[Sandra Oh’s Netflix series - Instead of fetishizing the
literary classroom as a luminous font of inspiration, the
series shows us how Ji-Yoon’s strenuous efforts are constantly
crushed by structural racism and sexism.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

A CHAIR REVIEWS THE CHAIR  
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Karen Tongson
August 20, 2021
Slate
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_ Sandra Oh’s Netflix series - Instead of fetishizing the literary
classroom as a luminous font of inspiration, the series shows us how
Ji-Yoon’s strenuous efforts are constantly crushed by structural
racism and sexism. _

Sandra Oh, Nana Mensah, and Holland Taylor in The Chair., Eliza
Morse/Netflix

 

It’s a little embarrassing how desperately we academics have
publicly displayed our eagerness for the new Netflix series _The
Chair,_ starring Sandra Oh as a professor and chair of an Ivy
League–ish English department at the fictitious Pembroke University.
Ever since the streamer rolled out a faux news story
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the Pembroke Daily announcing professor Ji-Yoon Kim’s appointment as
the English department’s “first female—and POC—Chair” in the
school’s 179-year history, academic Twitter has been abuzz with
speculation about everything from the show’s potential
verisimilitude to the outfits Oh’s character might don as a
fortysomething scholar who specializes in Emily Dickinson. The
earliest trailers even spawned memes
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scholars scrutinized the faculty offices on the show. Actual
professors focused on the abundance of modernist art and wood paneling
that rarely adorn faculty offices—if we’re even lucky enough to
have them—in real life.

About a year before _The Chair_’s debut was announced, I became the
first woman of color to be promoted to the rank of full professor in
the English department in my university’s entire 140-year history.
Shortly after that promotion (which I wasn’t aware would be quite so
historic while I was immersed in “trusting the process,”
as _Bachelor _Nation might say), I was also asked to chair the
department of gender and sexuality studies. Given that my own
relationship to _The Chair_’s premise is so profoundly
overdetermined, I approached the series by managing my own
expectations about what it might mean to be finally seen on any
screen, big or small, and on so many levels: as an Asian American
woman, as a recently minted department chair, and as a Sandra Oh fan
from as far back as _Under the Tuscan Sun_.

The thirst for shows that accurately represent academia, or that
bother to represent academia at all, is understandable given how
spectacularly television and film have failed to get even the major
details of our profession right, let alone the more nuanced aspects of
its racial and gender politics as they unfold through interpersonal
intrigue. Shows about academia, and humanities professors in
particular, tend to fail miserably because most of our drama unfurls
as minutiae, as invisible labor that exacts its toll psychologically,
in isolation, and behind the scenes. Furthermore, the material rewards
of academia are minuscule when compared with other purportedly
“elite” professions. The great Wendy Rhoades
on _Billions_ nailed it when she observed wryly that in “academia
everything’s a big fucking deal because the stakes are so small.”
Even the largest grants and most prestigious prizes earned by
professors usually don’t amount to much in the grander scheme of
America’s capitalist sensorium, so cultural capital (and its very
niche stakes) remains king.

Save the sitcom _Community_, which decouples academia from its
elitist legacy, and a recurring _SNL_ sketch featuring Rachel Dratch
and Will Ferrell as professorial “lovahs”_ _who sup on spiced
meats and foist their ribald eroticism onto strangers in
“hot _TUBS_,” few shows represent scholarly subjects with any
sense of humor—perhaps because academia itself insists on being
taken way too seriously in an effort to preserve its cultural
currency.

The absurdism beneath academia’s shabby-genteel displays of
self-importance and intellectual grandiosity amid small, yet
nevertheless life-altering, stakes is what _The Chair_’s
co-creators, Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, who received her Ph.D.
in English from Harvard, truly get right.* The series sheds the
earnestness and drama of so many previous small screen efforts at
depicting the professoriate and strikes a screwball comedic tone
befitting the actual zaniness of its subject. Pratfalls abound in the
opening episode, even as we are serviced by the buttoned-up B-roll of
collegiate life: a Northeastern campus blanketed by snow, a
leather-bound edition of Thomas Carlyle’s _Sartor Resartus_,
stained glass windows depicting scenes of medieval piety and anguish,
and massive oil portraits of old white men whose names adorn all the
buildings.

We are predisposed to root for newly elevated chair Ji-Yoon Kim
because she comes to us in the familiar guise of Sandra Oh’s
signature messy put-togetherness. Her slightly anxious, somewhat
idealistic persona is in keeping with what we might expect from a
frazzled, overworked college professor. Ji-Yoon isn’t quite nutty,
but she isn’t quite on solid ground, either, as the opening scene
makes sure to highlight when her first act as the department head is
literally to fall out of her broken office chair. (The
heavy-handedness of the metaphor is lightened by Oh’s expertly
truncated, “What the fu—?”)

In its finest moments, _The Chair_ is a workplace farce doled out in
tidy 30-minute increments. Instead of fetishizing the literary
classroom as a luminous font of inspiration, the series_ _shows us
how Ji-Yoon’s strenuous efforts are constantly crushed by structural
racism and sexism. We’re given the sense that she won’t be able to
heal the institution or bring her department into the new millennium,
no matter how many conciliatory Harold Bloom quotes she drops in
department meetings.

Ji-Yoon’s focus at the start of the series is, as it should be, on
shepherding rising star Yaz McKay (Nana Mensah), who also happens to
be the only junior scholar and the only Black woman in the department,
to tenure. But her time as chair is consumed by massaging the wounded
egos of older white faculty members who have the lowest enrollments in
the department even as they reap the highest salaries. Furthermore,
she must contend with constant pressure from the upper administration
to boost enrollments or downsize. The deans’, provosts’, higher-ed
legal teams’, and trustees’ only commitment, it seems, is to
“endowment management.”

Where things get a little trickier for Ji-Yoon, and for _The
Chair_ as a whole, is negotiating her personal and professional
relationship with her friend and colleague Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass).
Whenever a Duplass brother is cast in a dramedy, you have a sense that
showrunners are testing the limits of how much sympathy we’ll be
able to muster for a deeply flawed but likable man. As a widower and
prototypically drunken modernist, Bill sits squarely on the flawed end
of that spectrum. He is young enough, and possessed of enough Joy
Division T-shirts, to inspire the occasional misplaced crush from an
undergraduate, though to the show’s credit, it exposes how often
these “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” vibes are purely a projection
from male professors who have an inflated sense of how desirable they
are for their “genius.”

Despite being Ji-Yoon’s greatest champion, and supposedly one of the
reasons she has ascended to the chairship in the first place (as he
constantly reminds her), Bill also does the most to derail her
reformist agenda. His misguided parody of a Nazi salute in a lecture
on fascism and modernism sets off a chain of reactions that highlights
how the show hedges its bets on the “cancel culture” debate. We
see Bill for the drunken, (self-)destructive idiot that he is, a white
man coddled for his brilliance and popularity who expects his female
colleagues and graduate students to clean up the messes he leaves in
his wake, all while his competence as a writer and scholar never bears
deeper scrutiny. But we also see co-eds secretly filming professors’
lectures on their phones, as the threat of controversy looms over the
embattled English department in its hapless struggle to keep “butts
in seats.” When Yaz’s class is merged with the woefully
underenrolled survey of “American letters” taught by old-timer
Elliot Rentz (Bob Balaban), it’s unclear whether the
students’ _Hamilton_-esque transpositions of _Moby-Dick_ into rap
are meant to be fetishized as cutting-edge pedagogy or seen as the
decline of serious scholarly engagement with the text. Furthermore,
the idealistic and notably diverse group of undergrads is implicitly
held responsible for polarizing the campus climate with its quickness
to decontextualize classroom content on social media. Laying this
responsibility at the undergraduates’ feet seems to let both the
faculty and the administration off the hook for remaining oblivious to
a changing world.

Nevertheless, I’m heartened by the fact that _The Chair_ manages
to sidestep some of the other clichés of shows focused on academia,
especially in the complicated interpersonal relationship between
Ji-Yoon and Bill. When Bill is aghast that his shenanigans receive
pushback from the students with whom he feels he has a special touch,
Ji-Yoon, in her capacity as chair, dresses him down with the utmost
clarity: “You think you’re one of those men who can dust
themselves off and pretend it never happened.” Later on, Ji-Yoon is
herself subjected to a clear-eyed read of her political waffling, when
Yaz underlines the conciliatory approach she takes with Pembroke’s
old guard: “You act like you owe them something.”

Overall, _The Chair_ offers just enough realist elements not to
alienate those of us who are deeply invested in seeing certain aspects
of our invisible scholarly labor—largely of the social,
interpersonal kind—made legible to the streaming masses. I imagine
many of my colleagues will be heartened by the brief shoutouts to
“eco-criticism” and “affect theory,” and tickled by an
inspired celebrity cameo in the middle of the series’ run. The show
also accurately mirrors how flawed and pathetically self-involved most
of us academics are: from Balaban’s fading scholarly star to older
female professors like Joan Hambling (a pitch perfect Holland Taylor),
still smarting from decades of being “the only one.” We see
through the lens of humor and kindness how her charade of
“belonging” to a sexist institution, often at the expense of
younger women and people of color, has eaten away at her sense of
self-worth over the years.

_The Chair_’s greatest strength is in where it eventually lands:
with an accurate, if heightened, sometimes satirical portrayal of what
it’s actually like to chair a department (at least from my
experience doing so at a private research university). It’s all
there: cradling egos, negotiating office space, being stretched
between meetings and squeezed by the deans and provosts for every last
penny in your operating budget, struggling with promotions and
retentions, and having to answer to the whims of donors and
trustees—though in real life, a trustee is highly unlikely to dine
with a lowly department chair. The most resonant line of the series
for me is when Ji-Yoon comes to a realization about her predicament:
“I feel like someone handed me a ticking time bomb because they
wanted to make sure a woman was holding it when it explodes.” As the
series progresses, she begins to see chairing a department for what it
truly is: a burden and a hazard more than an honor.

Crucially, the series also shows us that universities, caricatured as
they are by the right as bastions of progressive thought, are actually
deeply entrenched, culturally conservative institutions whose foremost
concern is liability. Insofar as institutions are intent on keeping
intact the hierarchies and structural inequalities that allow the
system to go on as usual, both faculty and students can be treated as
collateral damage. Ji-Yoon comes close to saying as much when, in a
course devoted to Emily Dickinson, she asks her students to marinate
on Audre Lorde’s foundational feminist truism about the master’s
tools inability to dismantle the master’s house. She finds herself
trying to accomplish two fundamentally incompatible things: doing
right by her people and her constituencies, and defending the
existence of a discipline—and a department—that will never quite
accept her place in it.

Correction, Aug. 20, 2021: This article originally misidentified Annie
Julia Wyman as a Ph.D. candidate. She received her doctorate in 2017.

Keep reading. Keep Listening. Subscribe to Slate today.
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