College Knowledge: Why Does TV Get Academia So Wrong?

I didn’t often find Bee funny on The Daily Show, but she’s in her element here. TBS.

Consuming: Chris has a new year-long promotion at the college that’s keeping him traveling a lot, so we haven’t eaten out much. We celebrated the new job at The Monkey Bar, which was good, though expensive and quiet. A foodie I know was shocked we got reservations, but it was easy both on Feb 13 when I originally made them and on Feb 20 when I switched them because it was so cold on the 13th and it was not close to full. Maybe because we ate at 6:45 like savages? I also had pizza at Co, which was just OK, and picked up a bombolini and some cookies at the Sullivan Street Bakery next door, which were excellent. I’m liking Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. She has the righteous anger I need from my late night hosts and am sadly not getting these days from Stephen or Trevor (Larry’s mad enough, but his show is weak tea), and Broad City is back!

Producing: I have a lot of new students to mentor, who I’ve been working with, have submitted a good first draft of catalog entries, and volunteered to run for a very important but very time-consuming college committee. It turns out my Intro wasn’t as done as I though, so I’m still working on that but I also have to cut a 30 page chapter down to talk-length in the next 3 weeks.

The previews for Grandma made it look funny. Let’s hope so! Sundance Institute.

Anticipating: Chris has to travel again this weekend, so we’ve agreed to watch the Downton Abbey finale over the phone. Now that The Oscars are over, we can watch fun movies that weren’t nominated, like Grandma. House of Cards starts up again soon. More snow this weekend, and then spring?

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I don’t even know what Loreen teaches, and the Internet is not much help HBO.

We don’t have HBO, so I just caught up on Girls season 4. There’s a story line about Hannah’s parents in which her mother finally gets tenure, and her dad, who hasn’t yet, spoils her party with a big surprise. There are, in fact, faculty members who get tenure at 63 (which is how old Becky Ann Baker is). I have a colleague who just did at around that age last year. I earned tenure at 46, after getting a doctorate at 39. But it’s not the normal thing at all. We work at what a co-worker has dubbed Extremely Strange College, and am fully aware that would not happen at most other schools, where they want young scholars who can kill themselves to get tenure and promotion.

In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend they were singing and dancing in court, but even they knew better than to introduce hacked documents. The CW.

On doctor shows, they have technical consultants who make sure everyone is using the right terminology and that nurses or interns aren’t doing jobs only experienced doctors are allowed to do (even if, for dramatic purposes, they have better instincts or are “renegades”). Lawyer shows apparently mess up a lot, but they seem to pretty much get right that there’s a judge, and a prosecuting and defense attorney with different goals, and that, say, the youngsters on How to Get Away with Murder are not actually trying cases because they’re still law students, and only Annalise or Bonnie, who have law degrees, can do that. Flight attendants only fly the plane on TV if everyone else passes out.

But TV writers don’t seem to do their research at all when it comes to academia. They are aware that there is such a thing as tenure and that faculty want it. They know that many faculty members attended graduate school, and wrote and defended  a dissertation, to achieve a doctorate. Surely they have some poorly paid college friends they could call to find out how it actually works. They wouldn’t even have to pay most academics, just give them a credit, or let them meet a famous person. I knew at least 5 people at the University of Chicago who now work in TV or movies, (although alas I wasn’t actually friends with any of them), but I’d take that deal.  It’s possible Hannah’s mother had been at several prior colleges and not gotten tenure before, but unlikely she’d have gotten a tenure-track job at Michigan State in her 50s if that were the case. The same story (minus the statement that “I’ll never have to move again”) could have been equally effective if Loreen was finally becoming full professor, something that could take as little as five years or as much as 20 after tenure (or might never come).

Bernadette just announced one day she got her doctorate, for which we never heard about her doing significant work. Howard at least would have known every step of that. CBS.

On The Big Bang Theory, they had tenure as a mud-wrestling competition among three of the characters for one “slot,” which hinged on an interview with the head of HR, which Sheldon flubbed. There was no discussion of publications and teaching evaluations, and we’ve never seen any of them do any kind of college committee service or leadership. We didn’t hear about a senior professor  with a grudge against one of them, or how one of them was a favorite. It made no sense at all, and ultimately we never found out who got it. In the next season Sheldon changes his research interests and is “promoted” to a teaching position, which also makes little sense.

Annalise doesn’t have that much time to actually teach, given all the murder everyone is getting away with. ABC.

Professors on TV are either Svengali figures like Annalise on How to Get Away with Murder, fools who can’t button their sweaters correctly, or they are sleeping with their students. Shows that have had college professors as main characters are few. 2001-2’s The Education of Max Bickford starred Richard Dreyfuss as a history professor. 2004’s  Jack and Bobby had Christine Lahti as a professor raising two boys. Of course, there’s Ross Geller on Friends who starts out as a paleontologist at a museum, but ends up teaching at NYU, and toward the end of the final season, comes home one day with (vanilla) Champagne and announces he got tenure. I don’t know enough about paleontology to have asked a lot of the questions in this Buzzfeed article, but I knew enough that it seemed odd that the others seem surprised, and not terribly impressed.

Ross on Friends sleeps with a student, and never seems to be grading or writing much, but gets tenure. NBC.

Getting tenure is a process. A tough process. At my college we put up an electronic portfolio of our work, including teaching and mentoring evaluations, plus letters from both outsiders and insiders. Then there are six different people or committees that either write a report with a recommendation, or just vote yes or no. None of these people, by the way, are from HR. The whole thing takes over 6 months, not counting the time it takes to write and assemble the report. This happens after one has been teaching full-time at the college for 6 years and, has already experienced 2 or 3 prior reviews of the same duration. At other colleges, it may happen a bit sooner and with different setups, and there are huge differences in the amount and type of scholarship required, or teaching expectations, but it’s stressful for everyone I know. I’ve had friends with stellar publication records who seem like great teachers not get tenure and have to leave their colleges for other colleges because of issues with “fit,” or personal vendettas. There’s a lot of racism and sexism, and expectation that junior faculty will think like senior faculty.

How does Alaric on The Vampire Diaries move from teaching high school history to teaching occult studies to college students?The CW.

As I said in a post from 2014, TV is not great with the idea that most things worth doing take painstaking work, and repetition and practice, and that there are tons of boring times at any job involving reading or doing paperwork that would be so boring to watch that the audience would gladly switch to a commercial. I’m not remotely suggesting that any show should portray the whole tenure process. I don’t think I could even hate-watch that.

Colleges are being blamed for high tuition because of “highly-paid professors who barely teach.” In reality, salaries have barely (if at all) gone up for us full timers in ages, while work has gone up, mmand even lower-paid adjuncts do a lot of the teaching. It seems like TV writers could do a better job of showing what happens when the people from their English or science classes who were similarly creative but maybe a little more quiet and less social, or who were slightly more devoted to a life of the mind, do their jobs.