Pictures of the Professoriate
By Mark Falcoff

The academic novel is a strictly Anglo-American invention, probably because only in Britain and the United States do professors live in closed communities as asphyxiating as company towns. In Western Europe, Canada, and Latin America, universities are largely metropolitan affairs, and their faculty live alongside salesmen, doctors, plumbers, and other ordinary folk. They do not see their colleagues except during working hours. In contrast, many American colleges and universities are removed as far as possible from urban life; the result is a peculiar kind of hot-house atmosphere that provides abundant opportunities for unreality, intrigue, and conflict. True, the stakes in academic politics are often very low indeed--but, as the old adage holds, that's precisely why the contenders often tear at one another with such viciousness.

In Britain and America the academic novel is so common that it requires no effort at all to summon up a long list of examples. My personal favorites include C. P. Snow's The Masters, which deals with the politics of an unnamed Oxford college where the master (in American parlance, the dean) has recently died, and the fellows and scholars must pick his successor; Bernard Malamud's A New Life, which chronicles the culture shock experienced by a New York (presumably Jewish) academic suddenly thrust into the high philistinism of a technical and agricultural university in the American West; Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, which depicts life in the ultra politically correct new universities created in Britain since the Second World War; Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, a merciless send-up of graduate student education at a similar kind of institution; Alison Lurie's The War Between the Tates, which deals with an academic marriage in dissolution; and Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe, in which a professor denied tenure at a liberal arts college manages to turn the tables on administrators by inventing a wholly fictitious story that he was dismissed for belonging to the Communist party.

In some ways, however, the most amusing, literate, and even elegant of all American academic novels is Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution, published in 1954 but happily still in print. Its stylistic felicities are not an accident; in addition to being a man of vast literary erudition, Jarrell was one of America's finest poets. The "pictures" referred to in the title were drawn from his own experiences teaching at American colleges, particularly at Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville, New York. Both it and Benton, the fictitious school where the novel's action (such as it is) takes place, are expensive and exclusive progressive women's colleges.

Pictures is Jarrell's only novel, and in some ways it is not really a novel at all. Rather, it is a series of sketches of faculty and administration personalities; the students themselves appear only marginally. In fact, the only student identified by name is a young woman who has stayed on after graduation for a year to work in the president's office. The narrator is an unnamed poet who is obviously Jarrell speaking in his own voice. One by one he introduces the major figures of the college, floods us with delicious details about their lives, habits, and opinions, and then slowly weaves the materials together so that we get some sense of how they interact with each other.

Meet the inmates

The first of Jarrell's major characters is President Dwight Robbins, a kind of boy wonder, a former Olympic swimmer who has become chief of the institution at the tender age of 34. Just how this meteoric ascent has been achieved is not revealed, but he is obviously adept at manipulating trustees and alumni. He is an insincere fraud, and everybody knows it, but nobody seems to mind. "About anything, anything at all, he believed what it was expedient for the president of Benton College to believe." Jarrell tells us that he was "so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins."

President Robbins made a speech that you had to hear it not to believe it.... He finished by thanking the students, parents, and faculty of Benton for the experience of working with, of learning from, and of growing to...love...such generous and intelligent, such tolerant and understanding, such--and here he paused for quite a long time--such...good...people.

The president also boasts a suitable consort--suitable, that is, to the Anglophiles who even today probably select the majority of university presidents. True, Mrs. Robbins is not actually English; she is South African, but she expends enormous energy trying to disguise the fact. "To hear her," Jarrell says, "she seemed to be born in an airliner over the Cape of Good Hope and to have arrived in Sussex on the second day." She wears tea gowns at formal events, boasts of her intimacy with the British aristocracy, and says "Sorry!" instead of "Excuse me!" Presumably she also drowns her tea in milk and sugar.

Jarrell then introduces key faculty members and their spouses. First there is Professor Jerrold Whittaker and his wife Flo. Whittaker is a professor of sociology of a type almost inconceivable today--he is not a Marxist, a feminist, or an environmentalist. Rather, he is a pompous, rather dull exponent of the classic tradition of Weber, Mannheim, and Levy-Bruhl. His wife Flo is a faculty wife of a genre also now all but extinct. Poor Flo is a bundle of frustrations and causes--"an informed voter...as public spirited as the sun.... Sometimes it seemed to you that she was not a person, not a thing, but an idea, and a mistaken one at that."

She thought of others night and day, and never thought about herself--but if she had thought about herself she would have done something about that, too.... After she talked to you a while you almost doubted that you existed except in some statistical sense.... She had learned to think of people only in hundred thousand lots.... Almost everything that happened to Flo and her family and friends was...private; and to her real life was public, what you voted or gave for or read about in The Nation.... She cancelled out half-a-dozen good Republicans.

Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, Flo's best friend on the faculty has long been Camille Turner Batterson, a Virginia spinster who teaches creative writing. Miss Batterson has been at Benton since time immemorial--she is practically the cornerstone of one of the buildings. "She believed," Jarrell writes, "in ladies, in gentlemen, in the poor; once only a few years ago she had said that something was 'common'. Her point of view about student work was that of a social worker teaching finger painting to children or the insane." She tended to favor students who showed promise of becoming just like herself. When asked for advice by her students, she merely answered, "Do whatever your grandmother would do in your place."

Some time before the story begins we are told that Miss Batterson has reluctantly left Benton to assume a handsomely endowed chair at a major state university. With a sure grasp of what might be called the political economy of academic hiring, Jarrell reveals to us the mechanism by which she was tendered this prize--the wife of the department chairman turns out to have been Miss Batterson's oldest and dearest friend. (Mrs. Chairman has overruled the work of the search committee thus: "'Think of what it would mean to these young people--' she paused there: a great deal had been compressed into that these--'to these young people to come into contact with someone like Camille.'") But, alas, one year into her new dignity Miss Batterson contracts a mysterious disease and dies, much like the heroine of a romantic novel. Presumably she cannot live parted from her beloved Benton.

The herd of independent minds

The other faculty members are depicted in lighter tones--there is Gottfried Rosenbaum, an Austrian Jewish refugee who is composer-in-residence (and whose wife Irene--pronounced, if you please, i-RA-ne--is a former opera singer). Rosenbaum clearly sees Benton for what it is but goes along for the ride--he is onto a good thing and he knows it. He teases the other faculty members by insisting that "idt iss nodt fair, nodt to letd in boys; boys, too, dey must be educatedt. O, if I only couldt haf been a liddle girl, and go to Benton! You could not catch me being vot I am now"--and his colleagues half believe him. Their Europeanness--"a real Russian, a real Austrian, a real opera-singer, a real composer, a woman who had really sung with Chaliapin, a man who had really been a friend of Alban Berg"--is their ace in the hole, and they play it for all it is worth. One is almost ready to believe that Dr. Rosenbaum keeps up his thick German accent by listening to Berlitz tapes each morning before breakfast.

There is Miss Rassmussen, who teaches sculpture but also designs furniture on the side. Her work is so advanced that "people persisted in sitting down in her sculpture, and in asking 'What is that named?' of her chairs." There is Mrs. Caracoli, the modern dance teacher, whose creations resemble nothing so much as "a child's point of view of ballet." We are invited to revere a certain Doctor Crowley (field not indicated), whose chief virtue seems to be the Approval of His Colleagues. The latter remain somewhat mystified that he has not yet been given "the Nobel Prize--a Peace Prize, say," Jarrell writes. "They would have picked him to arbitrate a dispute between Earth and some other planet or solar system and he would have decided for Earth because it was more progressive and had Benton on it, and the other planet would have seen that this was right and given in."

Needless to say, over time all the Benton faculty have come to resemble one another. Those who cannot fit in have left. What remains is something like a little community in the Middle Ages: "there was a most homogeneous public opinion, a most homogeneous private opinion--almost all the people there were agreed about almost everything, and glad to be agreed, and right to be agreed." The people of Benton, Jarrell quips, "would have swallowed a porcupine, if you had dyed its quills and called it Modern Art; they longed for men to be discovered on the moon, so that they could show that they weren't prejudiced against moon men." "If Benton had had an administration building with pillars," he concludes, "they could have carved over the pillars: Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you feel guilty."

They also believe privately that if Benton did not exist it would be impossible to be educated at all. This causes the best of them to lapse into awe, but does not forebear them from sincerely believing it. As Professor Rosenbaum puts it archly, they resemble the Patagonians. Their best known poet is a man by the name of Gomez; they naturally tend to refer to Shakespeare as "the English Gomez."

The peace of Benton is interrupted, however, by the appearance of Gertrude Johnson, a novelist who has been hired on a one-year basis to replace Miss Batterson. Clearly modeled on Mary McCarthy, Gertrude is a kind of serpent in the garden, inasmuch as she openly refuses to worship the college's established pieties. She sees through President Robbins; she despises Professor Rosenbaum; she treats Flo Whittaker with icy condescension. The narrator spends at least half the book trying to restrain Gertrude, the other half laughing up his sleeve at her observations. When not in conference with her students she is busily writing a novel about Benton--a kind of merciless revenge, one feels. Her major performance in the book takes place at Art Night, where she unmasks a visiting lecturer who resembles no one so much as the late novelist-critic Clifton Fadiman. At a reception at President Robbins's house she blurts out, with respect to one of the visitor's novels, "It was a novel--about--well, it's been some time since I read it, but I remember thinking that the critics had been most unfair to it."

Gertrude's main role is to sound a discordant note in the disciplined harmonies of Benton. Her most startling discovery is that there is nothing particularly progressive about the place at all; as she tells her husband Sidney, more happens in a week "at home on Bleeker Street" in Greenwich Village than will ever happen at the college. This is, in fact, true. The "progressive" character of Benton is established by its atmospherics, not by anything that actually goes on there. Nothing actually does happen in the book. It ends with the termination of the school year; the faculty disperses to their summer vacation haunts; one senses that next year will be just like this year, so the year after, and the year after that. But this, of course, describes virtually every American college and university.

From comedy to tragedy?

Though Pictures from an Institution was published more than a half-century ago, it continues to accurately depict many aspects of higher education in America. In faculty meetings anywhere one can find the same Group Think, the same imposition of a collective opinion, the same social pressures, the same preening vanity and self-congratulation--above all, the same sense of isolation from the realities of American life.

But there are some differences too. First, of course, there are not nearly as many women's colleges today as in Jarrell's time; coeducation has long since arrived with a vengeance at places like Sarah Lawrence. Even more to the point, Jarrell was writing before the dawn of feminism; the "girls" of Benton, as the author dares to refer to them, seem to be preparing mainly to become the wives of successful men. Second, in Jarrell's portrayal there is a kind of good-natured quality to the political correctness of the faculty; nobody seems out to assassinate anyone else on the basis of their views. Third, the curriculum at Benton is still quite traditional; what makes it a liberal college is the methodology of teaching, not the subject matter. There are no African-American studies, no Native American studies, no gender studies, no "post-colonial" studies, no "peace studies" praising terror bombers or African or Arab dictators, no courses on comic books, no professor laboriously exposing Henry James as a monstrous sexist or Jane Austen as a repressed lesbian. Instead there is a kind of peaceful complacency that irritates Gertrude Johnson but seems in retrospect to be a refreshing throwback to happier and even more productive times in American higher education.

To be sure, if one reads Pictures carefully, one can discern some of the germs of what now afflicts the American academy. And since there are a limited number of professorial types, any readers who have spent time at American universities will immediately find strong resemblances between the Benton faculty and individuals they have known personally. Jarrell sees the habitues of his little academic zoo as harmless, rather amusing creatures, and so they are to his readers. One cannot help wondering, though, whether he would be able to summon up the same sense of levity if he were alive to write a novel about American academic life today.


Mark Falcoff, an emeritus scholar at AEI, taught for a dozen years at three different American universities.