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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, and I really like Sandra Oh, 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, so I was willing to make allowances. It is satire, Sandra Oh is great in the role of the chair, the series has its funny moments and it does, from a very elite upper-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 addressing those important issues.

The deeply exploitative nature of academic work in the real world, the struggles of the 80% 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 depicted fairly well in 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. The 99% of Black university graduates who will never get this far, no matter how smart and brilliant they are, are left out. Also left out are the 80% of academics on precarious contracts who will never make it anywhere near the career ladder regardless of their quality.

In the real world of (UK) academia, those lucky enough to have been appointed to one of the highly competitive permanent lectureship positions are more often than not bullied and exploited by their more senior colleagues, worked to the point of mental breakdown, and in a small but rising number of cases – even suicide. For most, unless, they are lucky enough to get a professorship (which for most women will never happen no matter how smart they are), academic freedom to develop their own scholarship will only ever be a dream. Today’s academia is highly marketized, poorly managed, and riddled with 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 output scoring and rankings, and constant precarity. All of this is largely ignored in the series. If you have permanency, it is fairly meaningless because you can still get fired at any time, as the recent waves of compulsory redundancies at British Universities have shown very clearly. The only thing that protects academic workers somewhat is trade unionism, and that, too, is ignored here.

I also disliked the low-blows 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.

Academia is going up in flames as we speak, Phd holders in both the US and the UK teach on precarious contracts that in some cases don’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 so much talent been so utterly wasted. Yet this series focuses on the lucky few who made it to the top, or are on their way there. The producers missed a great opportunity for some really meaningful and sharp satire here. Instead, the series perpetuates 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 academia in 2021.