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 A foodie I know was shocked we got reservations, but it was easy both on Feb 13 when I originally made them and on Feb 20 when I switched them because it was so cold on the 13th and it was not close to full.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.

 

Insecurity Blanket: TV in the Age of Anxiety

Burger Joint menu. Yelp.

Consuming: Burgers and Boozy Shakes at Burger Joint with a friend. Mediterranean Food at Pera with a good friend for the last day of Restaurant Week. Straight Outta Compton. I didn’t personally watch the Superbowl, but Chris did, and I watched the halftime show and the commercials.

Producing: Entries for our new unified college catalog. Proposed two new courses. Attended three meetings at a distance. Even though I haven’t been to such meetings for eight months, neither the issues at hand, nor the amount of information people have, nor the technology has improved. Still can’t hear everyone. The last meeting, with a smaller group, was particularly fraught because not only could I not hear everything, but there was noise on the line whenever I talked, and my voice echoed a lot, meaning I was thrown off every time I had to say anything. Which means everything I say is filtered through my lack of information and sounds blunt, rude, and as if I’m not sure of myself. When I asked for help from tech support, I got new headphones, which is hardly solving the biggest problems.

We’ll watch Chi-Raq soon, even though it wasn’t nominated.

Anticipating: Valentine’s Day Dinner at The Monkey Bar. We have Chi-Raq and Suffragette on disk, or we could go see Creed or 45 Years (the last of the Oscar nominations we haven’t seen, other than shorts, animation, documentary, song or makeup, which has some bizarre movie I never heard of), though I don’t know that we will. Chris is about to start a new job at the college and has been working late a lot, so we’ll be behind on TV by then since Scandal returns Thursday, and the weather has finally become very February.

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Rebecca is a good lawyer when she’s not acting crazy. CW.

I wasn’t nuts about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend when I watched the first episode. In fact I reviewed it on Antenna (which evidently has ceased publishing as of last week, so so much for a follow-up piece, or linking this there) and figured it was too derivative to last. Well, it may still not last, since the ratings are not good, although Rachel Bloom’s Golden Globe award and a slight ratings surge may help keep it alive for a second season. It’s hard to predict the CW. But it really is among the most interesting and creative shows out there, and not just because of the entirely original songs, but because it’s a portrait of a woman with real issues who reflects how so many seem to feel.

Somehow Rebecca got into her therapist’s house through the doggy door. CW.

She has no impulse control–she is perfectly capable of breaking into her crush’s apartment, or her therapists’ house, or going on a date with one guy, picking up another guy and having sex with him, and then attempting to apologize to the first guy. She’s a 26-year-old erratic enough to have picked up and moved cross-country to a town she’d never been to and to a job that pays a lot less than the one she had, (and that she apparently begged for), because she ran into her boyfriend from summer camp when she was 14, and he lives there. We know now that she actually likes it in West Covina, and she’s finally admitted to herself and best friend Paula that she is in love with the guy, Josh, even though he has a serious live-in girlfriend. He is friendly, and likes things about her, but does not appear, to an outside observer, to love her back.

If Rebecca doesn’t have friends, she’ll corral some kids for a song. CW.

While I didn’t care much for the “Sexy Getting Ready Song” from the pilot, some of the other songs have definitely grown on me. Now that I’m back at the office, more than once at lunch time, I’ve found myself singing:

I have friends, I definitely have friends. Friends friends, friendly friends, I definitely have friends.

which Rebecca sang first excitedly, and then in a later episode in a little tiny voice.

But on Monday night’s show, she actually seemed to realize, not for the first time, how disturbing her behavior is. But instead of going to her actual friends to get reassurance –she has one unequivocal friend in Paula, and a few others like Heather and Greg, who are more tenuous– but that’s not bad for someone who has been in town as short a time as she has, or to a therapist (a different one than she saw last time), she went for the self-blame. And boy did she, in a song called “You Stupid Bitch”.

Lyrics include:

You ruined everything you stupid bitch. You ruined everything you stupid, stupid bitch. You’re just a lying little bitch who ruins things and wants the world to burn. Bitch. You’re a stupid bitch. And lose some weight.

Sometimes the couch is our best friend. I’m not sure why Rebecca doesn’t get a cat. CW.

While the language is harsher than I’ve ever used on myself, (and even at 26, or 14, I wasn’t as crazy as Rebecca, though I certainly had my share of crushes and impulsive moments), it’s common for women to self-blame. As anyone who reads anything about the media knows, women get so many messages about how to be that’s it’s impossible to live up to them and we blame ourselves a lot when we get something wrong.

Rebecca’s mother is a piece of work. CW.

It’s worth noting that she one of very few characters on anything we watch (and we watch a lot) to say she is Jewish and embrace that (Samberg’s character on Brooklyn 9-9 said he is half, the women of Broad City both are), and, as we’ve seen,  she has the voice in her head of her mother, who blames her for all kinds of things, and brings the “Jewish mother” stereotype to life.

Heather can be mean, but she actually likes Rebecca. CW.

I do take exception to the word bitch in this case, not just because it’s an anti-feminist term, but because it implies someone doing something mean to someone else, and despite the fact that if she “gets” Josh she’ll hurt Valencia, (who hates Rebecca, but is a person who can get hurt) and if she ever figures out how much more in common she has with Greg she’d hurt Heather, her second closest female friend, I don’t think she’s thinking that way, so in this case her behavior was not really bitchy. Stupid, short-sighted, and self-sabotaging for sure. Harder to get that into a song title, I guess.

Miss Piggy can work the red carpet. ABC.

On the same night, CW viewers saw Jane of Jane the Virgin kicking herself for misinterpreting signals from her graduate school adviser and leaning in for a kiss which was not reciprocated. We saw Miss Piggy on The Muppets blaming herself for showing her tail because of a dress that Uncle Deadly designed (without supplying double-stick tape), and poses he suggested for her. Both these shows led to a happy ending (sort of). Jane’s instructor asks her out, and the show waves away the fact that even if he is no longer adviser, there’s a good chance they’ll have to work together again, with attendant power differential. Piggy’s friends all wear pig tails to demonstrate pig acceptance or maybe it’s tail acceptance, even though some of them, like Fozzie, have their own tails, and even though Kermit, Bobo, and Sam the Eagle come to work naked, (and Fozzie wears only a hat and a tie). But there’s plenty of self blame and apologizing to go around before that, and that’s just in two evenings of shows.

The country is anxious  us about the presidential election, the still-not-great economy, wars, guns, terrorism, whether or not black lives matter, whether or not women can star in or direct movies that make money, and whether actors who aren’t transgender can play characters that are (and at what point they should be transitioned).  Social media certainly does not help. Anything anyone writes or does is subject to instant critique and discussion, and potentially a hash tag (except when, like most of it, including no doubt this blog, it’s lost in the morass of competing actions or narratives). I’m sure my own college is not alone in feeling organizational turmoil and confusion over direction. Our TV characters, women in particular, are reflecting that anxiety in a way they haven’t in the past. I wonder if we’re going to learn anything from this.