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‘The Chair’ on Netflix – a funny, rose tinted cliché

‘The Chair’ on Netflix got some raving reviews by The Guardian and others, so I was looking forward to watching it this weekend. I was unimpressed by the series’ nostalgic take on academia.

I’m a UK academic and the setting of this is an upper tier American University, which is a somewhat different context from the UK, but the two have a lot in common. The show is satire, Sandra Oh is great in the role of the chair, it has its funny moments and it does, from a very elite middle class perspective, pick up on some of the issues that plague today’s academy, such as racism, sexism, gender inequality, and ageism. But it ultimately fails in accurately depicting them.

The deeply exploitative nature of academic work in the real world, the struggles of the 50% on non-permanent contracts, which, as far as I’ve heard from colleagues in the US are very similar to the UK, have been severely downplayed here. Some aspects of the existing institutional racism was touched upon fairly well where the show focuses on the plight of the non-tenured, and only Black female professor in the series, Jaz. But even this is done from a very elitist perspective. To be fair, the show does raise the very important question why nearly 90% of tenured professors are white. But the 99% of Black university graduates who will never even make it into an academic profession, no matter how smart and brilliant they are, are left out of the story. Also left out are the 33% of UK academics and c. 50% of US academics on precarious non-professorial ‘teaching only’ contracts, who will never make it anywhere near the career ladder, regardless of their quality. The vast majority are women. There won’t be any fancy offers from Ivy league institutions for them.

In the real world of (UK) academia, those lucky enough to have been appointed to one of the highly competitive permanent lectureship positions are often bullied and exploited by their more senior colleagues, worked to the point of mental breakdown. For most, unless, they are lucky enough to get a tenured professorship, academic freedom to develop their own scholarship will only ever be a dream. Today’s academia is highly marketized, poorly managed, and plagued by corruption at the very top senior management level, as the many recent disputes between Universities and trade unions clearly illustrate. Academic workers are overworked and tired, subjected to ruthless performance management, nonsensical scoring and rankings, and constant precarity. All of this is largely ignored in the series. Even a permanent contract no longer offers protection, as you can still get fired at any time, as the recent waves of compulsory redundancies at British Universities have made blatantly clear. The only thing that defends academic workers and protects them somewhat is trade unionism, and this, too, is completely ignored here.

I also disliked the low-blow against woke culture in the name of ‘free speech’ – a trope much loved by the far right which the producers should have been aware of. Sure, there are cases of unjust victimisation of male white professors, similar to the one shown in the series, and yes, this is an injustice, but where is the engagement with the racism and classism at all but the very highest level of the lucky 1%? Non-existent in the series. Instead, we are to laugh at a few Black student protesters.

Academia is going up in flames as we speak. Phd holders in both the US and the UK teach on precarious contracts, in many cases the pay won’t even suffice to pay the rent, those lucky enough to have a tenured job live in constant fear of being made redundant, never has more talent been so wasted. In the UK alone, the university & college trade union UCU has been in a sector-wide industrial dispute over pensions, pay and conditions since 2018 and the British Higher Education sector has just seen three of the biggest strike rounds in its entire history (2018, 2019 and 2020). Academics at the University of Liverpool just had 3 months of local strikes over 47 compulsory redundancies this year. Similar strikes have taken place at the Universities of Chester and Leicester. The working conditions in the US are no better from what I’ve heard from colleagues there. Yet the show focuses on the lucky few who made it to the top, or are on their way there. The producers missed a fantastic opportunity for some really meaningful and sharp satire here. Instead, they chose to perpetuate a dated, rose-tinted upper middle class cliché from, perhaps, the 1990s. ‘The chair’ delivers some good comedy laughs, but has little to do with the real world of academics in 2021.

23/08/2021