Psychoanalysis of The Chair; Psychology of The Chair; The
Chair as a representation of life in the academy.
Sayre’s
law maintains that academic fights are so vicious because the stakes are so
low.
My father did not want me to get a Ph.D. If I was going to go to graduate school, he
said, I should get an M.B.A. so that I would understand how the business world, his world, works. When I let him know that I was
applying to graduate schools in psychology, he wanted me to go into Industrial
Organizational Psychology, not Clinical Psychology, for the same reason. I wanted to do neither because I had no
interest in becoming a middle manager.
So, in the middle of my academic career, when I was
“promoted” to chair (the Dean offered me his congratudolances on my
appointment), I found I was a middle manager without the training. Of course by that time I had been teaching
for many years with lots of training in psychology and being a psychologist but very little in how to teach psychology, so I suppose it seemed natural to move into something about which I knew very little.
The Netflix series “The Chair”, which has, not surprisingly,
been garnering a lot of attention from academics. As an academic ex-chair, I am reminded of a physician friend's response to E.R. - he felt retraumatized as he remembered his own stint as a med student in an E.R. But I think E.R. and The Chair both have a broader reach because they are capturing something about the complexity and drama of living in an environment of what feels like life and death and what it feels like to be tasked with managing a situation that feels all but uncontrollable.
I think the series gets a number of things right about being a chair, but especially that the task of living; even when you are bright and accomplished and capable, isn’t easy. It is a strain. Though the series ignores the pandemic, I
think that we have all experienced the sense of being on a roller coaster that
is threatening to jump the tracks at any moment over the course of the past
year and a half and we
have recently had to buckle up for more. And this first season feels something like the roller coaster ride we have all been on.
When I was appointed Chair, the previous chair left me a few
things in the desk, just as Ji-Yoon Kim’s (Sandra Oh) prior chair Bill
Dobson (Jay Duplass)
left her a plaque saying, “Fucker in Charge of You Fucking Fucks.” The most useful thing the former chair left me was a mimeographed manual on
being chair (so you know it was old and many chairs had passed it along). It started with a statement that said something like, “If you are
the kind of person who likes to plan their day and then have that day conform
with your plans, being chair is probably not the right job for you.”
Ji-Yoon starts one of her days as chair hustling across
campus to join a meeting that she has set up with an older faculty member, Joan
Hambling (Holland Taylor)
whose Title IX complaint Ji-Yoon is supporting when she discovers that Bill – who
has gone off the rails since leaving the chair position and becoming widowed far
too young – is not yet in the class he is supposed to teach this morning.
She finds him sleeping in her office, so she props him up, literally ties
his shoes and gets him out the door to teach, leaving Joan to alienate the
woman Ji-Yoon has intended to be Joan's ally. As
absurd as this sounds, it rings true.
Though I never got my MBA, when I became chair I did go to a
boot camp for new chairs. The first
thing they taught us was not to let the administration woo us over to the dark
side; we needed to remember that we were leading our peers, not acting as an
agent of the Board, the President, the Provost, or the Dean. Yes, we represented the faculty to them, and
communicated with the faculty on their behalf, but we were not enforcers,
snitches, or “bosses”. We were
representatives who were working with our team to have our department be the
best it could possibly be.
A central dynamic in the series is that the Dean wants Ji-Yoon to do his dirty work, and the central dramatic narrative revolves around whether she will buckle after initially working to inhabit the office as an advocate for her department. She wavers in her support of her faculty, and this makes sense. They aren’t doing their part. One of the frustrations of being a chair is that most of the faculty are protected by tenure and really don’t have to do what you tell them. As frustrating as that is, I think that this is balanced, or at least it was in my case, by having faculty who really care about the quality of the work that they do and that are passionate about the enterprise as a whole. Without giving too much away (this time), The Chair ultimately delivers on this front. We see the ways that faculty can forget that teaching is the primary reason that they are there, but we also see, especially in the younger faculty, the passion that is required for and results from connecting people to the great art, thought, and achievements of the world they will soon be joining and leading. Again, The Chair rings true (with grace points for needed dramatic effect).
Being a faculty member – and perhaps even more so – being the
chair, creates pressures on the personal lives of faculty members. We can struggle to give our families the time
and attention they deserve. And we put
pressure on them as we ask for support for those things that seem so life and
death to us and somewhat abstract to them.
I don’t think this is the exclusive pressure of academia. I think it is a universal conflict in our
culture. We could call it work/life balance. I think that conflict is
amplified for working women – and the pandemic has exacerbated these strains across the
lifespan, though the strain is particularly acute, and portrayed in snippets,
in caring for young children where daycare/schooling becomes unreliable and
being Mom (and increasingly Dad) conflicts with being professor or chair or whatever.
This series focuses on the life of a woman of color in the
chair. She is the first woman and first
POC in the chair. As I pass through the
arc of my career, I am now somewhere in between being the immediate past chair
(Bill) and not quite to the point of being the deadwood of the ancients who can
no longer attract students to their classes and should leave so that young,
vital faculty can take their place (though it is certainly possible that I am
simply in denial…). I was the first
non-Catholic chair in my Catholic institution, but I don’t
think this compares to the margins that Ji-Yoon is working from. That said, I think that the impostor
phenomenon is a real thing. We all
question whether we belong, and while institutions are finally getting this and
addressing it with their students – including especially first generation
students and students of color, I don’t think they get it with regard to
faculty and administrators.
With the cautionary tale of Copernicus in mind, colleges and
universities have been set up to protect academic freedom. They have, then, been administratively
organized to support the autonomy of faculty members over their needs to be a
member of a group. Sports and teams (both as athletes and as fans) and
coaches and, to a certain extent, classes and clubs and dances fill this role
for students. At some colleges, faculty
eating facilities, unions, but ultimately the department fills this role. The chair, responsible for supporting this
function, because they are in an administrative role and responsible for things
like evaluations, frequently doesn’t feel the support that they are trying to facilitate
for the departments they serve. Ji-Yoon’s sense
of aloneness is palpable in this series.
Faculty should be free to engage in whatever thoughts they
might entertain and to try them out in an atmosphere of open enquiry, which is
the reason for academic freedom. Students,
too, should participate in this. In The Chair, lines of conflict open along this fault line. The students decide that Bill’s mocking of
Nazism is a sign of his being a despotic and authoritarian figure. As a teacher, he is a figure of
authority. And his efforts to engage in
the students in dialogue around this are some of the most intriguing moments in
the series.
I also struggled with these moments as I watched them. They seem manufactured. He is being maligned when he finally steps up
to the plate and is engages in the process of teaching, a process that he
clearly cares deeply about. The
controversy seems manufactured and, frankly, fake. As I have wrestled with this, I have come to
experience it as a representation, no matter how artificial, of something true –
that the academy exists as a place where students can observe models of what it
looks like to be an adult and to struggle with the confusion of living in a
world that is far from ideal and figuring out how to object to that world while
working with it to become a better version of itself. In the process of doing that, they wrestle
with the world that is presented by its representatives – the faculty – and hold
that group to unrealistically high standards and struggle with how to make use
of them as models while also seeing their faults.
I think the reason that I have had trouble with this corner
of the series is that it is at odds with what I see as a more dominant need on
the part of the students – and that is the need to learn; to learn from the
faculty, to learn from each other, and, as part of their maturation, to learn
from their parents. The inclusion of
Ji-Yoon’s parenting – and her daughter’s apparent rejection of her as an
adequate parent mirrors her department’s rejection of her chairing, the Dean’s
rejection of that, and Bill’s rejection of her honest efforts to get him back
on the rails. It can be a very lonely
role to be the only adult in the room, but it is a role that Ji-Yoon plays with
passion and, ultimately, believability.
I assume this series will continue, but if its first season
is its last, it will stand as a sensitive testament to the complexities of
stepping into the roles that are necessary and playing them, whether we have
been trained for them or not, to the best of our abilities.
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