustees is to manage endowment.
Advertisement
Ji-Yoon's personal and professional relationships with Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass) are where things get more complicated. You get the sense that showrunners test their limits when a Duplass brother is part of a drama. Bill is a widower, a prototypically drunken modernist and sits right at the bottom of this spectrum. Although he is young enough and has enough Joy Division T-shirts to incite the occasional misplaced crush of an undergraduate, it shows how these Dont Stand So Close To Me vibes are often a projection of male professors with an overinflated sense of how valuable they are for their genius.
Advertisement
Ji-Yoon's greatest champion and, as he insists, one of the reasons she was able to ascend to the chairship in first place, Bill does everything he can to undermine her reformist agenda. A misguided parody of the Nazi salute in a lecture about fascism, modernism causes a series of reactions. This highlights the show's insistence on cancelling culture. We see Bill as the (self-)destructive, drunken idiot that he really is. He expects his female coworkers and graduate students to pick up the mess he leaves behind, while his academic competence and writing skills are not under scrutiny. We also see co-eds filming professors on their phones as the threat to controversy over the embattled English Department. It is unclear if the Hamilton-esque transpositions into rap by students of Moby-Dick are to be fetishized or viewed as cutting-edge teaching methods. The idealistic, diverse group of undergrads are implicitly blamed for creating a campus climate that is polarized by its willingness to decontextualize content in classrooms via social media. This seems to be a way for both the administration and faculty to get away with not being aware of the changing world.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
The Chair manages not to fall for some of the other clichés that are associated with shows about academia, particularly in the complex interpersonal relationship between JiYoon, Bill. Ji-Yoon dresses Bill down in a chair role, even though he is furious that his shenanigans are being criticized by students who feel he has a special touch. Yaz explains the conciliatory approach she uses with Pembrokes' old guard, where she acts like they owe her something.
Advertisement
The Chair has just enough realistic elements to not alienate those of you who are deeply committed to seeing certain aspects our invisible scholarly labor-of the social, interpersonal varietymade visible to the streaming masses. Many of my colleagues will find the short shoutouts to affect theory and eco-criticism encouraging. They may also be enthused by an entertaining celebrity appearance in the middle of the series. This show shows how flawed and selfish academics can be. From Balabans' fading scholarly star, to older female professors such as Joan Hambling (a pitch-perfect Holland Taylor), we see through humor and kindness how her charade at belonging to a sexist university, often at the expense and disadvantage of people of color, has eroded her self-worth.
Advertisement
The greatest strength of the Chair is where it ends up: with a realistic, but sometimes humorous, portrayal about what it's like to be a chairperson in a department (from my experience at a private research university). It's all there: managing egos, negotiating office spaces, trying to get every penny from the deans and provosts, dealing with retentions and promotions, and answering to trustees and donors. But in real life, it is very unlikely that a trustee would dine with a poor department chair. For me, the most memorable line in the series is Ji-Yoon's realization about her predicament.
Advertisement
The series shows that universities, portrayed by the right as being a bastion of progressive thought, in fact are culturally conservative, deeply rooted institutions whose primary concern is liability. Faculty and students can be considered collateral damage if institutions want to preserve the hierarchies, structural inequalities and systems that allow them to continue as they are. Ji-Yoon is close to saying so when she asks her students to read Audre Lordes fundamental feminist truth about the masters tools inability of dismantling the masters house. She is trying to do two things fundamentally opposite: she wants to be right with her constituents and defend the existence of a discipline and a department that will never accept her place.
